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{ "a_id": [ "ebwfcwc", "ebwhcab" ], "score": [ 32, 142 ], "text": [ "While not answering your question, /u/DubiousMerchant had a [great response on another thread about Kowloon Walled City](_URL_0_) and referenced some source material that may answer your question.", "In 1842, when the British won the First Opium War, they had China over a barrel and could set their own terms for surrender. One of the terms of the Treaty of Nanking was that Hong Kong would be ceded in perpetuity. The whole reason Hong Kong mattered at all was as a natural deep draft harbour, and the treaty reflected this - only Hong Kong Island itself was mentioned. \nIn 1858, realizing that their needs were growing, Britain leased Kowloon up to Boundary Street, and in 1860 the Convention of Peking made the lease permanent. \nAs Hong Kong grew, so did the need for land - and meanwhile the British position of power had weakened. in 1898, Britain leased the New Territories for 99 years. Dealing from a slightly stronger position meant China was able to get another small concession - a small military outpost - a fortified village, really - was excluded from the lease. \nFrom 1899 to 1945, the KWC was almost empty and treated no differently from any other part of Hong Kong, but in 1945 China re-asserted its rights to it. Squatters and refugees pored in, and after a brief confusion the infamous \"anarchist enclave\" was established. China was nominally in control, but generally only cared about the KWC for political gain and negotiation. \nAs the end of the 99-year lease drew closer, Britain and China entered into negotiations - starting in 1982 - to see what would happen when it came to an end. By 1985 it was clear that the end of the lease would mean Hong Kong was returned to China - which made the KWC unnecessary as a negotiating chip. Between 1987 and 1992, the 33 000 residents of the KWC were relocated, and in 1993 it was demolished - replaced by a memorial park.\n\nSources: \n\n* Girard & Lambot - City of Darkness\n* Pullinger - Crack in the Wall & Chasing the Dragon\n* Portisch - Kowloon Walled City\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5m60ul/what_was_life_like_inside_the_kowloon_walled_city/dc1kqqp/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "easudjn" ], "score": [ 59 ], "text": [ "Oh boy, one that I can actually answer! I will try to be thorough enough for this sub's standards. For the record, I have a Master's Degree in Clinical Psychology, my thesis was written on in-group/out-group formation through auditory processing, and I specialize in adolescent Bipolar Disorder and ADHD. I also have a BSN and am certified as a Psychiatric Nurse.\n\nSo, to briefly answer your question before I explain: Yes, Freud's ideas on hyper-sexualization (and honestly most of his ideas on sexual development and sexuality in general) are considered incredibly outdated and not terribly scientific^1. In fact, Karl Popper (who is regarded by many as the progenitor of modern scientific thought/philosophy) famously used Freud as an example of pseudoscience in his work *Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge*^2 (Popper essentially considered most of Freud's theories to be the pinnacle of pseudoscience, since many of them could not be falsified).\n\nHowever, Freud remains influential to this day for several reasons. First I will explain his impact on modern psychotherapy and psychological/psychiatric science. Then I will discuss why he is such an important historical figure for the fields of psychology and psychiatry. As /u/stev0supreemo mentioned, Freud has also been studied heavily in a literary context, but I'm not as familiar with that area so I won't touch on it too much.\n\nSo, Freud's ideas are, as previously discussed, absolutely insane by modern standards. A lot of it seems like he just made it up himself based on what he saw and thought, and there is definitely some truth to that^3. Im not even going to go into the Oedipus Complex or his stages of psychosexual development because... well because I don't want to. Much of Freud's early work focuses on far more than sexuality and the unconscious mind, and he was actually one of the earliest people to correctly dismiss lack of oxygen during birth as a primary cause of cerebral palsy. However, Freud's biggest contributions that still remain today are most relevant to the practice of psychotherapy and our understanding of unconscious drives. Freud identified, described, and/or synthesized quite a few phenomena of which many are scientifically testable and still widely taught today. Among these are words you're no doubt familiar with: Id, Ego, and Superego (these are...less testable), Libido, Repression, Transference, Countertransference, Projection, and many more. His work on the unconscious and dreams is really hit or miss in terms of scientific validity and empirical support, but there are some aspects that are testable and have been supported by evidence (e.g. he proposed that particular traumatic events or life stressors could manifest themselves in dreams, and there is considerable empirical support for this idea though not necessarily for the deeper interpretation of those dreams)^4. I'll touch a little more on this in the section where I talk about his historical significance.\n\nHis biggest contribution to psychotherapy was probably his advocacy for psychodynamic therapy. He specifically championed a type of therapy called Psychoanalysis that is still practiced today, but psychodynamic therapy is the more general practice of talking to patients, forming a dialogue, listening to them, and helping them work through their issues. I know this seems like a no-brainer now, but back then it was pretty revolutionary (I mean, why would you talk to a crazy person?). There are arguably others who \"invented\" this therapy, and I will leave that debate for more qualified historians (read: actual historians) than I, but Freud undoubtedly popularized the method. He also provided the basis for what many consider the prototypical \"therapist-patient\" relationship, with practices such as trying to remain objective and not judge the patient, maintaining confidentiality (though he was less than stellar on this front), and providing analysis and recommendations where appropriate. The details of modern psychoanalytic practice and how the current practice differs from his original work is way too complicated for a single post (and I was trained in different methods), but a lot of his original techniques were the original basis for modern psychotherapy of all disciplines.\n\nSo to summarize, again, Freud's theories, ideas, and his techniques vary wildly in terms of how well they stand up to scientific and philosophical scrutiny, but they undoubtedly had a massive impact on how psychology and psychiatry are practiced today.\n\nHowever, in my personal opinion (which is shared by others, like Ernest Jones^5 and David Eagleman^6) is that Freud's true impact is a historical one. That is to say: Freud was a freaking *rock star* in his day. Psychiatry was a well established field by the time Freud came around, and Freud didn't invent the concept of psychotherapy, but Freud brought psychology into the mainstream. He gave lectures at universities around the world, he promoted his ideas and his works in sold-out talks. He was invited to speak and participate in events and research in almost every relevant scientific area. His work was so popular that it radically changed the fields of psychiatry and psychology forever. People devoted their lives to either proving his theories or to disproving them (Neo-Freudians like Karen Horney and Alfred Adler essentially founded their entire fields of work on disagreeing with Freud). The idea that the unconscious mind is the primary driver of human behavior (rather than the conscious mind, which Freud believed was important but only a small part of the human psyche) was not a new one, but it was not a mainstream idea until Freud made it so with his works, such as *The Interpretation of Dreams* (1899) and in *Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious* (1905). This idea touched a huge variety of fields, including criminal justice (can criminals really be responsible for impulsive acts if our unconscious is so influential?), philosophy (how much agency do humans really have?), medicine, and more. His works were (and are) dense and honestly written with an air of authority and certainty that is totally in contrast to how we would expect modern scientists to present their findings. But Freud’s *ideas* were accessible to the common man, and they seem to make sense on a basic level. Freud was certain of his theories, and was famously bad at taking criticism (When somebody pointed out that Freud’s beloved cigars were a bit phallic, he replied, “*sometimes a cigar is just a cigar*”). But his charisma, confidence, and authority sold a lot of people, and his popularity overshadowed almost all of his contemporaries. Like I said, he was a rock star, and without him, I don’t think psychology would look anything like what it is today, for better or for worse.\n\nSources:\n\n1. Grünbaum, A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. University of California Press, 1984, pp. 97–126.\n\n2. Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1963, pp. 33–39\n\n3. MacKinnon, Donald W.; Dukes, William F. (1962). Postman, Leo, ed. Psychology in the Making: Histories of Selected Research Problems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 663, 703\n\n4. Stevens, R. *Freud and Psychoanalysis* Milton Keynes: Open University Press 1985 p. 96: \"the number of relevant studies runs into thousands\".\n\n5. Jones, Ernest. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press, 1953, pp. 94–96.\n\n6. Eagleman, David Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011, pp. 17\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e8rn05c" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The short answer to this question is that different Slavic groups were not seen as equal in the eyes of Nazi leaders. However, this was largely due to necessity and logistics rather than true, unabashed ideology, especially as the Second World War progressed. Due to the nature of my expertise, the following answer will be focused on German interactions with Czechs. Despite the exclusion of an in-depth discussion of German interactions with other Slavic groups, I believe Nazi policy towards Czechs and Sudeten-Germans within the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to be the perfect example of the belief that some Slavs could be treated differently or \"better\" by the Reich.\n\nOne thing that should be noted at the start of this, is that even ethnic Germans outside of the borders of Germany-proper were often ostracized by Nazi occupation. Most Sudeten-Germans especially had a particular identity that did not seek to build connection with other Germans in Austria or Germany, but rather sought to create a unique identity that was tied to the natural landscape of the Sudetenland specifically. This was supported by \"Heimat,\" or \"homeland\" groups, which heavily attempted to spacialize Sudeten-German nationalism. Heimat lead hiking and excursion clubs, as well as natural history and preservation groups \"nurtured the idea that [Sudeten] German achievements were inscribed in the [Sudetenland's] landscape” (Glassheim, *Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands*, 27). Heimat activists especially sought to build this identity especially in opposition to a Czech identity that was supposedly based on \"modernity\" and industry, as well as “alienation from the soil, denationalization, and godless socialism” (Glassheim, *Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands,* 33). \n\nWith this being noted, as I've mentioned in [other answers](_URL_1_), Sudeten-German nationalist parties, such as the Sudetendeutsche Partei, were decidedly Pro-Reich, but this does not mean that the Sudeten-German identity was not one completely unique of a wider Pan-German identity that the Reich desired to create. Additionally, historian Tara Zahra has done great work in showing that most of those who lived in interwar Czechoslovakia, both German and Czech, were often more anational, and the lines between what constituted a \"German\" and what constituted a \"Czech\" were often blurred, with many being able to speak both languages, as well as widespread \"mixed\" marriages. This uncertainty of exact ethnicity within Czechoslovakia is especially pertinent for understanding the absurdity of Nazi racial policy within the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War, as Nazi policy wished to enforce strict racial policies in a place where ethnicity had characteristically been uncertain. \n\nOn the topic of resistance to occupation: many Czech patriots had been disheartened by former President Beneš's capitulation to the Munich Decree in 1938, and Czech Communists had been absolutely mortified by Stalin's signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (a metaphorical deal with the Devil [Hitler] in the eyes of Czech Communists). These facts, combined with the lack of a tradition with armed resistance or partisan warfare among the Czechs (as opposed, for example, to the Yugoslavs), meant that Czechs practiced traditional, open resistance against Nazi occupation comparatively less than other occupied Slavic groups. Where Czech resentment existed, it was usually directed at Sudeten-Germans rather than Reich Germans. Often, many Sudeten-Germans who could, did not initially opt for Reich citizenship due to fear from social and economic boycotts that Czech patriots might call for. Additionally, although Reich Germans occupied high ranking positions within the Protectorate's administration, Sudeten Germans usually occupied entry level bureaucratic positions and therefore were often the ones to deal face to face with Czech dissenters. \n\nCzech resistance was mostly manifested in subjective, less concrete, or otherwise less measurable ways than open armed conflict or \"traditional\" resistance (although resistance groups, such as the Ústřední vedení odboje domácího, or ÚVOD, did exist). Czechs often practiced intentional incompetence at their jobs, especially if they worked in a war related industry, such as steel or weapon manufacturing, in order to sabotage the war effort. Other actions that were deemed \"acting nationally,\" such as making a point to speak Czech rather than German, or telling jokes that undermined the perceived authority of the Reich, were popular ways to resist Germanization that were more ambiguous, harder to notice, and thus harder to punish than more \"traditional\" ideas of resistance. Cited below, Mastný's *The Czechs Under Nazi Rule* is a great work on Czech Resistance.\n\nHermann Göring, among other Reich officials, especially tied their expansionist goals not to ethnicity but rather to an economically strong, industrialized \"mitteleuropäische,\" and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia would be integral to achieving this, especially as Czechoslovakia had been the 10th largest industrial producer per capita in the world during the interwar period, and 70% of Czechoslovakia's industry was located in the Protectorate (Bryant, *Prague in Black*, 77, 78). The revocation of Jewish property in the Protectorate was enough to justify the ideological reversal of \"Czechification\" of the Protectorate, and Reich officials allowed non-Jewish Czechs to largely participate in the working economy, with 84% of the Protectorate's industrial managerial roles filled by Czechs in 1941. (Bryant, *Prague in Black*, 84, 85) Especially as the war situation became more dire for the Reich, the original goal of repopulating the Protectorate with Germans changed into a goal to make the Czechs \"German.\"\n\nTo conclude, economic necessity, along with the lack of cohesive and constant resistance compared to other occupied Slavic countries, meant that Czechs were afforded a better status in the eyes of the Reich. However, that is not to say that Czechs did not suffer. This answer's intention is not to belittle the suffering of Czech Jews by the Reich. Furthermore, we should not forget other horrendous acts committed by the Reich against Czechs, such as the [Lidice Massacre](_URL_0_). There is always a great deal of difficulty that comes attached to writing about these topics, not only in an emotional sense, but also because we should strive to avoid attaching collective guilt or innocence to groups. Collaboration and resistance are often grey areas, and harder to define than people would ideally enjoy.\n\nFinally, I find it easier to differentiate between different \"German\" classifications in the Czech language rather than English, so I apologize sometimes if in the above post it is unclear whether \"German\" refers to either a Reich German or a Sudeten-German.\n\nA great book to read for this all, heavily referenced in the above question and cited below, would be Chad Bryant's *Prague in Black.* His chapters \"A Hopelessly Mixed People\" and \"The Reich Way of Thinking\" are especially relevant. \n\n\n*Works of Interest:*\n\nBrandes, Detlef. *Die Tschechen unter deutschem Protektorat; Teil 1: Besatzungspolitik, Kollaboration und Widerstand im Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren bis Heydrichs Tod: (1939 - 1942)*. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1969.\n\nBryant, Chad. *Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism.* Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. \n\nGlassheim, Eagle. *Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands: Migration, Environment, and Health in the Former Sudetenland*. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.\n\nMastný, Vojtěch. *The Czechs Under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance, 1939-1942*. New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1971.\n\nZahra, Tara. *Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948*. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008." ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9jzs2f/was_the_western_powers_appeasement_of_hitler/e775x23/?context=0" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fb3mjnn" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "I'll take your second question first. The East German government, under Walter Ulbricht, officially called the Berlin Wall *der antifaschistischer Schutzwall* (\"Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier\"). When you remember that it was common for Eastern-Bloc politicians to casually refer to the capitalist west as \"fascist,\" this accurately sums up the Ulbricht regime's justification for building the Wall: It was necessary to protect the GDR from the West. This was framed not merely in terms of military protection and counter-espionage, but also economic and demographic self-preservation.\n\nIn the years before the erection of the Wall, the GDR hemorrhaged capital, both human and economic. Lured by the *Wirtschaftswunder* (\"Economic Miracle\") of the Federal Republic and West Berlin in the 1950s, and the strength of western currency, several million East Germans committed *Republikflucht* (\"Desertion of the Republic\"), fleeing to West Berlin or West Germany. Many of these refugees were young, educated, and skilled - precisely the sort of people that East Germany needed to stay. The unguarded border between East and West Berlin made such desertion exceedingly easy: One had, in many cases, only to walk across the street and report to the West Berlin authorities. This became the only widely available method of flight after 1952, when the East German government sealed the German-German border. In Berlin, traffic across the sector boundaries was an everyday reality. Many resident East Berliners held jobs or studied in West Berlin. West Berliners, for their part, would often cross into East Berlin for cheap shopping, since their Western Deutsche Mark was worth so much more than the Eastern Mark.\n\nThe Ulbricht regime - not without reason - understood this situation to be a lethal threat to the survival of the GDR. His presentation of the problem, both to the broader public and to the GDR's Eastern Bloc allies, was a mix of truth and lies. He talked about the out-flow of goods due to commerce in Berlin, and of the \"trade in people\" - a less-than-convincing attempt to portray the refugees as kidnapping victims, when they were not being portrayed as venal traitors who stole an upbringing from the GDR before fleeing it for pecuniary reward in the West. Building the Wall, from this perspective, was like cauterizing a wound. And a similar medical analogy was deployed by Ulbricht himself. He justified the wall by describing the sort of people it was intended to hinder in an August 28, 1961 article in *Neues Deutschland*, the official paper of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of East Germany: \"Counter-revolutionary vermin, spies and saboteurs, profiteers and human traffickers, spoiled teenage hooligans and other enemies of the people's democratic order [who] have been sucking on our Workers' and Peasants' Republic like leeches and bugs on a healthy body.\"\n\nThe people of East Berlin reacted in much the same way as the people of West Berlin, though their reactions were understandably more muted. First, there is reason to believe that they understood even in advance of the Wall's rise that it was coming. In the days and weeks before the border closure, the number of refugees reporting to West Berlin's processing centers rose dramatically. This was, in part, spurred on by the East German government itself. On June 15, 1961, Ulbricht famously declared at a press conference that \"no one has the intention of building a wall.\" (\"*Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten.*\") It has long been speculated that this statement was a dog-whistle to the people of Berlin, indicating that the East German government definitely intended to build a wall. Ulbricht's play here was to force the hand of the Khrushchev government in Moscow, which had opposed the building of a wall, by inciting more East Germans to cross the border, rendering the border situation even more unstable and untenable. \n\nAfter the border was actually sealed on August 13, 1961, there were some dramatic scenes in along the border as East Berliners attempted last-minute flights into the West. Nurse Ida Siekmann became the first casualty of the Wall on August 23, when she jumped from her window on the Bernauer Straße - the front facade of her apartment building was the border between the Soviet and French sectors - to her death on the pavement below. Others successfully dodged through gaps in the barbed wire that, initially, was all that constituted the \"Wall.\" Groups of East Berliners observed the construction mostly from afar, since the builders were guarded by *Volkspolizei* and *Kampfgruppen der Arbeiterklasse* (\"Combat Groups of the Working Class\" - East German paramilitaries). Some of those crowds became vocal in their disgust and anger, but this came to little and was never as open or virulent as the activity of enraged West Berliners on the other side. There was certainly no repetition of the June 1953 strikes and protests that had so nearly toppled the Ulbricht government. \n\nIn the ensuing years, many attempts were made to rush through, slip past, tunnel under, or fly over the Wall, but there was no organized, massive attempt on the part of East Berliners to protest or damage the Wall or its protectors. Whether this was a function of the repression of the East German government, self-control and acceptance on the part of the East German people, or genuine enthusiasm for the Anti-Fascist Barrier is hard to say. It was likely a combination of these factors, in grossly unequal proportions. Especially after the initial shock of the separation wore off, Berliners on both sides of the Wall acclimated to its existence in many ways. Whatever the proportion of acceptance to enthusiasm in the 1960s, how much popular support for the Wall remained by the end of the Cold War was clearly demonstrated by the crowds who cheered its fall to the echo in November of 1989." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d8lvtwc", "d8m0iua" ], "score": [ 11, 5 ], "text": [ "The javelin was a weapon peculiar to Mediterranean warfare, especially for Latin/Italian, Iberian and Celt-Iberian peoples (Sanz 21). The use of javelins (not always the *pilum*, later the *spiculum* and earlier a different type, but javelins are all basically the same in function) remained a mainstay of Roman infantry warfare for basically the entire Roman period. We keep digging them up even in the late Empire (Bishop & Coulston 200). Indeed, missile warfare became in some ways more prominent rather than less in the late Roman period, with Germanic groups also using javelins (such as the *ango*), and there was an increasing trend toward training recruits in various types of ranged warfare, also including archery and slinging (Rance 251-3). Javelins did not go away with the 'fall' of Rome either, and throwing spears (again, the Germanic *ango,* which was based on the *pilum*) pop up in the Merovingian period, though it appeared to fall out of use by the 7th century AD (Halsall 164-5). Archery became perhaps more significant in this period, as it certainly was later (166). \n\nI see no reason why any great developments in warfare (tactical or technological) should be responsible for this gradual fading away of the Mediterranean sword-and-javelin style of fighting. In my view, fighting styles shifted over time for reasons as much to do with society and culture as with technology and tactics. Perhaps the intermittent disappearance and re-use of phalanx-like tactics at various stages of European history might fit this bill: it's not as if shield-and-spear ever stopped being an effective weapons combination.* I think it is perfectly explicable by the massive shift over time in the culture of Western Europe, and the role of the javelin could be in many ways readily filled by archers and the multi-skilled soldiers of the early Medieval period (166). There is a tendency by Westerners to view changes in and the relative effectiveness of different military tactics and fighting styles from a 'technological' standpoint. For instance many casual observers tend to obsess over the exact size and shape and capabilities of the *gladius* and *scutum* in explaining Roman success and ignore the fact that the Roman army in the Mid-Republic was a highly trained, highly motivated force with hugely superior manpower reserves to its enemies. I suppose the point I am making is that shifts in military equipment and fighting styles do not necessarily have to be tactical or 'Darwinian' in any way, but can reflect changes in societies, cultures and approaches over time that are not necessarily 'superior', just different.\n\n\n\n*I am of course aware that the Romans beat the Macedonians and Seleucids, who had all-but-perfected the classical phalanx, but tactics, generalship and superior Roman resources are important factors in this. Libyan (and Carthaginian) spearmen performed usually very well, even against Roman legionaries, in the Punic Wars for instance. Later on the Romans began to re-adopt spear-based fighting styles once more, though the performance of the Mid to Late Republican Roman legions clearly demonstrate that the Mediterranean style of fighting could, well handled, deal with any enemy (though I'm not factoring the fluctuating dominance of cavalry warfare in the ancient to early modern periods in here). The reasons for the use and re-use of spear tactics are probably as much to do with the quality of recruits and training, and cultural shifts, as any 'tactical' necessity.\n\nSources:\n\nM.C. Bishop & J.C.N Coulston, Roman Military Equipment: From the Punic Wars to the Fall of Rome (second edition), Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2006.\n\nGuy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450-900, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2003.\n\nPhilip Rance, \"Battle\" from The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (Vol II), New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.\n\nQuesada Sanz, F. ‘Not so different: individual fighting techniques and small unit tactics of Roman and Iberian armies’ in P. Francois, P. Moret, S. Pere-Nogues (eds) L’Hellenisation en mediterranee occidentale au temps des guerres puniqes. Actes du Colloque International de Toulouse, 31 mars-2 avril 2005. Pallas 70 (2006) 1-25.\n\n", "Roman weapons evolved across the empire's history, and the pilum wasn't exempt these processes. The general idea - a weapon with a long, narrow metal shank that would bend on impact, rendering it useless by the enemy and possibly tangling the shield of the person it hit - stayed relevant, but the form changed.\n\nBy the late empire, we see the pilum replaced / evolving into a barbed throwing darts that archaeologists usually call 'angons' (a Greek word used by a Byzantine author to describe the pilum-like javelins used by 6th century Frankish soldiers). [This image](_URL_0_) shows some reproductions of an early angon style that was popular in both the late Roman army and among 'barbarian' groups outside the frontier.\n\nWe find a lot of these javelins in bog deposits, like [Illerup Adal](_URL_2_). At Illerup, at sometime around 200AD (and on several occasions after that), a bunch of weapons were dumped into a bog. We're not entirely sure why, but the general theory is that they're the armaments of a disarmed, defeated army. The weapons were found in sets, and it was clear that warriors were armed with (among other things) a spear for hand-to-hand fighting and an angon-like javelin. In Illerup, as in the Roman army, we're looking at an organized force whose warriors whose equipment was standardized, including the provision of everyone with a made-to-purpose javelin. That speaks of a particular kind of centralized political structure: someone in charge equipped the soldiers with these standardized, specialized weapons.\n\nAs Roman power began to spin out of control in the west, however, this centralized control started to change. The army became increasingly privatized, and the responsibility to equip and support it devolved onto local elites. Regular weapon factories shut down, and production seems to have in many cases shifted to local production. Sometimes these locally manufactured weapons were still very regular, but in England at least there was an increasing amount of diversity of style, particularly in the spears people used. It's like if the army today shut down, and were replaced with a private citizen militia that had to arm itself: you'd see a lot of military surplus at first, but as time went on things would get more and more chaotic. And in England, and to a lesser extent in France, the weapons did.\n\nWhat that means for weaponry is this: the organized, specialized kits of shield, spear, javelin, etc start to disappear from the archaeology by the end of the fifth century. That doesn't mean they necessarily disappeared from the army - people may not have been buried with every weapon they owned. But I personally think the variety of weapons we see in the ground reflects the larger change in military structure we see by the end of the fifth century in the west: there's no organized army anymore, and individual members of the warrior militia have a lot more individuality and personalization in their equipment. This is when angons start to become very rare.\n\n[An angon of the style more commonly found in the 6-7th centuries](_URL_1_).\n\nIf you ask me why angons - the descendants of the pilum - ultimately vanished, I would say it's a result of a long process of military de-specialization. Warriors continued to use javelins, but the spears that are common in the archaeology during this period are generally more multi-purpose weapons that could be thrown or used in the hand. Some of these spears still have the long, narrow shank of the pilum / angon, but replace the barb with a more versatile leaf-bladed or angular tip ([for example](_URL_3_) - and there are more extreme cases with a much longer shank). These multi-function spearheads (either singly, or in pairs) seem to take the place of the more specialized set of angon + spear that we see in the larger, organized armies of the earlier (late imperial) period. I would suggest this reflects the decentralization and de-professionalization of the army in the early middle ages.\n\nWhen, precisely, the angon was entirely abandoned isn't clear. They disappear from archaeology after the 7th century, but that's because weapon burial went out of fashion. They continue to appear in art for the next 400 years, but whether that reflects reality, or whether the shape had become 'the way' to draw javelins (and outlived the weapons it was based on) is difficult to say.\n\nWhat does seem clear is that by the time armies re-specialized (in the later part of the early middle ages), the pilum / angon does not seem - as far as we can tell - to be given the same privileged place it had been in the old Roman model (whose influence had continued well into the early middle ages)." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://legvi.tripod.com/webonmediacontents/Arbeia%20Spiculum.JPG?1463431047092", "https://inthepresenceoftheancients.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/angon.jpg", "http://www.illerup.dk/documents/illerup_84.pdf", "http://www.antiqueo.com/artefacts/migration/ferdelancemero.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cmzxw9b" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "There were many economic factors such as competition. The Ottoman Empire had risen to prominence leading up to period of European colonization. They controlled many of the trade routes to the east, and Europeans would have had to pay to use them. So, while it was obviously an economic risk to send ships out into the unknown, the conditions of the time made it a worthwhile gamble and there was a snowball effect once resources started coming back from the New World. In the absence of an empire in Western Europe, there was great competition between powers which sped up the race to colonize. China was already powerful during this period (Ming dynasty). You had the Mughal Empire in northern India, Ottoman Empire, etc. I am not trying to say that these established powers did not try to expand using new strategies, but just think about what risks an internet start-up can take today compared to an established company like IBM or Microsoft, and the kind of disruptive economic growth happens as a result.\n\nIn addition to the economic factors, you must consider the geographic advantage that European countries had at the time. They were better positioned to send out expeditions than any of the powers in the east. It was not as feasible for, say China or Japan to send ships over the Pacific Ocean because of the long journey. They could and did take ships other places, but these places often had established powers and were not nearly as easy to conquer as the Americas proved to be. Meanwhile, after Gibraltar fell from Islamic control towards the end of the 1400s, European ships were able to get safe passage out of the Mediterranean Sea and then further west. \n\nThis brings me to the most important factor in this period of colonization, and the reason why the Americas were a desirable place to colonize: The vast majority of Native Americans were killed by germs that the Europeans brought over. This effect streamlined the process of domination in a way that the Eastern powers could only dream of. The Mongol Empire certainly dominated Asia in dramatic fashion years before this period of European colonization, but they failed to conquer Japan in two separate campaigns. Just think of what they could have accomplished with the aid of these killer germs!\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dq9fq6m", "dqa6m6o" ], "score": [ 38, 2 ], "text": [ "This is kind of a Thanksgiving version of an answer since I am not at home, don't have access to my books and am writing purely from memory. Should it happen that I have the time and energy to more adequately address *all* of your questions at some later date --like maybe tomorrow?-- I will. \n\nWith regard to whether or not Custer should have seen it coming, the answer is definitively yes. Virtually all of his scouts (an assortment of Crows and Arikaras as well as some old time traders like Charley Reynolds and Mitch Bouyer) repeatedly told him --as the 7th cavalry progressed from the Yellowstone, down the Rosebud and up to the divide separating it from the Little Bighorn-- that there was sign of thousands of horses and travois having passed through the area and converging on the Little Bighorn. All of the scouts would also have been very aware that the Lakota were holding a great council, as they traditionally did every year, and would have known that they had moved it to the Little Bighorn (or \"Greasy Grass\" as the Indians knew it) from the Black Hills under pressure from gold-seekers and a US government policy of official indifference to their treaty rights, which is just to say that they would have had one more reason to be hostile. \n\nThe scouts would also have known that among the thousands of warriors camped along the Greasy Grass were a handful of known \"hostiles\" such as Crazy Horse, Gall, Sitting Bull, American Horse and Two Moons, a Cheyenne war chief who'd seen his wife and children killed by Custer's forces on the Washita in 1868. Custer would have had zero reason to expect anything less than a fight to the death from these men, and while the 7th Cavalry did contain a number of new recruits, many of its veterans would have known that they could expect no mercy from the hostiles. \n\nAccording to several sources I've read, the Arikara and Crow scouts who did not flee immediately before the battle (there were a handful who wisely got the hell out of there) began singing their death songs in the predawn hours as Custer deployed his forces.\n\nThe upshot is that Custer had plenty of warning that he was walking into a deathtrap and, given his experience as an Indian fighter, certainly should have known better. As for why he did not, there are several possibilities. One is that he was relying on his past experience, as on the Washita, which told him that an early dawn attack against a sleeping Indian village could yield good results if it were conducted with speed and aplomb. Another, concomitant factor, may have been his refusal to acknowledge the actual numbers of Lakota and Northern Cheyenne camped along the Little Bighorn. While Custer certainly knew that he was taking a big chance --he had high political ambitions and felt that a great victory could propel him, ultimately, to the presidency-- it's not clear that he recognized that he was taking on 3-5k (possibly more) Lakota and Cheyenne warriors even though, had he listened to his scouts, he clearly should have. \n\nUltimately then, no matter how one slices it, Custer had access to plenty of good intelligence as to the disposition and numbers of the Lakota and Cheyenne camped along the Greasy Grass and definitely should have known that he had zero chance of victory. \n\n", "Also recommended reading is Archaeological Insights into The Custer Battle, an Assessment of the 1984 Field Season by Douglas D. Scott and Richard a Fox, Jr. which provides great insight into the course of the battle based on a comprehensive archaeological survey of the battlefield and subsequent detailed analysis of the artifacts." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d6v896v" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Adding to the question, I just today read (\"The Western Heritage since 1300 AP* Edition), that not only were there Catholic and Orthodox representatives plying for religious control of Russia, but there were also Jewish and Muslim representatives too. Was there any reason to choosing one over the other? Were Jews and Muslims stigmatized like they were in the rest Europe?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cg5ygr3" ], "score": [ 16 ], "text": [ "Well, \"history\" is the study of text, but generally that means that it only goes back as far as there has been written word (and myths and oral histories etc). In Western Eurasia, this goes back to the Sumerians in about the fourth millennium, although one could argue that you still can't really do \"history\" for some time afterwards. However, we can extend our knowledge of past societies far back before that with archaeology, the study of past material remains. Archaeology can tell us a great deal about the societies it studies, such as economies, political structures, and religions.\n\nNow, to answer your question, the period you are curious about is called the \"Neolithic\" which is a word essentially meaning \"new stone age\" and is a period of time after the development of agriculture and before the use of metal. [Çatalhöyük](_URL_0_) is southern Turkey is probably the most famous Neolithic site in the \"Fertile Crescent\", but an important thing to remember is that there is no \"one thing\" happening at this time. You are asking about the entire surface of the earth, a whole bunch of things were happening, and the spread of agriculture around the Black Sea had about as much to do with what as going on in Florida as the Lapita settlement of Tonga had to do with Homer.\n\nAs a side note, please disregard the Ancient Aliens nonsense in the other response." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.catalhoyuk.com/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cyfi19j" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the man who accepted the german armistice famously stated in 1919, [\"This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years\".](_URL_0_) He was correct, WWII began 20 years and 64 days later. He was not the only one who shared that sentiment. Winston Churchill avidly spoke about rearmament during the 1930s, but for the most part the general public did not." ] }

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[ [ "https://books.google.com/books?id=TmBN9fBcuO8C&pg=PA209#v=onepage&q&f=false" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ca1xm0l", "ca1zyyp" ], "score": [ 7, 19 ], "text": [ "You might try cross posting to /r/linguistics ", "Ooh! I can answer this one. Sort of. \nI studied linguistics at university, and Field Methods is one of the major aspects. So, while I can't talk about the historical aspect, I can talk about the modern approach. I can't imagine there's much that has changed there aside from the rigor of the method (you'll see what I mean in a bit). \n \nThe first step is to build a lexicon - a list of words. If the language is a living one, that's easy enough: the translator simply points at an object either in the abstract (on a map, for example) or in real life and tries to get the native speakers to name it, then records that name (this, of course, has been lampooned by Terry Pratchett when he talks about mountains that are named \"Mountain\", forests named \"Lots of Trees\", and even rivers named \"Your Finger You Fool\"). \nOnce a substantial enough lexicon has been built, the idea is to start looking for patterns - phonetic (sounds), morphemic (units of meaning), lexical (higher units of meaning), and semantic (socially-contextualised units of meaning). \nFrom there, the patterns are tested. The translator will try to generate their own sentences with the information they have at hand. They *want* to get it wrong at this stage, because they will learn more in being corrected than in getting things correct. \nThis process will go on and on, hopefully with multiple translators to correct for any confirmation bias or blind spots (some languages, for example, have a women's version and a men's version, so you'll need both genders translating to get both versions). Ideally, this process will go on for generations, because languages are, no kidding, *huge*. Hundreds of thousands of words, *millions* of permutations, *billions* of potential interpretations. \nAnd this doesn't take into account how some words simply do not gloss well. Look at r/DoesNotTranslate for some great examples. \nProblems, of course, arise with languages that no longer have any living speakers. We can't test the language, so we're left with huge gaping holes in our knowledge. Furthermore, no one's there to correct us if we go off track (by, say, misapplying a minor word, such as the difference between \"educate\" and \"elucidate\"). \nHistorically, recorded language also tended toward the more formal, with graffiti being a major exception. We therefore miss out on a whole lot of colloquial stuff too." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cb986qt" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Actually, there are a lot of papyri and archeological pieces from the ancient Egypt which have never been studied by archeologists and egyptologists. These numerous missing objects are actually in the hands of collectionners. \n\nThis is the result of the state of egyptology in the 18th and 19th centuries : Egyptology as a science just started with the decipherment of the hieroglyphics, in 1822. Before that, and until the creation of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in 1858 by Auguste Mariette, egyptian antiquities have been stolen because of their value and the mysticism attached to the old egyptian civilisation." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c61i405", "c61ibcw", "c61jqcu", "c61m67j", "c61mw86" ], "score": [ 92, 2, 3, 2, 5 ], "text": [ "That's a pretty complex question. Languages all move at their own pace, and have their own unique history, so it's going to be a different answer for each language. \n\nEnglish has gone through a lot of changes from its \"Old\" to \"Modern\" stages, so Old English and modern English are very different. Here's an exerpt from \"[Beowulf](_URL_2_),\" an epic poem in Old English, written around 900 A.D.:\n\n > Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, \n\n > þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, \n\n > hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. \n\n > Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, \n\n > monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, \n\n > egsode eorlas.\n\nIt looks very different to today's English, mostly because the language hadn't borrowed very much yet from Norman French (that comes later, after the Norman invasion of 1066). It had a lot of very different grammar rules, too - more like today's Germanic languages (eg, German, Icelandic) than today's English.\n\nOld French and Modern French are also very different, but less so than Old English and Modern English. Looking at the oldest written piece of Old French, from the [Oaths of Strasbourg](_URL_1_) (842 A.D.):\n\n > Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun saluament, d'ist di in auant, in quant Deus sauir et podir me dunat, si saluarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in adiudha et in cadhuna cosa si cum om per dreit son fradra saluar dist, in o quid il mi altresi fazet.\n\nOld French looks very Latin, still, but - and I'm relying on your Quebecois eyes, here - you can see where there are elements of Modern French already. (Edit: [Modern French translation of that text here.](_URL_0_))\n\nItalian is a bit different. There is no real \"Old Italian,\" as \"Italian\" was originally many different dialects. What Italians speak today is essentially the same as the Italian dialect spoken in Florence in the 1300s, made popular by Florentine author Dante Alighieri. An example from his \"[La divina commedia](_URL_3_)\" (1308-1321):\n\n > Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita\n\n > mi ritrovai per una selva oscura\n\n > ché la diritta via era smarrita.\n\n > Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura\n\n > esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte\n\n > che nel pensier rinova la paura!\n\nAside from his use of the *passato remoto* tense (\"mi ritrovai\" rather than \"mi sono ritrovato\"), it basically reads like modern Italian, and actually, the *passato remoto* is still often used today in the southern regions of Italy, so even that isn't really obsolete.\n\nI hope that gives you some useful information. If I can answer any questions, please let me know.\n\nEdit: Also, here is a comparison of Old High German (500-1050 A.D.) and modern German:\n\n > Old High German: Oba Karl then eid, then er sīnemo bruodher Ludhuwīge gesuor, geleistit, indi Ludhuwīg mīn hērro then er imo gesuor forbrihchit, ob ih inan es irwenden ne mag: noh ih noh thero nohhein, then ih es irwenden mag, widhar Karlo imo ce follusti ne wirdhit. (From the [Oaths of Strasbourg](_URL_4_) again, 842 A.D.)\n\n > Modern German translation: Falls Ludwig/Karl den Eid, den er seinem Bruder Karl/Ludwig schwört, wahrt und Karl/Ludwig, mein Herr, seinerseits ihn bricht, und wenn ich ihn nicht davon abhalten kann, dann werde weder ich noch irgendjemand, den ich davon abhalten kann, mich an einer Hilfeleistung gegen Ludwig/Karl beteiligen.", "More than about 600-700 years of linguistic drift seems to result in something which is basically another language. I can just about follow Shakespear and Marlowe ('early modern english'), but Chaucer ('middle english') is mostly gibberish to me. Actual Old English (pre-1200) is about as readable as modern German to me (i.e. I can guess at some of the words and sometimes manage to grasp the meaning of simple sentances).\n\nProbably worth posting this to /r/linguistics for a more professional opinion.\n\nEDIT: apparently I was wrong in my assumption that most languages evolve at about the same rate in the long term. The above only really applies to English.", "My Chinese History professor once told us that the Mandarin script hasn't changed (beyond vocabulary expansion) since Qin Shi Huang standardized it in the 2nd century BC. He could easily read texts in Mandarin from the 1st century BC and later without much translation difficulty.", "Not a linguist, but Arabic seems to have been a relatively static language at least since the standardisation of the written Arabic. The written language has a very exact grammatical notation so that, unlike in English, one always knows the 'proper' pronunciation. Of course dialects are still very varied though. Two people, one with the thickest Gulf accent and another with the thickest Moroccan accent, won't be able to understand each other, but for that the 'RP' of Modern Standard Arabic is available to talk in. Modern Arabic is quite different from classical, with its influences from English, French and so on, but most classical terms such as those found in the Quran are still part of the vocabulary.\n\nI interviewed a linguist specialising in Gulf dialects, Prof Clive Holes of Oxford University, a few months ago and he told me an interesting, relevant fact. The 'Bahraani' dialect, spoken by the native Bahrainis who've lived on the island the longest and their mainland cousins on the east coast of Saudi, share their dialect with some highly isolated village people in the mountains of Oman. As in, these Omani people (who have little contact with Musqat let alone lands beyond their nation) have almost the _exact_ same dialect a few hundred/thousand miles north of them. This suggests that they were part of the same group that migrated out of the Yemen which settled in Bahrain and eastern Saudi however many thousands of years ago, and neither dialects have evolved since leaving Yemen (the Yemeni dialect of course has). It's oddly static for such a long period of time.", "Some languages are very conservative--that is, they do not innovate new features or undergo significant phonological change--but not very many. Icelandic and Lithuanian are the two that pop to mind for me: Icelandic is, I'm told, extremely similar to Old Norse, and Lithuanian is reputed to be the living language that most closely resembles Proto-Indo-European, retaining a great deal of features that were lost in other languages." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/z5165/just_how_much_different_are_actual_languages/c61io4l", "http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serments_de_Strasbourg", "http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf", "http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Divine_Com%C3%A9die", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaths_of_Strasbourg" ], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c8acomy", "c8afhwt" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Matty The Horse Ianello served in Korea.", "One of my favorite fiction books is *The Fortunate Pilgrim* by Mario Puzo, and it's about an Italian-American family living in New York. One of the sons of the family is involved with organized crime (the Italian mafia, if you will) and another is conscripted to go fight WWII. The dynamic between the brothers is great. I recommend reading it, especially if you're going to try to write something similar. It sounds like you intend to focus more on the war aspect than Puzo did (it's only a very short moment in the book), so I think you can easily avoid repeating any of his ideas." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cxhkgt0", "cxhnlac" ], "score": [ 19, 9 ], "text": [ "Essentially you've hit the nail on the head with your last sentence\n\n > a perceived lack of opportunity in the North\n\nWhile the First Great Migration (1910-1930) was largely caused by the brutality of Jim Crow Laws and Lynchings, another reason were the increased job opportunities in the North, which largely didn't exist before 1910. The huge jump in Northern manufacturing capability required a massive boost in labor, which African-Americans would meet. Northern manufacturers like Henry Ford even sent men into the South to recruit black laborers for their factories. Before the Great Migrations, there was simply no pull to the North or West for African Americans. ", "To add to /u/Dubstripsquads' response, demand was also created by a series of stiff anti-immigration laws passed by Congress. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the first federal immigration law; it officially suspended Chinese immigration for a decade but had mixed effects (/u/Artrw can speak to these). After the establishment of the Bureau of Immigration in 1891, restrictions came on almost a regular basis. In 1902, the Chinese Exclusion Act was renewed for an indefinite period. In 1903, Anarchists, epileptics, polygamists and beggars were banned from immigration. In 1906, English language skills became a basic requirement for immigration.\n\nIn 1921, the landmark Quota Act of 1921 restricted immigration to 3 percent of each nationality present in the United States in 1910. Asians were still prohibited from immigration, and the act specifically targeted immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, whom the Dillingham Report of 1910 suggested were inferior to other immigrants. The U.S. State Department has [a pretty good precis of immigration laws from 1921 to 1936 here](_URL_2_).\n\nAt the same time the supply of workers was being cut through these anti-immigration laws, demand was soaring with the rise of consumer industry. In addition, the fighting of World War I raised industrial demand to previously unknown heights. In the South, too, there was a cause: The spread of the boll weevil across the South devastated its principal crop and put many farm workers off the fields.\n\nIt would be wrong to say that there was a unified, organized campaign to look to the American South for labor, but it happened anyway ─ 6 million black Americans independently making the decision to move north for employment. As [Isabel Wilkerson's *The Light of Other Suns*](_URL_1_) explains: \n\n > \"There was no leader, there was no one person who set the date who said, 'On this date, people will leave the South.' They left on their own accord for as many reasons as there are people who left. They made a choice that they were not going to live under the system into which they were born anymore and in some ways it was the first step that the nation's servant class ever took without asking.\"\n\nBetween 1910 and 1970, nearly 6 million black Americans left the South, [irrevocably changing the demographic and social map of the United States](_URL_0_)." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/", "http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129827444", "https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dcoscxw", "dcpb797" ], "score": [ 441, 36 ], "text": [ "To answer the first part of your question:\n\nThe Constitution did **not** specify March 4, or any other date, as the beginning of the new President's term. It stated only that the length of the President's term was four years. And, while the Constitution gave Congress the power to set the date for the selection of Electors, and the date the Electors should cast their votes, it did *not* give Congress the power to set the date on which the President's term began.\n\nCongress met for the first time on March 4th 1789. This date was the [result of a vote of the Continental Congress](_URL_0_):\n\n > Resolved, That the first Wednesday in January next be the day for appointing electors in the several States, which before the said day shall have ratified the said Constitution; that the first Wednesday in February next be the day for the electors to assemble in their respective States and vote for a President; and that **the first Wednesday in March** next be the time, and the present seat of Congress [New York] the place for commencing, proceeding under the said Constitution.\"\n\n[EDIT: So, to answer OP's specific question, it looks as if they were fond of Wednesdays, and March 4th happened to be a Wednesday in 1789].\n\nAlthough Congress didn't count the electoral votes of the first Presidential election until April 6th of that year, and President Washington was not sworn in until April 30th, his term in office was retroactively considered to have begun on March 4th (since that was when the new Constitution \"commenced\").\n\nSince every Presidential term was four years long, as specified by the Constituion, every subsequent Presidential term (until the XX Amendment was enacted) also began on March 4th.\n\n\n\n\n\n", "An interesting side note is that March 4, 1848 fell on a Sunday. Zachary Taylor refused to be sworn in on a Sunday, and took his oath on Monday. Millard Fillmore, Taylor's Vice President, also waited. Polk did not stay in office for that extra day. Some claim David Rice Atchison, president pro tempore and next in succession, was president for that day. He never claimed to have been president for that day (in fact mentioned he slept for much of that day), and the myth likely began as a marketing ploy by Atchison, Kansas.\n\nJanuary 20th is roughly a month after the Elecorial College vote (the third Wednesday in December) and roughly two weeks after the president of the senate confirms the vote. January 20, 1937 was a Wednesday, so the 20th became the official day (FDR was already in office and the 20th Amendment reached the required number of states ratifying it on January 23, so FDR's second term retroactively began on the 20th). To keep terms four years, it has remained January 20th.\n\nETA: I stand corrected. When arguing to shrink the lame duck period, those explaining why a long lame duck can be a bad thing, point to secession of Southern states with the election of Lincoln and the bank failures in the Great Depression (which FDR addressed pretty much as soon as he was sworn-in in 1932). For some reason I associated the 20th Amendment as a reaction to FDR closing the banks. Instead it was more of a reflection of larger issues related to the ability of government to respond to crisises." ] }

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[ [ "https://books.google.com/books?id=eU1HAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA861&ots=ARorzTzzMa&dq=%22That%20the%20first%20Wednesday%20in%20January%20next%20be%20the%20day%20for%20appointing%20electors%20in%20the%20several%20States%22&pg=PA867#v=onepage&q=%22That%20the%20first%20Wednesday%20in%20January%20next%20be%20the%20day%20for%20appointing%20electors%20in%20the%20several%20States%22&f=false" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d5p6wfi", "d5pmddr" ], "score": [ 56, 6 ], "text": [ "William Feetham patented a chain-release shower in 1767. In the late 1800s communal showers took hold by French military, under the direction of physician François Merry Delabost who had first tried them out on prisoners for reasons of economics and hygiene.\n\nIn modern times showers did not start to become common until the early 1920s, by which time homes had water heating and reliable plumbing, and had shower heads in existing tubs. But it was slow going at first. A 1954 article in Challenge magazine noted, \"the plumbing industry confidently predicts that the day is not far off when a bathroom and bathtub (with shower) will become a necessary adjunct to every bedroom in the home.\" (Challenge Vol. 2, No. 6 (March 1954), pp. 36-38).\n\n", "Piggy backing on this, when did bathing regularly become a thing, as an idea of hygiene. \n\nSure you see public baths in history, but was it due to hygiene or a social thing. Hot tubs are pretty cool and have nothing to do with hygiene. \n\nLike, was there a time when people didn't bathe regularly and just stank or did most people throughout history bathe? " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cejb6ha", "cejc49y" ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text": [ "Hitler discussed this in Mein Kampf. \n\nHe promoted the idea of five sub-races of the Aryan people. Dinaric, Alpine, mediterranean, Nordic, and Eastern Baltic. The best kind of Aryan is, you probably guessed it, are the predominantly blue eyed and fair headed Nordics. \n\nThis was actually very popular, Nordicism I mean, way before Hitler promoted it. Anyway, Hitler said that Germans and other kinds of Aryans have either been diluted and weakened over time (mixing with Jewish people for example).\n\nHe promoted blue eyed and blonde germans as models because they are less not Nordic. Essentially, Germans needed to expunge non-Nordic lineage which will cause them to have blue eyes and blonde hair again. \n\nThe issue with Nordicism conflicted with Italy which promoted Mediterreneanism. ", "see this similar post from a few months ago for previous responses\n\n[How is it the Nazis justified the attempted creation of a society filled with tall, blond-haired, blue eyed people, when Hitler himself did not fit this model?](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ "http://i.imgur.com/D6QG6X6.jpg", "http://i.imgur.com/T8qFFgE.png" ]

[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kjqnp/how_is_it_the_nazis_justified_the_attempted/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ffuej5c" ], "score": [ 19 ], "text": [ "The story you heard is from Usama ibn Munqidh, a poet and diplomat (among other things) from Damascus who often visited crusader Jerusalem:\n\n > “Anyone who is recently arrived from the Frankish lands is rougher in character than those who have become acclimated and have frequented the company of Muslims. Here is an instance of their rough character (may God abominate them!): \n > \n > Whenever I went to visit the holy sites in Jerusalem, I would go in and make my way up to the al-Aqsa Mosque, beside which stood a small mosque that the Franks had converted into a church. When I went into the al-Aqsa Mosque - where the Templars, who are my friends, were - they would clear out that little mosque so that I could pray in it. One day, I went into the little mosque, recited the opening formula ‘God is great!’ and stood up in prayer. At this, one of the Franks rushed at me and grabbed me and turned my face towards the east, saying ‘Pray like *this*!’ \n > \n > A group of Templars hurried towards him, took hold of the Frank and took him away from me. I then returned to my prayers. The Frank, that very same one, took advantage of their inattention and returned, rushing upon me and turning my face to the east, saying ‘Pray like *this*!’ \n > \n > So the Templars came in again, grabbed him, and threw him out. They apologized to me, saying, ‘This man is a stranger, just arrived from the Frankish lands sometime in the past few days. He has never before seen anyone who did not pray towards the east.’ \n > \n > ‘I think I’ve prayed quite enough,’ I said and left. I used to marvel at the devil, the change of his expression, the way he trembled and what he must have made of seeing someone praying towards Mecca.”\n\nThis is one of Usama’s various amusing anecdotes about the Franks. Usually they're probably meant to be jokes, making fun of the big dumb idiot Franks (i.e. crusaders) from the far away land of ice and snow. They’re basically like “dumb blonde” jokes or “dumb \\[insert ethnicity\\]” jokes but from the perspective of a medieval Muslim. There are certainly truthful elements of Usama’s stories, so it’s possible something like this actually happened - in general, both sides seem to agree that the crusaders who settled in the east were culturally different than the new arrivals. But did this exact incident happen? We don’t know, but maybe not.\n\nIn any case, Usama seems to be the only Muslim who got along well with the Templars. For everyone else, they were fanatically devoted to warfare. They often acted without consulting the other leaders of the kingdom, since they felt they had no authority but the Pope and could do whatever they wanted. On one occasion, some ambassadors from the Assassins came to Jerusalem to negotiate a truce, and the Templars ambushed and killed them. It was a major scandal in the kingdom. \n\nThey were recognized as brave and strong warriors, but that wasn't always necessarily a good thing. For the Muslims this bravery was interpreted more as brutal fanaticism. The Templars would attack and kill anyone, anywhere, with little regard for tactical or political considerations, or at least that's how the Muslims felt about them. They were in a way too strong, too dangerous, unlike the more respectable might and bravery of the regular crusader army. When Saladin defeated the crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, he took thousands of prisoners and many of them were eventually ransomed - but not the Templars. Would the Templars have spared any Muslim prisoners? Probably not! So Saladin had all the Templar (and Hospitaller) prisoners executed:\n\n > \"Two days after the victory, the Sultan sought out the Templars and Hospitallers who had been captured and said: 'I shall purify the land of these two impure races.' He assigned fifty dinar to every man who had taken one of them prisoner, and immediately the army brought forward at least a hundred of them. He ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a whole band of scholars and sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair, the troops were drawn up in their ranks, the amirs stood in double file. There were some who slashed and cut cleanly, and were thanked for it; some who refused and failed to act, and were excused; some who made fools of themselves, and others took their places.\"\n\nIn other battles they either all fought to the death, or were captured and killed afterwards as well - for example in the Battle of Forbie in 1244, only a handful of Templars survived.\n\nSo the story you heard is just the opinion of one Muslim, who may have been making the equivalent of an ethnic joke, and basically all other Muslims feared and hated the Templars.\n\nSources:\n\nMalcolm Barber, *The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple* (Cambridge University Press, 1995)\n\nUsama ibn Munqidh, The Book of Contemplation: Islam and the Crusades, trans. Paul M. Cobb (Penguin Classics, 2008)\n\nThe account of the Templar massacre at Hattin is by Saladin’s secretary Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, which has been translated in Francesco Gabrieli, *Arab Historians of the Crusades*, trans. E. J. Costello, (University of California Press, 1969)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cl6n81w", "cl6ur7z" ], "score": [ 66, 37 ], "text": [ "in 1977 NATO agreed to adopt a 2nd round in addition to the 7.62x51mm round, specifically the SS109 steel tipped round which was designed to pierce a soviet style steel helmet at 600 meters.\n\nJane's Infantry Weapons 1986–1987, pg. 362\n\nThe Small Arms Review vol.10, no.2 November 2006.\n\nIt's 4am and I haven't looked into the details of the agreement but I'm assuming it's related to the US introducing the M16 and 5.56mm round in 1960. ", "There's two questions here. One, why was an intermediate rifle round* chosen? Two, to get to your question why was 5.56x45mm specifically chosen?\n\n*\"intermediate\" rifle rounds are rifle cartridges which are smaller than full-sized rifle rounds. For example, the Russian 7.62x54mmR, which has a 7.62mm bullet and a 54mm long shell (the brass part of a cartidge that contains the primer and propellant). By contrast the Russian 7.62x39mm round fire by the AK-47 fires a shorter, lighter 7.62mm diameter bullet from a shorter 39mm shell. The 5.56x45mm is thus an intermediate round, whereas the 7.62x51mm NATO round is a full-sized rifle round.\n\nTo answer the first question, the end of WWII and the immediate aftermath saw a doctrinal shift amongst many world militaries. Observers realized that many infantry engagements were happening at realtively close ranges (25-400m). At those ranges, rifles firing full-sized rounds had several disadvantages. The heavy recoil of the larger rounds made quick follow-up shots difficult and allowed enemy soldiers armed with submachine guns (the Soviets frequently equipped entire battalions with SMGs for close assault work) to outshoot soldiers with bolt-action and semi-auto battle rifles. The heavy and bulky ammunition limited the amount of ammunition soldiers could carry. And the pistol cartridges fired by submachine guns simply didn't have the reach or stopping power needed to be an effectively replacement for full-sized rifles. So a compromise had to be reached.\n\nArms designers came up with a simple solution to these problems: the intermediate round. This idea actually predates WWII, and several firearms inventors had proposed mid-sized rifle cartridges. The best-known example is the .276 Pedersen round, which would have been fired out of the M1 Garand (Douglas MacArthur intervened and had the M1 chambered in .30-06 instead).\n\nHowever, intermediate cartridge development really accelerated toward the end of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War. In 1943 and 1944, Germany developed the StG43/MP44, which fired an intermediate round: the 7.92×33mm Kurz. In 1945, the British began work on the .280/7mm round, which they planned to fire from the EM-2 bullpup rifle. And of course the Russians had the SKS (and later the AK-47) in 7.62×39mm.\n\nNow, to answer the second part of your question: why was the 5.56mm round chosen? Why not .280 British or one of the other contenders? Well, part of it came down to the fact it was an American design. As the largest nation in NATO, the largest arms buyer/producer, and the founder of the alliance, the US had enormous clout over NATO standardization decisions. Once the Americans decided that they wanted to go with the AR-15/M-16 combination, any NATO member that wanted an intermediate round (and still wanted to be able to buy/borrow ammo from US warstocks in the event of an emergency) more or less had to go with 5.56mmx45. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfqv42w" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Your question is certainly welcome here but you might want to try posting it to /r/AskAcademia too – they're good with career advice." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cicqwex", "cicrzx5", "cid0noy" ], "score": [ 12, 53, 24 ], "text": [ "hi! could you specify which country you're referring to? thanks!", "Yes, that is the case. During the 1970s and 80s these plastic crates were regularly pilfered because of their solid construction and light weight. Today manufacturers have copied these designs and they're sold in stores as consumer goods.\n\nSome states have similar laws for shopping carts, possession is illegal.", "I don't feel like this is a history question at all. Really a cursory google could answer this:\n\n > Theft of milk crates, as it turns out, is an issue taken very, very seriously by the dairy industry. The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA), which runs a whole website devoted to public education on the issues of milk crate misuse, estimates that dairy companies lose 20 million milk crates a year to theft. At about $4 per crate, that’s an $80 million loss per year. That represents just a fraction of a percent of gross national fluid milk sales — in excess of $20 billion in 2012 — but dairy profit margins aren’t huge, and $80 million is $80 million.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAlso:\n_URL_1_\n\nThink about it, they are a great size, and incredibly sturdy therefore they are desirable. The practice in the industry is to place the empty ones outside so the worker can take them with them.\n\nI've acquired a few myself." ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://modernfarmer.com/2013/08/illegal-use-milk-crates-anything-besides-milk/", "http://www.nytimes.com/1989/11/05/nyregion/return-crates-milk-industry-says.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "clt2f5n", "cltghmk" ], "score": [ 8, 2 ], "text": [ "In addition to Calhoun, John Adams regularly presided over the Senate and partook in debates, and beats Calhoun by one vote for the most tie breaks. \n\nThat said, while they are the nominal head of the Senate, the Constitution also says that the House and Senate get to write their own procedural rules in Article I, Section V, Clause II: \n\n > Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.\n\nIn practical terms, the Vice President doesn't have much power if the Senate decides to write the rules to say that they can't do anything other than break ties and be physically present, the only things the constitution explicitly grants them authority to do so. Something like Frank Underwood barging into the Senate and immediately taking over wouldn't really happen since at present, party leaders run the floor and they have junior senators sit in the presiding chair. ", "Follow-up question:\n\nWhat were the differences in expectations of the Vice President's duties after the 12th amendment was passed? After presidential candidates began to choose their own potential Vice Presidents?\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cz7yb41", "cz8j3ao", "cz8olxr" ], "score": [ 12, 3, 16 ], "text": [ "There's one question you left out: is this actually a trend, or do you just know an unusual amount of Cherokees?\n\nI'm seriously asking, because I know a lot of people and I've never met someone who claimed to be Cherokee.", "I've read somewhere that it was used to hide the fact that they had African American blood. Is there any truth to this claim?\nedit\n > These conclusions have been largely upheld in subsequent scholarly and genealogical studies. In 1894, the U.S. Department of the Interior, in its \"Report of Indians Taxed and Not Taxed,\" noted that the Melungeons in Hawkins County \"claim to be Cherokee of mixed blood\".[3] The term Melungeon has since sometimes been applied as a catch-all phrase for a number of groups of mixed-race ancestry. In 2012, the genealogist Roberta Estes and her fellow researchers reported that the Melungeon lines likely originated in the unions of black and white indentured servants living in Virginia in the mid-1600s before slavery became widespread.[5]\n\nRoberta J. Estes, Jack H. Goins, Penny Ferguson and Janet Lewis Crain, \"Melungeons, A Multi-Ethnic Population\", Journal of Genetic Genealogy, April 2012", "Hello. I'm a mod over on /r/IndianCountry, the second largest and most active Native American subreddit. We recently constructed an FAQ [with a section that answers this specific question](_URL_1_) and links to several sources to back it up.\n\nI would like to note, though, that this is more of a social question with a historical context.\n\nIn short, according to Gregory D. Smithers, associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of *The Cherokee Diaspora,* the Cherokee adopted a tradition of intermarriage after contact with the Europeans for several reasons, such as increasing diplomatic ties. Because this was actually encouraged by the Cherokee, it isn't *impossible* that those from the geographic location of traditional Cherokee territory have a Cherokee ancestor.\n\nHowever, another thing to note is that most people don't actually know and just say they have Cherokee in them because it is the family legend.\n\nThe same professor mentioned above, Gregory D. Smithers, also states (bold is mine):\n\n > [**\"But after their removal, the tribe came to be viewed more romantically,** especially in the antebellum South, where their determination to maintain their rights of self-government against the federal government took on new meaning. Throughout the South in the 1840s and 1850s, **large numbers of whites began claiming they were descended from a Cherokee great-grandmother.** That great-grandmother was often a “princess,” a not-inconsequential detail in a region obsessed with social status and suspicious of outsiders. By claiming a royal Cherokee ancestor, white Southerners were legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South, as well as establishing their determination to defend their rights against an aggressive federal government, as they imagined the Cherokees had done. These may have been self-serving historical delusions, but they have proven to be enduring.\"](_URL_0_)\n\nSo the reality of things is that people like to claim something even if they don't have exact proof. One reason is the exotic factor of having native blood. That FAQ I linked touches on several other reasons. Point being, while there is some validity to the possibility of one possessing Cherokee blood or an ancestor, most cases are usually false." ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://tinyurl.com/qxqaomd", "https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianCountry/wiki/faq#wiki_why_do_many_people_claim_to_be_native_american.2C_particularly_.22part_cherokee.3F.22" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cap01bd" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "There were a number of methods used that resulted in widely varying estimates. Charles Mann provides a brief but thorough discussion of methods used to estimate pre-contact populations in the new world in \"1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus\" (Vintage, 2011). Some researchers used early records archived in church and governmental facilities then attempted to correct for population crashes caused by the plagues. Others based their estimates on number of households and estimated household size. Sherburne Cook was among the more prolific students of prehistoric populations publishing papers from the 1950s to the 1970s. In the mid 1970s there was an American Antiquity memoir published that employed assumed initial population estimates from skeletal populations (usually from excavated cemeteries) then applied estimated fertility and mortality estimates and extrapolated from there. Kroeber, in the \"Handbook of the Indians of California\" (1970, California Book Co) employed house and house pit numbers from early ethnographic surveys. Baumhoff (1958) in California Athabaskan Groups (University of California Anthropological Reports, Berkeley) developed population estimates for Northern California tribes based on the availability of fish resources. \n\nAll have their merits and their shortcomings. Mann notes that Henige in \"Numbers from Nowhere: The American Indian Contact Population Debate\" (1998: Univ.. of Oklahoma Press) is the pinnacle of vilification of indigenous population estimates and estimators.\n\nThis is a tiny sample of the reams of population studies that have been conducted. They all seem to have the same basic problems: the veracity of the basis for original estimates (censuses, house counts, fish populations and skeletal counts) and the estimated impacts of the plagues. The issue is further complicated by the bias of researchers and readers. Some tend to maximize the estimates others are much more conservative. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "crr76uc", "crrokzs" ], "score": [ 4, 3 ], "text": [ "Here's some answers I've given previously on the subject\n\n[The Balkan Wars] (_URL_1_)\n\n[Lead up to and outbreak of WWI] (_URL_2_)\n\n[Balkan Nationalism and the Outbreak of WWI] (_URL_0_)\n\nThe 1890s saw the formation of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy), the formation of the Franco-Russian and Franco-British Ententes, and the Anglo-German Naval Arms Race began.\n\nThe early 1900s saw the First and Second Moroccan Crises, the Bosnia Crisis, the First and Second Balkan Wars and the Scutari Crisis. It saw the beginning of a Land Arms Race in 1912, starting with Russia, then Germany and France. \n\nThere was growing tension. Germany's pointlessly aggressive stance in Morocco, combined with the naval arms race, alienated the British, and drew them closer to France, while events in the Balkans lead to increasing Austro-Russian antagonism.\n\nHowever, considering the lengthy affairs these crises were, and the important issues at stake, few civilian and even political observers believed that an assassination in Sarajevo could possibly lead to war. The pace of events in the July Crisis was much greater than in previous crises, and so decision makers found themselves under greater pressure.", "I always liked this quote from Otto Von Bismarck in 1888 \"One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans\". 26 years later he's be proven exactly right. \n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37n91p/to_what_extent_did_ethnic_and_nationalist/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/32gnjo/1912_war_in_the_balkans/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/35vtov/discuss_the_causes_of_world_war_i_what_were_the/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cfcuu8a" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "To which country?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d3adzn7" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I do not know much about the inner workings of the British military and government in April and May of 1945, and so I cannot say how seriously the British themselves took this plan, but I can say that Winston Churchill's goal of stunting Soviet influence in postwar Europe did not align with the aims of Harry Truman's government at the time. And since the plan obviously relied heavily on American power, we can say that the plan never came close to fruition. Note that \"Operation Unthinkable\" was not the only measure that Churchill thought about taking in order to counter the rise of the Soviet sphere in April of 1945. Churchill had contacted Truman directly with the hope of convincing the American president to renege on the agreement between FDR and Stalin regarding a \"Soviet sphere\" by ordering the American army to continue its march through Prague. \n\nIn brief, the American army had entered western Czechoslovakia in early May and plans put forth by Eisenhower had initially called for the liberation \"beyond the Karlsbad-Pilsen-Budweis Line [i.e., western Czechoslovakia] as far asa the upper Elbe [i.e., at least the west half of Prague].\" When the Soviets protested that this violated the agreement made at Yalta, however, Eisenhower instead ordered the army to halt. Churchill, however, argued that \"there can be little doubt that the liberation of Prague and as much as possible of the territory of western Czechoslovakia by your forces might make the whole difference in the post-war situation [in the region].\" Truman, however, showed no interest in pursing a blatant anti-Soviet policy at this time and instead allowed the Red Army to liberate Prague (Stalin remained unsure if Truman would honor the agreement reach with FDR at Yalta, however, and quickly diverted forces aimed at Berlin to instead liberate Prague). \n\nSo in early May, when the British finished outlining their \"Operation Unthinkable,\" Truman demonstrated clearly that he would not go so far as to challenge the Soviet Union by liberating Prague. The idea that he might then wage war on the Soviet Union in order to quell Soviet influence in Poland--influence that FDR and Stalin had already agreed at Yalta was a necessary component of Soviet postwar foreign policy--was an absurd assumption by whomever had put together Operation Unthinkable. There was no chance, at all, that it would be implemented as it was originally envisioned. \n\n**Sources**:\n\n\nAmbassador to France Jefferson Caffery to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, May 6, 1945, *FRUS,* 1945, IV:\n447-448.\n\nWinston Churchill to Harry Truman, April 30, 1945, *FRUS,* 1945, IV: 446. The language of this telegram is nearly\nidentical to language used earlier by Eden.\n\nJohn Erickson, *Stalin's War with Germany: The Road to Berlin*, (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1999),\n625, 783-786.\n\nOperation Unthinkable, excerpt: _URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "https://web.archive.org/web/20101116155514/http://www.history.neu.edu/PRO2/pages/002.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cx3exjb", "cx3f8yq" ], "score": [ 2, 5 ], "text": [ "Can you explain what influence the 1204 sack of Constantinople had on Islamic attitudes towards Christianity, in your view? That's not a connection I've heard before so I'm a little confused.", "Why the West attained a period of dominance is a separate question that I won't address here, although I will point out: Latin Christians conquered Constantinople from *Greek Christians* in 1204. That doesn't seem to be a breaking point in Muslim attitudes towards the \"Franks\" and \"Romans\" for, well, obvious reasons. And as we'll see, it's dangerous to draw conclusions about what the situation and attitudes today might be from a range of attitudes in the past, because even interpretations of a sacred text depend heavily on the historical context of the interpreter.\n\n~~\n\nIt is impossible to speak of \"*the* Muslim attitude\" towards other religions and their practitioners in the early Middle Ages, just like it's impossible to identity a universal view in the modern world. Instead, we can look at a range of laws and literary portrayals from specific historical contexts, and see how particular events affected them.\n\nThe Quran's specific views on non-Muslims are fairly well known. Jews and Christians share an Abrahamic foundation and are *dhimmis* or People of the Book. They can be permitted to exercise their faith freely in Islamic territories while subject to restrictions such as an increased tax. Practitioners of other religions (the web of Middle Eastern paganisms, Zoroastrianism, etc) are not afforded that leeway. A famous medieval, though not authentic to the named ruler, example of restrictions on *dhimmis* is the [Pact of Umar](_URL_0_). While we can't know whether restrictions like this were ever officially deployed, it shows us what the relationship between Muslims and protected non-Muslims was *idealized to be* by at least one group of Muslim legal scholars.\n\nIn practice, the application of the Quranic principles here varied. Sometimes Zoroastrians were extended *dhimmi* protection, and sometimes Jews and Christians weren't. The Almoravid and Almohad dynasties in North Africa and Iberia, for example, attempted to force Jews in particular to convert to Islam. Their Umayyad predecessors in the west, on the other hand, actually *discouraged* conversion among the lower aristocracy, for the tax benefit.\n\nThe question of what *jihad* meant in early Islam is as vexed as it is today. There's no question that the infant religion's adherents achieved explosive success by military conquest across the Near East and North Africa--the Umayyads are in Cordoba (Spain) less than a century after Muhammad. The early years of Islam are characterized by an apocalyptic, messianic sense in which jihad is indeed a spiritual *offensive*. As I noted earlier, that doesn't necessarily mean forced conversion--secular motives like money were attractive. (Richard Bullitt has postulated that conversion occurred over time on a logarithmic scale, with the bulk of conversion ramping up in the 9th and 10th centuries). It did mean Muslim *rule* and establishment of Islamic faith in new territories.\n\nBut--the expansion of Islam slowed. Christianity stubborned kept hold of northern Iberia; in the 9th century even Byzantium started making incursions into the Muslim Near East. That second example offers a prime chance to witness how historical events affect Muslims understanding and representation of non-Muslims. Our earliest Arabic sources portray Byzantium as a *rival*: some levels of hostility, but very respected. They are especially impressed with the political and economic importance of Constantinople, and of the splendor of the city's architecture. Once the Byzantines pick up some military action, Muslim writers ramp up their vitriol. They find new ways to label the Byzantines barbaric, amping up the rhetoric of horrid Byzantine morals.\n\nEven in the Latin Crusades, when the Islamic world is under *direct invasionary attack* by 'barbarians,' individual Muslim governors sometimes allied with the Franks against each other. (Although the chronicles are pretty uniform in calling the Franks atrociously bad fighters...it's just, they have really good armor and weapons, shucks.) In the Fifth Crusade, which dead-ended for the West in a *massively* humiliating capture of the entire crusader army in Egypt, the Muslim force treated them rather well and allowed their release as long as they returned to Europe.\n\nUnlike the later medieval Church, medieval Islam has no centralized body of law or dominant interpretation. It's characterized by a series of overlapping legal and theological schools of interpretation that jockey for ascendancy throughout the era. As the rate of expansion of Islam grinds down almost to a halt, scholars debate the meaning of *jihad* in a world that suddenly doesn't hold apocalyptic hope and expectation of triumph. \n\nOne line of interpretation emerges that divides the world into two: dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, the world of Islam/submission and the world of war. This spiritualizes the idea of jihad: it is defensive, a matter of protecting Islam and its people, rather than working to prepare the world for the messiah through conquest. Unfortunately, Mottahedeh and al-Sayyid, who've done a lot of the work on early notions of jihad, don't really talk about whether we can trace this spiritualization of jihad in specific contexts to changing treatment of non-Muslims under Muslim rule (i.e. did a focus on defensive jihad ever lead to increased conversions or increased signs of repression).\n\nMedieval Muslims who did find themselves in dar al-harb, on the whole, don't seem to have taken this idea of defensive jihad into their military hands. There are some cases of localized rebellion in Christian Spain and Sicily, but isn't that what you'd expect of any conquered people feeling ill-treated? Glick and Meyerson have both discussed the ways in which Muslim revolts in Christian Spain don't have hallmarks of proto-nationalism, they're in fact rather similar to or overlapping with Christian peasant protests of unjust conditions as well.\n\nThe Muslims of high medieval Sicily, conquered by the (Latin) Normans, found themselves deported en masse to the Italian mainland at Lucera. And yet they still *chose* to fight for their homes with the local Christian army against the papal invaders. The Muslim community of the Christian-conquered Ebro Valley in Spain stubbornly insisted, through letters sent abroad and sermons preached at home, that Iberia was their home and they *would* remain there against all the calls of the zealous Almohads in North Africa to leave *dar al-harb* for the comfort of the Islamic world. (And it sure wasn't because of amazing generosity on the part of their Christian overlords, to be sure.)\n\nAnd then you have to consider, of course, that most Muslims are just ordinary people trying to live their lives. Islam spreads in medieval West Africa *almost* by accident. Merchants from the Sudan and North Africa set up trade colonies of sorts in the Ghana Empire, common language (Arabic) facilitates trade, being Muslim allows you to tap into a global trade network...By the time Ibn Battuta makes it to Mali in the 14th century, he's treated to a full recitation of the Quran (in Arabic) while amusedly observing cultural differences in the practices of individual Muslims between Mali and elsewhere in the Islamic world.\n\nOverall, then--if we can even talk about an \"overall\"--it's a complex picture that depends heavily on specific historical contexts. The status of Islamic expansion, the school of law or theology, military developments on both sides, messianic expectation, the passage of time, geographic, economy, the goals of individuals: so many factors in the matrix, so many experiences we can identify in concrete times and places." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pact_of_Umar" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fjx76ok", "fjx79xh", "fjx88p3", "fjxafs3" ], "score": [ 14, 3, 26, 12 ], "text": [ "There's actually a browser plugin (at least, there's one for Chrome) called [AskHistorians Comment Helper](_URL_0_) that puts a little green number next to the number of comments that shows how many comments are still up.", "Maybe \"approved answer(s)\" might sound less finite?", "This one gets asked a lot, because it's a seemingly intuitive solution to the common problem of clutter - threads with high comment counts that suggest the presence of an answer, but in reality are all just removed comments.\n\nHowever, the issues - both practical and conceptual - raised by actually implementing an answered flair are considerable, and our collective judgement has long been that the downsides by far outweigh the advantages. For a more full explanation you can check out [this post](_URL_2_). But the basic issues as I see them are:\n\n1. Except for the most basic of factual questions (which we tend to redirect to our Short Answers to Simple Questions thread anyway), history rarely admits 'one' answer to a given question. Differing perspectives, methods, sources and so on all mitigate against definitive answers to most questions. An Answered flair - whether watered down by different terminology or not - risks giving a different impression, as well as discouraging users from adding new perspectives once that it has been declared 'Answered' (this is feedback that we have received from our flair community).\n2. These suggestions are usually based on misconceptions of how we actually moderate the sub. We don't read every comment that gets made, relying instead on user-generated reports to spot problematic answers that we then might evaluate in more detail if it seems necessary. Changing this to reading and evaluating every substantive comment would represent an exponential increase in workload for what is - compared to the size of the sub - a fairly small team of active moderators (and that's not even getting into the fact that for this to work, each flair would need to be manually altered and updated - we can't train a bot to be able to tell the difference between 700 words of wisdom and a 700-word scrawl of conspiratorial madness). Keep in mind as well that the mods aren't omniscient - unless one of us happens to have expertise in a particular topic, checking the content of any substantive answer is a lot of work (and often involves collaboration and discussion on our end - an answer which we initially let stand might be taken down later once someone with enough knowledge to spot the flaws is awake). Asking us to put what amounts to seals of approval on all such content would stretch us well past breaking point, and would if anything result in a massive increase in removals of longer answers, on the basis that we don't want to be seen to endorse material that we aren't completely sure of. While the line between 'decent enough to let stand' and 'good enough to endorse' might seem very thin, from our perspective it's a much bigger deal.\n3. It likely still wouldn't solve the main problem, while simultaneously interfering with the various ways we currently use flairs. For the large numbers of users on mobile, flairs often won't be visible to users before accessing the thread anyway (thereby obviating the sole advantage of such a flair, which is saving users a click). For users less familiar with the sub, who provide most of the added clutter in highly visible threads, a flair system is unlikely to get noticed, judging purely by how few of these commenters appear to read the Automod message in every thread.\n\nIf you are a regular user who finds the wasted clicks on deceptively empty threads to be annoying, we would heartily recommend our custom-designed [browser extension](_URL_1_) made by [/u/Almost\\_useless](_URL_0_), which does a great job of making thread comment counts actually accurate.", "I have to respectfully disagree with your Post Scriptum. Any sort of official indication that \"this post has an approved top level comment\" will be viewed with the Reddit lens of \"first post gets the upvotes\". No matter how we couch it, the knowledge that someone has beaten them to the punch WILL discourage later posters from attempting to answer." ] }

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[ [ "https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ask-historians-comment-he/jdkfbkogojpmdmpnkgjcgpngkkmhdfem" ], [], [ "https://www.reddit.com/u/Almost_useless/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c9gbcv/friday_freeforall_july_05_2019/esy2lm7/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eq0hsm/sub_question_why_cant_we_have_answered_flairs/femv0b6?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dhb2h91" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "As far as \"good luck\" goes, he may be thinking of a scene in the 1963 film *The Great Escape* where this happens in reverse- escaped British PoWs are captured when a Gestapo officer wishes them \"Good luck\" in English and one of them instinctively replies \"thank you\".\n\nI have seen claims (for instance in *This Great Escape: The Case of Michel Paryla* by Andrew Steinmetz, and *The RAF's French Foreign Legion* by G.H. Bennett) that this incident is based on the real-life case of the French escapee Sous-Lt. Bernard Steinhauer, who was fluent in English and German as well as his native French and who was captured at Saarbrücken station after replying in English to an English greeting by a Gestapo officer- although sources differ on the exact phrase used.\n\n(Like most of those who escaped in the breakout from Stalag Luft III, Sous-Lt. Steinhauer was shot a few days later)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c4ok42f" ], "score": [ 24 ], "text": [ "Oswald shot him. In the head.\n\nThat's pretty much the only opinion that will not get you rejected for tenure. Why? Because like all conspiracies, the JFK conspiracy relies upon such a perfect chain of events, placement of people, and reliance on their complicity, as well as not leaving a paper trail a mile long, that it borders on the absurd.\n\nWhat is really more plausible? That one crazy communist with a gun slipped through the security cracks and got off three honestly easy shots on a day that the President went against the better advice of his security team? OR, that the Cuban rebels/CIA/FBI/Mafia/Alien Greys/Freemasons/Rosicrucians/Girl Scouts conspired to off the most powerful man in the free world with out anyone having a guilty conscience, verifiable evidence, failures in security, lapses in timing, or just plain bad luck (if you have any experience with real government secret planning, you would know how many things get completely cocked up)?\n\n" ] }

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[ "http://www.businessinsider.com/a-closer-look-at-the-watergate-tapes-reveals-that-nixon-didnt-order-the-burglary-2012-5" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "dnahrh0" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Spain's force in Cuba numbered 278,457 soldiers, distributed in 101 Infantry Battalions, 11 Cavalry Regiments, 2 Artillery Regiments, and 4 Marine Battalions. The force in Cuba made up the bulk of Spain's entire military force, being nearly 57 percent of the Army. This force was bolstered by another 82,000 volunteers. Another 10,005 were in Puerto Rico, and 51,331 in the Philippines, for another 12 percent of the Spanish Army. \n\nAlthough a large force, the Spanish Army of the time was somewhat decrepit, manned with poor quality conscripts (those who could afford to pay the tax to avoid universal conscription always did), and never with enough equipment, even though they did carry decent Mauser rifles. Although commanding a large part of the Spanish budget, the bloated officer corps (1:4 officer:enlisted ratio!) ate up much of that with their salaries. The aloof officer corps wasn't up to the task of leadership, and the men were not all that easy to lead in any case.\n\nAt sea, Cuba and Puerto Rico were defended by 8 cruisers, 6 destroyers, and 49 other small craft manned by 2,800 sailors and 600 marines. As with the Army though, the Navy was a paper tiger at best, as barely any of the Spanish fleet was up to modern standards and able to go toe-to-toe with the US Navy, which as it turned out, made mincemeat of 'em.\n\n\"Spain, Army\" and \"Spain, Navy\" from Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine American Wars, ed. by Spencer C. Tucker" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cc3x9q7", "cc3xdjf", "cc44dx3" ], "score": [ 11, 5, 2 ], "text": [ "Don't forget that outside of the US it's spelt and pronounced 'arse,' whilst the type of donkey is still universally called an ass. A lot of Irish accents have a very 'ass'-like pronunciation of 'arse,' and of course Irish immigrants made up a huge number of Americans during the initial population boom.", "See [here](_URL_0_). It originally meant \"donkey\", then became an insult for people. The meaning of \"butt\" is first attested in 1860, but as slang it may be significantly older but not recorded in writings we have.\n\nIt actually seems to be from merger of \"arse\" and \"ass\" in some dialects of English--see [here](_URL_1_). Arse always meant \"butt\", it seems that the meaning of \"arse\" carried over to \"ass\" in dialect where they're different.", "In German it's Arsch." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=ass&allowed_in_frame=0", "http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=arse&allowed_in_frame=0" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cc0hnf1" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "While these sorts of posts are welcome in this subreddit, it's often not the best place to put them. You may find you have better luck in /r/whatisthisthing, as the sub specializes in identifying unknown objects." ] }

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[ "http://imgur.com/a/NH2Qh" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "c4n2hkd" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It's not the right era (up til 1600), but I checked my copy of [*Sources of Japanese Tradition vol. 1*](_URL_1_) and it has some primary sources that mention the Ainu.\n\n1. \"New History of the Tang Dynasty\" mentions the ainu arriving at the Chinese court w/ a Japanese envoy in 663 (p.12)\n\n2. \"Reform Edicts\" from the Taika Reforms in 645 mentions keeping weapons handy in provinces bordering the Emishi (p.78)\n\n3. p. 266 has some information from campaigns against them.\n\n4. The index has a listing for Buddhism and the Ainu on p.212, but for the life of me I don't see them mentioned on that page. It's either an error, or I've gone blind.\n\nMy copy of [*Sources of Japanese Tradition vol. 2*](_URL_0_)(1600-2000) is in a box somewhere, so I can't check it for you, but that might be another place to look for translated primary sources from the era." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.amazon.com/Sources-Japanese-Tradition-Introduction-Civilizations/dp/023112984X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336791953&sr=8-2_", "http://www.amazon.com/Sources-Japanese-Tradition-Volume-One/dp/0231121393/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336791953&sr=8-1" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eojbloh" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Lots of paddling but no Sailing\n\nThere is significant physical evidence that Native Americans traveled to various islands in the Great Lakes. There are hunting artifacts on Pelee Island and pictographs on Kelley's Island in Lake Erie.\n\nThere were Ojibway (Chippewa) recorded as living on Michipicoten Island at the time of first contact by Etienne Brule around 1620, and there were prehistoric copper mines on Isle Royale. Both of these islands are in Superior and are near to the route of the Edmund Fitzgerald. They are both around a dozen miles off the the mainland, which is close enough to be visible, but far enough to make it more than just a lazy afternoon paddle. (And not in a storm, and not in November.)\n\nLater, when the fur trade picked up, the larger loads of furs were transported to Montreal in 30-40 foot canoes, except for the obvious portage at the Niagra River and the rapids near Sault Ste Marie.\n\nAlthough every paddler learns to adjust course for tailwinds, the first actual sailing ship on the Great Lakes was the Griffin built in Robert Sieur de La Salle in 1679." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "drd3ynv", "drd4j3y", "drdbknz" ], "score": [ 4, 78, 13 ], "text": [ "A follow-up question: To what extent were the storylines of Shakespeare's plays already known to the average audiences of his shows? I recall learning about a Greco-Roman work with a similar storyline to *Romeo and Juliet*, but I am curious whether such works had entered the cultural lexicon of Shakespeare's time or if there was even a link between the two storylines beyond coincidence.", "The concept of a \"plot twist\" which can be \"spoiled\" is a fairly recent concept in the history of drama/literature. In Ancient Greece, for instance, everyone knew the all of the legends and their plots forwards and backwards - if you found someone who didn't know that Klytemnestra killed Agamemnon, you'd think them ignorant and remind them of the story.\n\nOr take Shakespeare's plays - Iago and Richard III explicitly detail their villainous plans to the audience, it's not concealed like the identity of the murderer in an Agatha Chrstie. In Elizabethan times, a \"comedy\" meant a play with a happy ending, just as a \"tragedy\" meant one with a sad one, so even before the audience sat down in the Globe they'd know that *Romeo and Juliet* wasn't going to end well for the lovers. Shakespeare even \"spoils\" the ending in the Prologue: \"A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.\" \n\nOr take *Robinson Crusoe*, considered the first novel in English. Its full title is *The life and strange surprising adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, mariner : who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an uninhabited island on the coast of America, near the mouth of the great River of Oronooque, having been cast on shore by shipwreck, wherein all the men perished but himself, with an account how he was at last as strangely delivered by pirates, also the further adventures, written by himself*. So no one was worrying about giving away the ending, \"he gets rescued by pirates\" - it's right there in the title! \n\nLiterature developed, of course, and by the time of novels like *Emma* or *Tom Jones* we see dramatic plot twists, and in *Barchester Towers* (1857), we even have the concept of a \"spoiler\": \n > And then how grievous a thing it is to have the pleasure of your novel destroyed by the ill-considered triumph of a previous reader. \"Oh, you needn't be alarmed for Augusta; of course she accepts Gustavus in the end.\" \"How very ill-natured you are, Susan,\" says Kitty with tears in her eyes: \"I don't care a bit about it now.\" ", "You are asking about centuries ago, but the phenomena of spoilers is much more recent, brought about by the internet age more than anything, I think.\n\nTake this [Variety 1960 review of Psycho](_URL_0_). They were not exactly keen on keeping the biggest secrets.\n\nSome highlights:\n\n\"throughout the feature is a mother who is a homicidal maniac. This is unusual because she happens to be physically defunct, has been for some years. But she lives on in the person of her son.\"\n\n\"Among the victims are Janet Leigh\"\n\n\"Martin Balsam, as a private eye who winds up in the same swamp in which Leigh’s body also is deposited.\"\n\n\"the psychiatrist who recognizes that Perkins, while donning his mother’s clothes, is not really a transvestite; he’s just nuts.\"\n\nThis review (June 22) is 6 days after its limited release. Its wide release would not come until September 8th.\n\n\n\n" ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://variety.com/1960/film/reviews/psycho-1200419814/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cyj0y5k", "cyj5cls" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "I can give you some answers on this, at least according to Herodotus. The Greeks generally had some rules of war, but they were also great \"innovators\" when it came to waging war, so sometimes these rules went out the window. A big rule though was not destroying temples, anyone who destroyed the temple of a God would be cursed by the gods. The Athenians are a great example of this, at least according to Herodotus. When they attacked Sardis, they destroyed the temples of the Persians (and the city itself). This offended Zeus, apparently, he sent first Darius against them, and then Xerxes (who was occasional described as being Zeus at least by the Delphi Oracle) who burned Athens, and the acropolis. Gaining revenge for Sardis.\n\nThe Greeks were sometimes known to sacrifice humans, often slaves or criminals to certain gods - the Titan Chronus would have criminals sacrificed outside city gates, I've heard. But it wasn't a common or well looked up habit. But it did occaisionally happen.", "I would recommend reading the first book of Thucydides, which includes the (probably fictional but highly sophisticated) arguments raised by Spartans, their allies, and their enemies, for and against starting the Peloponnesian War. It will explain a lot about notions of what justified going to war, and what other considerations were involved (costs, risks, plausible outcomes). The work is available for free through the Perseus Digital Library.\n\nI'm not sure if your premise is meant to be an alternative history, but of course the Spartans were defeated quite frequently. After Thermopylae, the Spartans lost on Sphacteria (425 BC), at Megara (409 BC), Lechaeum (390 BC), Abydos (389 BC), Olynthus (381 BC), Tegyra (375 BC), Corcyra (373 BC), Leuctra (371 BC), Cromnus (365 BC) and Mantinea (362 BC). This is not counting severe naval defeats at Cynossema (410 BC), Cyzicus (409 BC), Arginusae (406 BC) and Cnidus (394 BC).\n\nGreek warfare throughout this period was notoriously brutal and unrestrained, and the Spartans routinely committed acts that would be considered war crimes now (i.e. targeting civilians, killing prisoners, butchering whole populations). Only a few rules were generally observed, such as the sanctity of temples and the protection offered by events in honour of the gods (such as the Olympic Games).\n\nAnd no, the Spartans did not have human sacrifice." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fb2r8e3" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Edgar's F. Raines's *Eyes of Artillery: The Origins of Modern U.S. Army Aviation in World War II* ([link](_URL_0_)) seems to mention this unit on page 257. According to Raines, during the Battle of Leyte in 1944:\n\n > Resupply became the main, but not the only, mission of the [11th Airborne] division's aircraft during the campaign. The division surgeon organized two portable surgical hospitals (parachute), the 5246th and 5247th, which the L-4s [i.e. Piper Cubs] dropped into Manarawat, a small village where [division commander] Swing located his headquarters, and another jungle clearing before airstrips were ready. There, doctors stabilized the division's wounded; then liaison pilots, many of them returning to the coast for more supplies, flew the patients to the rear for long-term care..." ] }

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[ [ "https://history.army.mil/catalog/pubs/70/70-31.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cg1qbvq", "cg1r5pc", "cg1wlx2" ], "score": [ 5, 11, 4 ], "text": [ "It's still in the process of being excavated, but some of the discoveries we've made are already very interesting. The terracotta warriors are one of them. However, when they first opened the room containing the warriors the fresh air caused the paint on the warriors to flake off in a matter of minutes. So now they're being very very careful with the excavation, to prevent such a thing happening again. ", "There are conservation reasons, which I don't have the scientific training to discuss, but I'd like to question your assumption that it is the \"world's most fascinating monument\". Yes, it is a large and spectacular tomb that probably has a lot of marquee artifacts inside, but those kinds of sites are not always the best to answer interesting research questions. Take for example the archaeological site of Gordion in Turkey, which has been under continuous excavation for 1950. Compared to the likely contents of the Mausoleum of the Qin Emperor it has for the most part been entirely unspectacular with the exception of the large golden burial in Tumulus MM and a few nice artworks. But as a research site it is one of the most important in the entire Middle East, on the level of Bogzakoy, Assur, Warka, Ur and other major sites. It represents one of the longest continuous human habitations known in Anatolia, was the capital city of the Phyrgian state(MM stands for \"Midas Mound\") and as such has some of the most important Iron Age monumental architecture of Anatolia, important evidence of the Hittite presence in central Anatolia, a notable Hellenistic town that can answer a lot of questions along with other Hellenistic sites about the Greek presence in Anatolia, a lot of plant remains that can tell us about the ecological history and food production of the region, and is generally nearly unparalleled as a laboratory for the archaeology of the ancient Near East. It may not be an enormous mound burying a famous Chinese emperor, but from certain perspectives a site like Gordion(and I pick that only because I know the archaeology of the Near East better than the archaeology of China) that preserves evidence about a wide range of human activities and habitations over a very long period of time is far more valuable as historical evidence.\n\nEDIT: And I have not even touched on the humbler settlement archaeology, which for the most part surveys and excavates sites that barely make the front pages but can tell us things about daily life and historical geography that even the most impressive urban monumental site simply cannot.", "According to the texts displayed on the site itself (not really rigorous historical material, of course, but presumably written in consultation with the archaeologists working on the site) the reason is archaeologists don't feel they're able to properly excavate it using what is currently available technologically.\n\nAccording to legend, Shi Huangdi was buried in an enormous replica of the lands he governed using mercury to model the rivers and lakes of his empire. Preliminary soil readings have shown that there indeed seems to be a staggeringly high amount of mercury in the soil surrounding the probable location of his tomb. The feeling is that with the current state of technology it's not feasible to dig up something that is surrounded by so much mercury, both because it's impossible to guarantee the safety of those doing the digging and because it's impossible to guarantee the tomb itself won't be damaged when all that mercury is disturbed.\n\nSince there still is a vast amount of work to be done on the terracotta army itself (which really is just the outpost of the tomb) and, but I'm conjecturing here, based on where the site is located and what surrounds it*, there is no real hurry in getting the thing excavated in its entirety, they've decided to leave it for now.\n\n* The terracotta army site is located about an hour and a half by bus from the nearest major city, Xi'an, in an area that is mostly agricultural. Because of this there's much less of a hurry to excavate it, as there is little reason to suspect the city will be encroaching upon it anytime soon. This makes it a rather different site than, say the Ming Tombs (to which the outskirts of Beijing are edging closer every year) or the Jinsha site (which these days is well within the Chengdu urban area)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dq8ykix" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "I'm adapting this from some older answers. \n\n\nHere's the tricky thing about your question--do you mean 'porn' in the sense of moving visual art of people doing erotic things? Then in 1894 Edison's studio recorded a vaguely erotic short, titled Carmencita, which featured a Spanish dancer who twirled and posed on film for the first time. The short was considered scandalous in some places because Carmencita's underwear and legs could be seen in the film. A couple of years later, in 1896, the same studio recorded The May Irwin Kiss, an 18 second film of a Victorian couple kissing (in an incredibly awkward and forced manner). According to Maximillien De Lafayette, this scene in particular caused uproar among newspaper editorials, cries for censorship from the Roman Catholic Church, and calls for prosecution—although these calls do not seem like they were followed up on.\n\nOr perhaps you mean film of people actually doing the deed? Then the oldest surviving work we have is *L'Ecu d'Or ou la Bonne Auberge*, which was first distributed in 1908--and features a man coming to an inn somewhere in france. The inn has no food, but the inkeeper is desperate for food and offers a very different type of food -- his daughter. And then, just because a third woman has to come and join in on the fun. However, this film only survives in a few places now, censors managed to destroy most copies of this film. \n\nThe earliest surviving American film, available on [Wikipedia of all places,](_URL_0_) **[THIS LINK IS LITERAL PORN, YOUVE BEEN WARNED]** is called *A Free Ride,* and dates from 1915. These types of works were typically shown in brothels, until film projection equipment became cheap in the 1930s. \n\nAs with photography before it, and books before that, film eventually became cheaper and more widespread, began appearing in the alleyways and under the counter at stores, and eventually lead to arrests, prosecution and jail time. The Czech movie Ecstasy (1933), for example, featured scenes of nudity, and perhaps the first female orgasm shown in a major theatrical release. The scandal of these scenes lead to cries for the seizing and banning of the offensive material, and lead to the Hayes Code in the United States, which successfully banned erotic material from Hollywood movies for the next 30 years. Full freedom of pornographic expression was not available until 1988's California v. Freeman, which effectively legalized hardcore pornography. \n\nOr do you perhaps mean \"porn\" as in the concept of pornography as a whole? 'Porn' as we know it is a relatively recent thing, dating from the early 1800's or so, 1857 is when it was really written into law in our modern understanding of it (in england and France, a few years earlier in America). So 'porn' as we know it is only about 150 years old! \n\nThis is really surprising to most people, as they tend to think, as you do, of the Karma Sutra and other things as pornography. But they're not, or at least in their original contexts they were not\n\n > “the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings” (OED)\n\nAlthough pornography is a Greek word literally meaning “writers about prostitutes,” it is only found once in surviving Ancient Greek writing, where Arthenaeus comments on an artist that painted portraits of whores or courtesans. The word seemed to fall more or less out of use for fifteen hundred years until the first modern usage of the word (1857) to describe erotic wall paintings uncovered at Pompeii. \n\n\nSeveral ‘secret museums’ were founded to house the discoveries. However, these museums (the first of which was the Borbonico museum in Naples) were only accessible to highly educated upper-class men, who could understand Latin and Greek and pay the admission price. \n\n\nAs literacy rose and the book market developed in England and it began to seem possible that anything might be shown to anyone without control, then the ‘shadowy zone’ of pornography was ‘invented,’ regulating the “consumption of the obscene, so as to exclude the lower classes and women.” (Walter Kendrick, p. 57, *The Secret Museum*) Critics and moralists responded to the growing market, rising literacy, and the developing public sphere by expressing a deep anxiety over the impact and influences of erotic works. Erotic discourse began to be inextricably linked to a ’type’ of work that supposedly had undesirous effects upon the English public. In Lynn Hunt’s words then, “pornography as a regulatory category was invented in response to the perceived menace of the democraticization of culture.”\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Free_Ride_\\(1915\\).ogv" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7kzg9r" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Do you read German? If so, get the standard work on the Hanseatic League: *Bracker, Jörgen / Henn, Volker / Postel, Rainer (Eds.): Die Hanse. Lebenswirklichkeit und Mythos, 3rd edition, Lübeck 1999.*, a German language collection of various texts on a diverse range of topics. I don't believe it's been translated though." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "che1fmm", "cheair9" ], "score": [ 10, 2 ], "text": [ "They used the old Greek letter notation as well as Greek music theory. This was, as far as we can tell, a matter for the educated in theorising about music, rather than a tool for musicians to help remember and communicate musical ideas. One of the best preserved antique pieces of music is from the roman period, but it is culturally Greek rather than Roman. [Seikilos Epitaph](_URL_0_), which was inscribed on a tombstone found in what is now Turkey. As far as I am aware, we have no evidence in the form of written down music of how music may have sounded in the city of Rome, though it surely changed a lot over the centuries.", "hi! here are a bunch of links I rounded up a few days ago for a similar question (what did ancient Roman music sound like, and did they have notation?); check 'em out ~\n\n* [Do we have any idea what Ancient Roman music sounded like?](_URL_7_)\n\n* [Is there any surviving sheet music from the Roman Republic/Empire? Is there somewhere I could hear it?](_URL_1_)\n\n* [Was Roman music different from Greek music?](_URL_3_)\n\n* [What was music like in the Roman Republic/Empire? Was there anything close to an orchestra in scale?](_URL_4_)\n\n* [What musical instruments were there in 0CE?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [What did popular music sound like in the Roman Empire?](_URL_2_)\n\n* [What type of music was common in ancient Roman and Greek societies?](_URL_5_)\n\n* [Did urban Romans and Greeks have a concept of folk music, dress, and so on?](_URL_6_)\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph" ], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wq9ht/what_musical_instruments_were_there_in_0ce/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13uo2p/is_there_any_surviving_sheet_music_from_the_roman/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hxrmb/what_did_popular_music_sound_like_in_the_roman/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/21q87u/was_roman_music_different_from_greek_music/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14ks96/what_was_music_like_in_the_roman_republicempire/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xffmi/what_type_of_music_was_common_in_ancient_roman/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1py2ck/did_urban_romans_and_greeks_have_a_concept_of/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17jmva/do_we_have_any_idea_what_ancient_roman_music/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dqwh94e" ], "score": [ 45 ], "text": [ "So I'm not entirely sure that Snyder is being serious there? Right after he states it, he then goes on to say \"OK, you didn't think that was as funny as I did.\" If he *is* serious, well, it is an hilarious silly thing to state. At the outbreak of war, France was able to mobilize roughly 5 *million* soldiers, across the three main forces it controlled - Metropolitan Army, Army of Africa, and the Colonial Troops. By the invasion of France, 94 Divisions were operational in France.\n\nFrenchmen certainly fought in the German military, but not in number anywhere near that for the Allies. The 33rd Wafffen-SS Division Charlemagne, saw only in the ballpark of 10,000 men (in my brief look about, sources seem in marked disagreement on the exact number), and the 638th Infantry Regiment - \"Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism\" - adds a few thousand more to that number. Even if we are incredibly charitable and count the 100,000 men of the Vichy Army of the Armistice, and the Vichy-era's 225,000 men of the Army of Africa, we still are woefully short of reaching the number of french soldiers fighting for the Allies in early 1940.\n\nAnd if we don't want to count that, and *just* look at the Free French, even the initial Free French Forces numbered about 7,000 soldiers and 3,600 sailors, which is not exactly puny compared to the numbers above not counting Vichy, and by mid-1944, the Free French numbered 400,000 men. We can split hairs over whether they were \"Frenchmen\", since a large part of the force was drawn from French Colonial possessions, so included men we would perhaps instead refer to as Algerian or Senegalese, but the original Army in France in 1940 had a strong minority of Colonial troops anyways, and not counting them would seem to discount their contribution and sacrifices.\n\nSo in short, while I again seem to read him as making a joke, and his actual point seems to be about the sacrifices of Ukrainians versus those of the French, France had literally millions of men serving in the Allied forces in 1940, and the Free French were nearing half a million later in the war, which certainly dwarfs the French formations within the German military.\n\nNumbers mostly taken from Encyclopedia of World War II ed. Alan Axelrod, also \"La Grande Armeé in Field Gray’: The Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism, 1941\" by Oleg Beyda and \"Hitler's Gauls\" by Jonathan Trigg" ] }

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[ "https://youtu.be/wDjHw_uXeKU?t=1198" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "dazgiog" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Some parts of your question were covered in [this earlier answer,](_URL_1_) which points out that the earliest certain written record of Stonehenge only dates from the late Norman period (c.1130). And even after that, it wasn't until the first stirrings of antiquarianism in the mid-17th century that we get any sort of significant flow of information about the site and how it was regarded. \n\nAll that said, we do have some clues. Let's review the ways things stood from period to period.\n\n**Saxon era**\nThe word \"Stonehenge\" is a corruption of the Saxon *Stanenges*, \"hanging stones\". It's usually supposed the name was given to the site because the trilithons at its centre reminded people of gallows. Some support for that supposition comes from the discovery of the victim of a Saxon-era execution (an articulated skeleton known to archaeologists as \"burial 4.10.4\"), whose remains were found in 1922, inhumed in the north-east ditch that surrounds the monument. These remains were long thought lost, but when rediscovered in 1999 they were carbon-dated to c.600-690. The victim, a male of 5 feet 4 inches (1.65m), who may have been either Saxon or a Briton, and was aged 28-32, had been decapitated with a single well-aimed blow from an axe or sword. Pitts et al observe that several known Saxon execution sites are associated with Neolithic monuments such as long barrows. Hence we have some evidence that for the early Saxons, Stonehenge may have been an execution and funerary site. Also worth noting, Pitts says, is that this burial is \"the oldest indication we have that Stonehenge had a significance in recent centuries.\"\n\n**Norman period**\nThe chronicler Henry of Huntingdon wrote about Stonehenge in the context of his listing of the four great wonders of England. For his (much less reliable) contemporary Geoffrey of Monmouth, who claimed to base his work on a probably non-existent old Welsh book, Stonehenge was a memorial to British soldiers killed by Saxon invaders led by Hengist in the fifth century AD, and later the burial site of two great British kings, Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther.\n\n**From 1130-1530**\nStonehenge again goes largely unrecorded in this period. The historian and Tudor propagandist Polydore Vergil mentions it, but only to repeat Monmouth's account.\n\n**Mid to late Tudor period**\nThe first known image of Stonehenge was executed probably by Joris Hoefnagel in 1568 or 1569. The original is lost, but [several versions of it exist,](_URL_0_) including a print by \"R.F.\" and a watercolour by Lucas de Heere. It's notable for its inaccuracy, showing the stones as \"curvaceous as a Modigliani nude\" (Burl) and focussing, as do so many later descriptions, on the sarsens rather than the less well preserved bluestone circle. \n\nThe topographer William Camden mentions the site in his *Britannia* (1588), though without devoting the sort of attention we might expect from our more modern perspective. He focused on the monuments; physicality, calling it \"a huge and monstrous piece of work,\" made of \"certain mighty and unwrought stones.\" He added that some thought the stones themselves were artificial, not things that had been quarried and carved, being stuck together with \"some glewie and unctuous matter\".\n\n**Stuart period**\nThe first systematic investigations of Stonehenge date to this period. James I and other members of a party paying a visit to the Earl of Pembroke, who lived nearby, excavated some ox bones from the site in 1620 (which they speculated were the products of sacrifices once made there), and the king asked his architect Inigo Jones to investigate the monument's history. Jones pitched a tent at the henge and took measurements, also excavating to find out how deeply embedded the stones were in the local chalk. His notes were published in 1655 as *The Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain, Vulgarly Called Stoneheng, on Salisbury Plain.* He thought it was a Roman construction and likened it to temples he knew of in Tuscany. At about the same that infamous royal favourite George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, also visited the site and excavated a large pit in the centre of the monument in order to topple one of the sarsen stones (55), also significantly undermining its companion (56), whic hby 1660 was leaning over at an angle of 75 degrees . Buckingham was interested enough in pursuing these inquiries to offer to purchase the site from its owner, a local gentleman, but he was rebuffed.\n\nIn 1663, Walter Charleton wrote a book on the monument, *Chorea Gigantum* (\"giant's dance\") which speculated that Stonehenge was a royal court or palace constructed by the Danes around the time of King Alfred.\n\nCharles II also visited the site (on his way into exile, 1651) and was entranced by it, pausing in his flight to \"reckon and re-reckon the stones.\" After his restoration in 1660 he ordered the renowned Stuart diarist John Aubrey to conduct fresh investigations at the henge.\n\nAubrey already knew the site well, though he considered it be be inferior in its plan and construction to the Avebury Circle. He was the first to attempt to compare Stonehenge to other ancient stone circles and also the first to associate it with the druids, speculating that it was an ancient religious temple (still a popular supposition even today, of course). It's also to Aubrey that we owe the discovery of the \"Aubrey holes\" inside the bank encircling the henge. Modern archaeologists believe these had been used to anchor wooden poles that had once surrounded the henge.\n\n**The Hanoverians**\nGeorg Keysler, a German traveller who visited Britain in the 1720s, saw Stonehenge and thought it had been constructed by Saxons. Organised excavations at the henge date to 1723, when Lord Pembroke (a descendant of the earl of the 1620s) had trenches dug around the altar stone at the centre of the monument and discovered numerous flints.\n\nFinally we come to William Stukeley, another antiquarian, whose once-battered reputation has been undergoing quite a revival in recent years, It was Stukeley who first correctly suggested that the stones were of far greater antiquity than earlier thought, putting its construction at about 480 BC (still out by around 2,000 years, but by far the best and most thought-out guess made to that time – and that can be said to have ushererd in the modern period of Stonehenge studies.) He also identified the stones that make up the henge as coming from at least three different sources, and made the first serious efforts to place Stonehenge within the wider context of its surroundings.\n\nOf course, while all this antiquarianism was going on, the local people of Salisbury Plain were also interacting with the monument - generally to despoil and quarry it for homes and road surfacing, but also to chip away at the stones to carve out bits of rock that were considered lucky charms. Examination of successive images of Stonehenge show the loss of some stones and the toppling and fracturing of others, as a result of this small scale but ongoing work. Other forces were also at work in this period, however; the loss of one 60-ton sarsen was caused by a band of \"gypsies\" who sheltered at Stonehenge in the early 1790s while waiting for a local fair to begin. They dug a shelter for themselves against the stone and this was enough to weaken the foundations and bring it down a couple of years later.\n\n*Sources*\n\nBurl, Aubrey. *Stonehenge: A Complete History*, 2006\n\nNorth, John. *Stonehenge*, 1996\n\nPitts, M. and Bayliss, A. and McKinley, J. and Bylston, A. and Budd, P. and Evans, J. and Chenery, C. and Reynolds, A. and Semple, S. J. (2002) ’An Anglo-Saxon decapitation and burial at Stonehenge.’, *Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine*, 95 . pp. 131-146.\n\nRichardson, R.C. \"William Camden and the re-discovery of England.\" *Trans. Leics. Arch. and Hist. Soc.* 78 (2004) pp.108-123." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.salisburymuseum.org.uk/collections/art-stonehenge/stonehenge-9", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5fmrqd/what_did_the_romans_think_of_stonehenge/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "em26kds" ], "score": [ 570 ], "text": [ "The answers are further back in time than you're asking about here, but while you're waiting this thread might interest you:\n\n[*Do the speeches we often see before a battle in most literature and visual performances have any historical basis. Did the kings and generals leading an army ever give a speech to rally the troops. Or is this just a modern romanticism?*](_URL_0_) featuring /u/Thrasyboulus, /u/Celebreth, and /u/Quietuus" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1i9zdn/do_the_speeches_we_often_see_before_a_battle_in/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c65n4af", "c65na7p", "c65nif4", "c65nrbi", "c65ns7g", "c65nsnn", "c65o8td", "c65oava", "c65oc8h", "c65odku", "c65ogpb", "c65okga", "c65or4p", "c65ovbj", "c65p17d", "c65p4it", "c65p93e", "c65pbmb", "c65peee", "c65pegd", "c65pp6o", "c65pxae", "c65q7ef", "c65qcq8", "c65qk5n", "c65qymg", "c65r1x6", "c65rc50", "c65rwyj", "c65s1vj", "c65stmr", "c65sxxx", "c65szts", "c65tl06", "c65u0r0", "c65u6zs", "c65urxw", "c65v8aw", "c65wpi2", "c65wq7m", "c65ww1j", "c65x613", "c65xj6j", "c65xono", "c65yky2", "c65z19z", "c65z8y9", "c660ao2", "c660dsk", "c661dhi", "c662jyf", "c662tix", "c663o1i", "c66641u", "c669miw", "c66afzy", "c6cey4k" ], "score": [ 129, 123, 404, 428, 56, 52, 17, 34, 23, 12, 149, 11, 109, 444, 103, 46, 14, 15, 3, 187, 103, 66, 14, 5, 27, 27, 10, 16, 146, 46, 21, 26, 62, 26, 16, 21, 2, 7, 4, 8, 3, 7, 12, 9, 3, 6, 6, 3, 2, 5, 10, 2, 2, 8, 10, 9, 2 ], "text": [ "'Pirates' helped finance the first Episcopal church in Rhode Island, Trinity church. The church denies this (and are technically correct), as none of the men were ever convicted of piracy, or they were under a Letter of Marque at the time (making them privateers).\n\nThis little factoid allows me to begin the long and fascinating story of Henry Avery, Thomas Tew, Thomas Paine, William Mays, William Kidd, the ingenius (read: pirate brokering) Rhode Island governors, and the Golden Age of Piracy... all in one wonderful teaser fact.", "Not a historian, but I have trained as a history teacher in Australia, and I love Australian colonial history, and telling people our most famous icon / outlaw Ned Kelly, and the convict Alexander Pearce...\n\nKelly is very well known, but some of what he did is complete genius... In their famous bank robbery, they locked the police in their own cells, dressed in their uniforms and posed as reinforcements form Sydney, robbed the bank, burnt the mortgage deeds (so everyone in the area owned their property), and then went to the pub, and shouted the bar for two days...\n\nPearce was a convict in Tasmania in the 1820s who escaped with six others along the inhospitable west coast of Tasmania, there is nothing there (even today) and they turned to cannibalism to survive, and although apparently he didn't start it, Pearce was the last to survive... When he was caught, and brought back to Hobart, no one believed him when he said what happened, and so he was simply locked up again... Pearce then escaped again with another inmate, and was caught later, having eaten him, he was carrying his bones on him, and wearing his clothes, even though he still had normal food left... After this, he was put to death...", "On child labor during the Industrial Revolution.\n\nIt's often taught in the U.S. that children were used to work certain machines, in part, because the children's small hands were needed to fit in the small spaces. This isn't the entire truth. The machines could have been designed for adults, but were specifically designed for children. Child labor was preferable to the factory owners as they were cheaper, and far less able to quit.", "I used to teach middle school kids about the Civil War and they all seemed to enjoy hearing about [Wilmer McLean](_URL_0_). When the war started he owned a farm in Virginia, Manassas to be exact. As most of you know, the first major battle, The First Battle of Bull Run, took place there. There was fighting on his farm even. The Confederate general Beauregard used McLean's home as his headquarters till a cannonball ripped through the kitchen. \n\nMcLean was too old to fight and wanted to protect his family more than anything so he packed up what possessions he had and left Manassas behind. He thought he'd move farther south, away from D.C. where there was sure to be more battles, to relative safety of southern Virginia. The *safe, peaceful* town he picked was Appomattox. \n\nIn April 1865, with the war about over, General Lee uses McLean's new home as a meeting place to surrender to General Grant. After the terms of surrender were signed in McLean's parlor, officers realized that this was obviously a historical site now and proceeded to remove all his furniture. I believe they used his home for weeks after as well. \n\nWilmer McLean, the man who the Civil War started and ended on his property. ", "One of the more important parts of the American declaraion of independence was taken almost literally from the Dutch declaration of independence.", "I'll point out that the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence was taken as much from France's [Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen](_URL_0_) as it was from its American predecessor. As Vietnam was a former French colony, Ho Chi Minh studied in Paris and was certainly familiar with the document. David Armitage has a good book on the propagation of a declaration as a genre in his prosaically-titled [The Declaration of Independence: A Global History](_URL_1_).\n\nAs long as I'm talking about France and the DRM & C, a fun fact I like sharing is that while the document was written and propagated in French and has become synonymous with the French nation, Henri Grégoire estimated that at the time of the Revolution, [only about an eighth of France's population claimed French as its native language](_URL_2_). Most spoke a local dialect (_patois_) such as Occitan, Gascon, or Breton.", "I... Um... All of it? Pretty hard to nail down one part. I suppose telling people about how factories were converted to war production during WWII leading to all kinds of innovations in technology, work and labour relations. I particularly enjoy pointing out that the Ford factory in Geelong was used to manufacture a whole heap of things: jeeps, machine guns, submersible vehicles and even sea mines!", "Learned last year in history lessons doing the wild west. One particular event we had to cover was the Johnson County War (I believe it was called) where a bunch of cattle barons hired some armed gunmen to go and kill off a bunch of supposed 'cattle rustlers' (who were actually just homesteaders who's land the barons wanted). The hired guns (around 50 in total) had a list of people to kill, quite a few of which were in the nearby town. There was also a farm nearby in which they had been asked to kill other 'rustlers'. While it should have been an easy job at the farm, they were actually held off there for an entire day, by a lone man called Nat who's friend they had just killed. One man against 50. They eventually burned him out, but by that time word had got to the town and a force of 150 was rallied together, who chased the thugs back to another farm and held them captive there till the army came.\n\nSorry if things are inaccurate, we did this a while back and I'm terrible at names. It a good story though to attract people to what was actually happening in the west, since a lot of people's knowledge is just stereotypes. For example cowboys are often painted as gunslinging, drinking and whoring bad guys who spent most of their time in the town. While this sometimes did happen, it was only for a few days, and for the rest of the time cowboys led a hard life either moving cattle or patrolling ranches. ", "It's pretty much the showpiece of my area of study, but I love talking about the August coup. I'm also very surprised at how few Westerns know the basic details of the coup, if they have heard of it at all. \n\nLess historical and more speculative, but I love batting around the \"Lost Cosmonaut\" theory. I think it nicely illustrates how secretive the USSR was, and also how primitive the space program was in its early years. ", "I live in rural central Florida and i often like to recommend a book aptly named \"A Land Remembered\" by Parick Snith about the pioneer's who colonized this land when only the indians, who've been established since 12,000 bc. How the land and the expansion of the united states destroyed an ancient land that you can still see and be apart of. ", "Pope Sylvester II, who was educated in the Arabic tradition of Spain, was so well educated in comparison to Europeans of the day that many people thought he was a sorcerer who practiced witch craft. \n\nEdit: Changed Sorceror to Sorcerer. Misspelled it the first time. ", "Part of my work includes Thomas Paine, well-known because of his impact in the United States, France, and England. However many people (usually people not studying history) question whether or not Paine and his ideas are relevant in today's world. I like to point out that President Obama quoted Paine in his inauguration speech. Although Obama was referring to the words spoken by Washington, it was Washington quoting Paine's work, \"The American Crisis.\"\n\nIf you are interested in the quotation, it is near the end of his speech: _URL_0_", "I enjoy telling people about the Battle of Kursk, many people haven't heard of it and its staggering number of participants and overall impact on WWII.", "Going through Victorian newspapers, I've come across a lot of strange and transient cultural phenomena that never made it into the history books. For example: monkey parachuting.\n\nNo, seriously. The case I came across was in 1851. A hot-air balloon went up from a park in London, and a monkey was tossed out with a parachute attached, falling into the back garden of a Mr Lovelock. The monkey was fine, but Lovelock was beaten up when a gang barged in his front door to get their monkey back.\n\nThe best thing is that the papers refer to this kind of bizarre balloon stunt as a fairly common nuisance. Apparently, as well as all the other problems in Dickensian London, you had to keep an eye out for animals descending from on high.", "I live in Arizona, and always enjoy telling people complaining about Mexican immigrants that where we live was once Mexico, until the US beat Mexico in a war and took (purchased for a pittance in their surrender treaty) almost half of Mexico's land. In my experience the Mexican-American war is entirely skipped over in primary and secondary curriculum.", "I love telling people, kids especially, that John Keats was 5\"1' (meter and a half) tall. That I'm 5' makes this quite fun, indeed. Also that he was well known in school for being quite a scrapper and once beat up a kid who he found torturing a cat.", "During the WWII there was a lot of intelligence activity which made a big difference on the outcome of the war.For example before the d day they threw aluminum airplanes above the pas de calais which on radars appeared like air fleet.Germans were convinced that attack is going to be launched on calais which was heavily defended.Also British airforce didnt protect the south east of the country so german recon thought they got away unseen,spotting what they thought it was tank _URL_0_ the same time all the british force was located in south west and of course guarded by airforce.German planes seen inflatable tanks which were \"hidden\" there just waiting to be seen.A lot more of interesting things like this can be found almost for any operation in the war!", "_URL_0_\n\nI know it's a wikipedia article, but I think it's hilarious.", "William Walker. Grey Eyed Man of Destiny. President of Nicaragua. Free Booter. Nemesis of Vanderbilt.", "Pretty much any chance I get to talk about my area of study, I'm happy. The Roman views on oral sex are the thing that I tend to bring up the most, because they're so different from Modern American views, and it always kind of blows (heh!) people's minds. (Romans thought of cunnilingus as one of the most scandalous sex acts that one could perform because it made the man passive to the woman. This is why, in the first episode of Spartacus, when the Roman legatus goes down on his wife who has inexplicably turned up at the battlefield in Thrace, I had a hard time not just turning the show off then and there. I can maybe buy that a well-born Roman man might have just gone ahead and done it anyway, but in a tent in his army camp where someone might have walked in and seen him letting a woman use his mouth? Uh, no.)", "Frank Lloyd Wright abandoned his family, was married several times, and his home (Taliesin) was the site of a mass murder by a disgruntled servant while Wright was in Chicago (8 dead). Also, Falling Water, one of his most iconic buildings, has been plagued with mold problems and deflection of the cantilevers, which caused some significant cracking. Since it's an iconic image of American architecture, a significant amount of money has been poured into restoring it (I wish I could find an exact figure, but my google skills are failing me)\n\nThe patron that commissioned Falling Water, Edgar Kaufmann, also commissioned another vacation home in Palm Springs, California from modernist architect Richard Neutra. [Immortalized in this photograph by Julius Shulman](_URL_1_), I think it has a far more interesting relationship with the landscape than Falling Water.\n\nAnother interesting fact from my field that I find really fascinating is that Leslie Robertson, the engineer for the World Trade Center in the 70s, ran simulations on what might happen if a commercial airliner hit the buildings. Unfortunately he only considered the impact, and not the resulting heat from the fire. NOVA did a great documentary called [Why the Towers Fell](_URL_0_) if you don't mind watching this poor older gentleman feel partially responsible. His design was credited with keeping the building standing far longer than expected, allowing many more people to get out, but watching him cry during his interview is heartbreaking.\n\nedit- the documentary, while informative, is occasionally disturbing.", "Honey bees are not native to North America. They were often one of the first signs to indigenous groups that white settlers were entering their territory. \n\nThe uniform of a park ranger is linked to the very first guards at Yellowstone National Park. Those guard were U.S. Army cavalry. \n\nThey're really just interesting facts, but can be tied into a discussion about larger issues sometimes. ", "I have a 20th century political history degree and after my conversations involving the middle east evolve to a certain point, I bring up [ Mosaddegh]( _URL_0_). all of the fundies and horror stories you hear about Iran can be traced to the united states displacing him. We put the shah of Iran into our pocket and that set the stage for the 79 Iranian uprising whose party is still in power today. \n\nWe made the middle east a shit hole.", "I'm from Cirencester, UK (a.k.a. Corinium Dobunnorum) - the second largest town in the Roman Province of Britannia. It was initially a fort, but nearby in what is now Bagendon was a pre-Roman oppidum (tribal centre) with a mint.", "Either of the following, both of which I've posted before in this subreddit, proving that I do, in fact, enjoy telling people about them, hah!:\n\n1. [Mystery surrounding the colour of USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941](_URL_0_), the battleship whose destruction at Pearl Harbor so enraged the American populace and into WWII;\n\n2. The [role of a few dreadnoughts](_URL_1_) in bringing the Ottoman Empire into WWI.", "The fact that slavery was thriving in southern industry (U.S. History). This dispels the notion that capitalism and slavery were incompatible. Slavery as a system was quite adaptable, and it was becoming a central ingredient to the infant southern industry of the nineteenth century. Southern industrialists believed that they could not compete with northern and foreign industry without the low labor cost of slavery.\n\nThere are at least two major implications. One is that capitalism and freedom/liberty do not automatically go hand-in-hand. The philosophic debate on slavery versus free-labor ideology was ultimately decided through violence rather than a natural connection between capitalism and liberty. The other is that slavery was not going to go away on its own without the U.S. Civil War. Slavery was becoming more strongly entrenched in the decades prior to the war.", "it's very likely that there was no [\"last stand\"](_URL_0_) by custer at the battle of little bighorn, due to archaeological evidence collected at the site. it's been a while since i read richard fox's book about the subject but i believe the evidence showed that it was probably a massive single assault with crazy horse leading a bold charge and \"splitting\" the last big group of the 7th. the actual \"last stand\" most likely occurred in a deep ravine that the remaining survivors fled down but were picked off easily by the natives on each side of the ravine. i also think that more evidence showed that custer's group was killed before miles keough's battalion.", "I love debunking the myth that Washington murdered a bunch of drunk and sleeping Hessians at the Battle of Trenton. This lets me get into how Washington was actually a pretty good tactical general and that he wasn't **only** good at running away. \n\nI also love talking about trench warfare in the US Civil War and how much certain aspects of that war were signs of what would happen in WWI. ", "Al-Jahiz, an Arabic poet and philosopher, wrote about natural selection and biological evolution (see the Book of Animals), a thousand years before Charles Darwin, and with 0% of the bullshit that Darwin and modern science have had to endure underneath religious fundamentalists.", "A fun piece of historical math. The Roman Empire was in decline longer than the US has been a country. The reign of Commodus, who lived until 180 AD is generally regarded as the beginning of the end for Rome. But Rome in the west would last until 476, in the reign of Romulus Augustus. thats about 300 years. If the Eastern Empire is included in our calculations, it lasts yet another 1100 years making the total 1300 years. The US has been a sovereign state for only 250 approximate years. ", "When Alaric (who sacked Rome in 410CE) died, his successors had the Busento River diverted so they could bury him, and his wealth, in the riverbed. The river was then sent back on its original course and the slaves and captives who did the labor were killed so no one would know where he was buried.", "That great master painters most often just did detail work of their paintings (faces, hands and so on) and that everything else was done by their workshop. For example Rembrandt is know to have bought works of art and resold it under his name. The reason for this was that by singing them he have them a sort of seal of approval. - > as good as by myself. ", "I love telling people that during medieval and renaissance times, and basically any era in which witches were prevalent, that a witch \"flying on her broom stick\" was actually a woman using a broom stick as a makeshift penis/dildo, which was lubricated with a substance (usually a mixture of toad skin, which can contain DMT, and a hemp seed oil) that gave euphoric hallucinations along with the stimulation of the makeshift penis/dildo. The mixture itself was given the term \"flying ointment\", which was applied to the shaft of the broomstick before being inserted into the woman's vagina.\n\nWhat's even funnier and more intriguing is that when you look up old depictions of witches flying on their brooms, they appear to be sitting on them the opposite way that you would imagine a witch to be sitting. The broom bristles usually appear [in front](_URL_0_) of the witch, rather than behind. Though, many times you'll see pictures in which they aren't even riding brooms, but rather a pitchfork, or a pike, or some soft of pole-like object. And just like the broom though, they're usually depicted riding it the other way around, not always, but many times.\n\n[Source](_URL_1_)\n\n*edited for the inclusion of a source*", "As a Midwesterner I love telling people about the real Johnny Appleseed:\n\nJohnny Appleseed is a heavily mythologized figure so a lot of people don't even think he is real. He would run around the Ohio River valley planting apple tree nurseries in desirable locations just ahead of settlers moving into the area and then sell them to buy more land.\n\nChapman's father fought as a Minuteman in Concord, MA and continued to fight in the Continental Army under George Washington. And Chapman himself was born right around the time of the Battle of Bunker Hill.\n\nBasically he would purchase land, make a nursery, fence it off to protect it from animals, and leave it in the care of a local person who would sell the trees. He would periodically come back and tend the land. He did this all over PA, OH, IN, and IL. He lived an itinerant subsistence lifestyle even though he owned thousands of acres of land by the time he died.\n\nThe really fun fact is that apple trees grown from seed almost never produce tasty, large apples (You have to graft branches that produce, say, a Red Delicious onto a new tree in order to get new Red Delicious apple trees. This means that all Red Delicious apples are clones of the original Red Delicious apple tree).\n\nThe trees and apples they made were used primarily for making hard cider and apple jack (a concentrated cider that had more booze in it).\n\n", "Henry VIII of England has a reputation for being quite the womanizer and going through wives like a Hollywood actor, but many people don't know he was married to Catherine of Aragon for almost 24 years. From the evidence, he was truly in love with her in the beginning of their marriage - he known her since he was a boy, and married her as soon as his father (who had been postponing the marriage) died. Henry had some affairs with other women even starting fairly early in the marriage, but this was pretty common for kings. He didn't think of ending his marriage to Catherine until he'd been married 16 years, Catherine had passed childbearing age, and he met Anne Boleyn.\n\nHis later marriages were indeed pretty short (6 months and 3 days for Anne of Cleaves), but he wasn't always as capricious and quick to turn around as he gets made out to be.", "I always find it interesting to talk about the argument over whether or not \"God\" would appear in the Israeli declaration of independence, and what this said about the founders of Israel. A secular Labor Zionist refused absolutely to have \"God\" appear in the text (referring to the last paragraph, \"Placing our trust in the [God] of Israel\"), while the religious insisted on mentioning God somewhere in the declaration. Ben-Gurion eventually proposed a compromise, where they would say \"placing our trust in the Rock of Israel,\" where \"Rock of Israel\" could be seen either as a metaphor for the God of Israel or for the Land of Israel. Ben-Gurion's compromise was accepted without a vote, to prevent splitting the room with the hostility such a vote might create.", "Well it's really not a historical fact (and I obviously state that when i tell it), but it befits the common self-ironic historical narrative I have, so here goes nothing:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nsry for wikiarticle", "There are World War One training trenches in Houston's Memorial Park.", "I love talking about the nature of religious debate in the early centuries of Christianity, mainly how Latin Christianity related to Byzantine Christianity: their differences, their fights, and how they gradually split. ", "Don't ever let me start talking about the Eastern Roman Empire... I will talk to you for hours on end about how awesome they were, and how much it sucks that they're always overlooked. I actually did this to a girl once... I kinda feel bad now looking back, but what happened was a friend asked me about the Roman Maniple formation (I had been applying it to great success in Empire: Total War, and he was asking me about it) to which I happily obliged. Before I knew it I was going on about how much I disliked Romulus Agustulus (only because I don't think he's worthy of being called the last emperor, I actually feel bad for the kid) was, and why Constantine XI is the real last Emperor, all with a ton of Roman history in between. I went on for probably over an hour. Poor girl probably didn't even know who Romulus was to begin with.", "My friends from Russia believe they won the war, as we here in the US also believe. As a historian it's important to remember that without the involvement of the US Germany would not have had to fight a two front war and might have won. Although we all know winning a war in Russia in winter is near impossible against the Russians. Also the fact that Hitler broke his treaty with Stalin and attacked was a huge mistake. The war is just what we thought it was a concerted effort by many nations, not just one. This gets lost because sometimes American pride blinds us to other countries contributions. ", "Most people have not even heard of Aksum; usually the only time I get to talk about my pet subject is with people on the internet, most of whom are unable to grasp the idea of a strong polity in Africa, central the trade between Rome and India. Yes people, not every important classical civilization was located in Eurasia.", "Around the turn of the 20th century, some enterprising farmers in southern California decided to try and irrigate \"The Valley of Death\" (different from Death Valley, also now called Imperial Valley) with water from the colorado river. The valley receives around 2.4\" of rain annually, but has excellent, loamy soil from the river. They cut irrigation channels, but they kept silting over. As a temporary measure, they built a small gate to regulate the water flow, to hopefully ease the rate of infil in their newly cut channels. Unfortunately, 1905 was an especially good year for the Colorado, precipitation wise, and the resulting spring flood, washed out the gate, overflowed a dike, and allowed the river to flow uninhibited through the very soft, loamy soil, which it quickly cut a deep trench into. As a result, There was an approximately **80ft tall waterfall moving backwards up the river, at about the pace of a walking man**. The railroad eventually stopped it, but some estimates say that if left unchecked, it could have grown to almost 300ft high as it moved farther up the river. This is how the Salton sea was formed", "The fork became popular in the West due to a Byzantine woman eating with one in Venice", "The Battle of Midway hung on the action of one dive bomber pilot.\n\n(for those who know what I'm talking about, yes, I know I'm over-simplifying)", "The reason we have our current days of the week set up and named as they are (in the English Language anyway) is because of our Germanic ancestors and Rome. Typically, when one thinks about the cultural influences in the ancient world that contribute to the modern Western world they think Rome and Greece. But a lot of times it's the cultural influences of the Germanic tribes during their migrations and subsequent societies that contribute directly to our day to day modern lives. I like to think about why things are the way they are. \n\nBut the Germanic tribes got the system of a 7 day week with days named after gods in the pantheon from their Roman neighbors, they just adopted their own gods (except for Saturn, he kept a day because he's badass...or eats babies, I can't remember). This is important because it suggests a level of cultural trade that is contrary to the stereotypical view most people have of Rome on one side of a wall and the barbarians on the other, with nothing but hate and warfare between them. ", "I'm not a historian, but I love this bit of local history. I lived in Brooklyn for many years, before it got too expensive, and people there are still upset about the Dodgers leaving back in 1957, and still curse the name Walter O'Malley, the team's owner who pulled up stakes for Los Angeles.\n\nBut it's harder to fault O'Malley when you know the whole story. Ebbett's Field, the Dodgers' stadium, was cramped and in poor condition - there were reportedly rats living under the outfield bleachers. As he had to compete with the Yankees and the Giants, who hadn't yet departed for San Franscisco, O'Malley was having trouble filling the stadium, even with a championship team.\n\nSo, he wanted a new stadium. Unlike today's sports owners, he didn't blackmail the city into paying for one. He was going to build it himself, with his own money, he just needed a place to put it. Then as now, there wasn't a lot of empty land up for grabs in Brooklyn.\n\nBut there was one mostly empty spot, at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. It's an ideal spot, at the edge of Downtown Brooklyn, above several subway lines, and across the street from where the Long Island Railroad terminates. So, centrally located and very easy to get to on public transportation. The northwest corner of the intersection was mostly empty lots, and O'Malley lobbied the city to use the power of eminent domain - which New York had recently granted itself - to force the owners to sell, so the stadium could be built.\n\nThe city refused. The city council didn't think a baseball stadium was as important as, say, an opera house (Lincoln Center was one of the first major uses of eminent domain by the city). For years, O'Malley tried to sway the council, all the while, fielding offers for millions of dollars to move out West. Finally, he gave up banging his head against the wall in Brooklyn, and took the money to move to L.A. He instantly became the most hated man in Brooklyn, never mind it was the politicians who basically drove him to it.\n\nThe great irony is, when I moved to New York in '96, that northwest corner of Atlantic and Flatbush was still mostly vacant lots. No one ever used that land. Right at the end of the 90s, someone finally built a shopping center there. It has a curved facade facing the intersection, and looks for all the world like a baseball stadium.\n\nThe second irony? Professional sports left Brooklyn in 1957, and would not return until next month, when the Brooklyn Nets debut in their new arena... at the northEAST corner of Atlantic and Flatbush.", "I study left-wing European terrorism; primarily in the 1970s. People will often glibly say someone \"would have to be insane to be terrorists,\" or something to that effect.\n\nThere was a group of students with various mental illnesses that were patients of a Dr. Wolfgang Huber, attached to the University of Heidelberg in the very late 1960s and very early 1970s. Huber was a proponent of the notion that mental illness was the result of capitalist society, and the path to mental health was essentially revolution. He and his patients formed a group called the Socialists Patients Collective; the German version of the acronym was the SPK.\n\nDuring this time frame a nascent terrorist group was scaring the crap out of Germans and killing American GI's, blowing up buildings, and maiming Germans: the so-called \"Baader-Meinhof Group. After the primary leadership of the group was captured in the summer of 1972, a second-generation of terrorists joined up to help secure the release of the first generation from prison. The group that formed the basis for this second generation? The SPK.\n\nIn 1975 the former SPK members were responsible for taking over the German embassy in Stockholm, eventually killing Germans and blowing up the embassy (how the bomb went off is still a mystery).\n\nThe bottom line to this anecdote is that when folks mention to me \"boy, you'd have to be crazy to be a terrorist,\" I say \"that's more true than you realize... let me tell you about the SPK...\"", "That's where my Great Grandpa died. (He was Russian) He was buried on the spot in a brother grave together with his buddies. I found out later in soviet archives the exact place.", "I always enjoy telling my friends about my granddad , who during the north sea flood of holland in 1953 saved his boss and his family who lived across the canal by rowboat at the age of 19.\n\nHe and an older coworker who joined him after he volunteered also enlisted a police officer who rather didn't come along.\n\nThey went by row boat, my grandpa and his colleague rowing and the police officer was emptying the boat with a bucket.\n\nAfter rowing over the canal which was pretty rough water they arrived at the farmer's house with the family sitting on the roof.\nMy gramps needed some rope, so he dove in the ice cold waters of the barn and swam\nBetween drowned cows and horses to get to a rope.\n\nThey then helped the family climb down the roof with the rope. \n\nAnd then they had to row back again.\n\nI can tell it way better in Dutch but that's my main language anyways so that'd explain pretty wel ha.\n\nI always like this little bit of history in a big historic event in my country.\nI think because I can relate to it..\nAh well thanks for reading if you did !", "As someone who studies Byzantium, I like telling people how the Roman Empire never actually fell but lasted another 1100 years.", "The Vatican is faced using marble from the Colosseum. When other people also started stealing marble from ancient ruins to decorate with, the Vatican would no longer have a monopoly on that pretty marble, so they declared the Colosseum\ta site of martyrdom to protect it from revrent looters, even though no Christians were every executed there. Also, after the fall of Rome, only about 50,000 people lived there in a city built for millions, until the Vatican moved back there and fixed it up. Picture only a few thousands people living in an abandoned New York City for reference and scale. \n\n(note: I'm not a bona fide historian, I just studied a lot of Renaissance and ancient Roman art history.)\n\nEdit: bonus: even though Christians weren't killed in the Colosseum, tons of slaves and criminals were. If someone was sentenced to die, they could instead opt to act out one of the Roman myths in the stadium. Sometimes these involved castrating themselves, fighting wild animals, or any number of other gruesome but potentially non lethal acts. ", "The [cadaver synod](_URL_0_) is kind of interesting because it's really weird and fascinating. Pope Formosus's body was exhumed, put into trial, hastily buried, exhumed again, tossed into a river, retrieved and buried, then ten years later again exhumed, put intor trial, tossed in a river, retrieved and buried for the third time. I think they all lost thier marbles somewhere.", "In the 8th century, Charlemagne (the original Holy Roman Emperor) and Harun al-Rashid (greatest of the Abbassid Caliphs) exchanged a series of letters. They were obviously sympathetic to each other, and insofar as it was possible, corresponded regularly. In one letter, Harun al-Rashid mentioned elephants, an animal with which Charlemagne was unfamiliar.\n\nWhen Harun al-Rashid learned this, he sent an elephant named Abul-Abbas to Charlemagne's court in Aachen, where he lived for eight years. \n\nFor me, it's fascinating on so many levels. The ease with which Roman Catholic and Muslim rulers could converse, the 8th century Bromance element, the idea that diplomacy used to be about gift-giving. Most of all, the elephant was delivered by land. So I imagine peasants in the Balkans, quietely cutting wood in a clearing, only to see a military guard march past with an elephant. \n\nOh, and to toss in a Vietnam reference - when The Communist Manifesto was first published in Vietnamese in 1923, they had to come up with a new word as Vietnamese lacked a translation for \"society\"", "Early in his *Histories* (A.D. 100) Tacitus, Roman senator and historian, mentions that at the time of his writing, \"...the Balkans were in turmoil.\" \n\nThis may seem underwhelming but ask yourself: when in any of our lifetimes, or our ancestors' lifetimes, have the Balkans *not* been in turmoil?", "Moldavia(very small country) Year 1475 battle of vaslui where stefan cel mare (stephen the great) with an army of 40.000 men(mostly peasants) defeted a ottoman army of 150.000.\n\nHe knew that didn't stand a chance in direct battle , so he burned all the crops , posioned all the wells except on the way to vaslui , then he had a bit of luck with a very foggy day when the ottoman army was crossing a river and send 500 men on the other side of the swamp to sound the trumpets so to fool the ottomans where the moldavian army was , they took the bait and sent the bulk of the army through the swamp , clogged not able to see anything with the moldavians attacking from all sides they routed but they were slaughtered .\n\nnext year sultan sends another army this time 200.000 men , the moldavians with a 20.000 army again mostly peasants this time looses the main battle(razboieni) but by poisoning the wells burning all the fields forces the enemy army to split up or starve , and then through guerilla tactics forces them to leave by winter time.\n\nStefan had the tartars to the east , polish to the north and hungarians to the west , and ofcourse ottomans to the south , he rulled from 1457-1504 won 48 major battles against all 4 nations , lost only 1 (razboieni) but as i mentioned above it wasn't a total loss.", "I don't enjoy telling people this, but I have to remind people constantly Marie-Antoinette neither said 'let them eat cake' nor drove France into debt." ] }

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[ "http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1945vietnam.html" ]

[ [], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmer_McLean" ], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_Rights_of_Man_and_of_the_Citizen", "http://books.google.com/books?id=X2QCAa27Zy4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=declaration+of+independence+armitage&source=bl&ots=ZosQUYK3gt&sig=JejvvMVUURm5bfD5i3eDJD8YcC4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=YZ5MULihKY3c8ASDoYHoDw&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false", "http://books.google.com/books?id=jKX1TenIOH0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Sur+la+necessit%C3%A9+gregoire&source=bl&ots=3hG3zAtBfF&sig=7aqGkOkwSlxt3wRG-3mp4TMDbSg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1p5MUOGZLoWa9gS_sYHoCQ&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Sur%20la%20necessit%C3%A9%20gregoire&f=false" ], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html?pagewanted=all" ], [], [], [], [], [ "divisions.In" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War" ], [], [], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPqxJpykW00", "http://www.dorothygoldeen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/julius-shulman-kaufman-house.jpg" ], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Mosaddegh" ], [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yombh/which_minor_historical_mystery_to_which_you_would/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yuit6/if_you_could_teach_any_historical_periodevents/" ], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn#Last_break-out_attempt_by_28_troopers" ], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Goya_-_Caprichos_%2868%29.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_ointment" ], [], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kar%C3%A1nsebes" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaver_Synod" ], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f30nq0x" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Villa's motives for the Columbus raid seem to have been various. He wanted to take revenge on the American arms dealer who had taken money for supplies and neither given him the arms or returned the money. He was increasingly angry at the way the US professed to be neutral in the Revolution, but actually aided Carranza. He also hoped to gain arms and supplies. He achieved none of these. Instead, instead of easily overcoming what he'd been told was a garrison of 50 US soldiers , he encountered one of 600. Instead of opening fire in a surprise attack on the barracks, Villa's troops opened fire on the stables. As a result of a vigorous defense and counter-attack, Villa lost men- especially officers- and was forced to retreat back to Mexico empty handed.\n\nThe Punitive Expedition was ordered by President Wilson after Villa's raid, intended to find Villa and his army. About 5,000 soldiers, it had the initial tacit cooperation of Carranza, who helped supply it by railroad. Despite the advantages of force and supplies, it was however trying to operate in Chihuahua, Villa's home: and so Villa knew the territory. Chihuahua was/is also the biggest state in Mexico, sparsely settled and with rough terrain, so capable of hiding armies. There was a great deal of local resentment to having a US army operating in Mexico, despite Pershing being under strict orders to treat civilians with great respect. Pershing soon discovered that no one would supply his army with information about Villa's whereabouts, and rightly suspected that the locals were also constantly supplying Villa with information about Pershing's. Villa also discovered that Carranza's troops were also often more sympathetic to his army than to the Americans, and would sometimes look the other way when his men were in an area. When Villa was wounded in the knee, he essentially dispersed his units and hid in a cave for two months. This also briefly created the impression that he was possibly dead, and the Expedition therefore successful.\n\nPershing had had some experience in fighting guerrillas in the Philippines and pretty quickly assessed the situation, saying that a much longer time would be needed, and more resources, if Villa was to be found. But as the Expedition continued, Carranza became himself more hostile to the US, more hostile to having the US Army on Mexican territory and less cooperative, and his troops began to show some real armed resistance to the US, for example blocking them at Parral. Things might have escalated further, but neither Wilson or Carranza wanted to enter into a war: Mexico was too divided and weak, and the US was anticipating being pulled into WWI in Europe for which it would need an entire army. After about a year of futility, Pershing was put back into a more defensive position along the border, and eventually all US forces left Mexican soil." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c981o1a" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "I'm not going to answer your question directly, and I apologize since this will be a top level post, but I don't know that you will get any replies again. You're asking the people here to do your homework for you in a way. But I'll give you my thoughts as someone interested in the period.\n\n[*The New York City Draft Riots*](_URL_0_) by Iver Bernstein has been on my reading list for a while. [Here is a review of it](_URL_1_) on JSTOR if you have access. It covers the riots portrayed in *Gangs of New York* (at least the movie, I haven't read the book) and also discusses the religions and politics working in New York at the time. This would be where I would start off, partly because that's the most interesting part of the American Civil War to me, and partly because those riots were a pivotal part of the plot (again, of the movie), and something that is confirmed historical. It also covers the fundamental issues surrounding the riots.\n\nNow, keeping in mind, I haven't read either book. I read reviews of the Bernstein book but I haven't quite gotten to it on my list yet. But I looked for it and picked it up partly because of the movie, which I know is different than the book, so take that as you will. So that's where I would start." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.amazon.com/New-York-City-Draft-Riots/dp/0803234538", "http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20092635?uid=3739728&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101844907093" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d55b1ec", "d55cvim", "d55hoje", "d55jaw1", "d55qyhc" ], "score": [ 4, 9, 7, 2, 4 ], "text": [ "If anyone can answer this, what's the case with the other major romance languages e.g. Spanish, Italian, etc? ", "Might be worth a cross post to /r/linguistics ?", "Hi! I hope this answer will help you out. The thing about medieval French is that it was more a language that was created from the way it sounded, rather than the French of today that is highly regulated and very planned out. So, medieval French when spoken aloud, even by a non-speaker, sounds exactly the way it should (like Spanish and German, which are phonetically spelled out when written down). If you're familiar with modern French, you'll know that it's almost impossible to speak the language just by reading the words, because of all the hidden pronunciations.\n\n\nI have included a portion of the Lai de Lanval by Marie de France, originally written in Anglo-Norman ca. 1170-1215. Anglo-Norman is one of the \"easier\" medieval French dialects to understand from a modern perspective, but I think that this passage, and its translation into modern French, is enough to illustrate how the two are close and comprehensible to one another, yet still very different.\n\n\n-ANGLO-NORMAN-\n\nEle jut sur un lit mut bel\n\nLi drap valeient un chastel\n\nEn sa chemise senglement.\n\nMut ot le cors bien fait e gent;\n\nUn cher mantel de blanc hermine,\n\nCovert de purpre alexandrine,\n\nOt pur le chaut sur li geté;\n\nTut ot descovert le costé,\n\nLe vis, le col e la peitrine;\n\nPlus ert blanche que flur d'espine.\n\n-MODERN FRENCH-\n\nElle étoit couchée sur un lit magnifique dont le plus beau château n'auroit pas seulement payé le prix des draperies. Sa robe qui étoit serrée, laissoit apercevoir l'élégance d'une taille faite au tour. Un superbe manteau doublé d'hermine et teint en pourpre d'Alexandrie , couvroit ses épaules. La chaleur l'avoit forcée de l'écarter un peu, et à travers cette ouverture qui lui mettoit le côté à découvert, l'œil apercevoit une peau plus blanche que la fleur d'épine.", "Just one thing to keep in mind: there were drastic changes to English throughout the Medieval period, partially under the influence of the Vikings and Normans. So, while English from the 11th century and before is effectively impossible to read without studying it as if it were a foreign language, Middle English, which existed in the later Middle Ages, can be read without too much more annotation than Shakespeare, and is certainly not \"incomprehensible.\" If you read Chaucer's writings (14th century), you'd find that they would, in general, be readable.", "As an aside, not all medieval English is as incomprehensible as you think. We read Chaucer and various other works in ~14th century Middle English in college, without any special training in the language. As long as you have a glossary or footnotes for the most arcane words, you can generally figure the rest out; it's not that much harder than reading Shakespeare or any other early modern English writer." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dckk194", "dclpu0q" ], "score": [ 6, 3 ], "text": [ "Hi, long-time lurker. But I think I can actually contribute a bit to this!\n\n___________________________________________________________________\n\n**Banned Beards**\n\nI actually don't know too much about the Jehovah's Witnesses, so I won't try and touch on their beliefs and practices.\n\nMormons (LDS), however, I do know a bit about. For the LDS Church and its members, **a lack of facial hair is more cultural than spiritual**; there's no commandments or doctrine that insist men be clean-shaven. The early Presidents of the LDS Church, from [Brigham Young](_URL_4_) to [George Albert Smith](_URL_10_) (#2 through #8), had varying degrees of facial hair, and many of the other leaders of the LDS Church ([early Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and First Presidency](_URL_7_)) sported what look like quite stylish beards for the time.\n\nInstances within the LDS Church where facial hair *is* banned do exist. The two that come to mind are (1) young men serving as full-time missionaries and (2) students at Brigham Young University (BYU). From the official *Missionary Handbook*:\n\n > Keep your hair relatively short (not clipped too close) and evenly tapered. Extreme or faddish styles— including spiked, permed, or bleached hair or a shaved head—are not appropriate. Sideburns should reach no lower than the middle of the ear. (See the pictures of a missionary haircut included with your call packet.) **Elders should shave each day.**\n\n > ([Missionary Handbook: Missionary Conduct](https://_URL_5_/manual/missionary-handbook/missionary-conduct?lang=eng), emphasis added)\n\nBYU's Honor Code contains a similar requirement that [\"men are expected to be clean-shaven; beards are not acceptable.\"](_URL_0_) According to the Salt Lake Tribune, BYU President Ernest Wilkinson banned beards in 1969. (Salt Lake Tribune, [The History of BYU's Honor Code,\"](_URL_1_) 29. Oct. 2016.)\n\nBoth bans are addressed by Dallin H. Oaks, who was President of BYU at the time (he now serves as a member of the LDS Church's highest governing body).\n\n > \"Our rules against beards and long hair have the same purpose as the requirements our Church makes of its missionaries. In this university, which is largely supported by the tithes of faithful members and which stands as a beacon of Latter-day Saint values, we wish to avoid an appearance that has become associated with rebellion and rejection of values we hold dear. A recent book by Jerry Rubin, the clown prince of the hippy movement, gives this vivid characterization of the meaning of long hair:\n\n > > \"'Long hair is communication. Young kids identify short hair with authority, discipline , , ,—and long hair with letting go, letting your hair down, being free, being open. Wherever we go, our hair tells people where we stand on Vietnam, Wallace, campus disruption, dope. We’re living TV commercials for the revolution.\n\n > > \"'Long hair is the beginning of our liberation from the sexual oppression that underlies this whole military society.'\" [Jerry Rubin, Do It, pp. 93, 95–96]\n\n > (Dallin H. Oaks, \"Be Honest in All Behavior,\" 30. Jan. 1973, [_URL_12_](_URL_9_).)\n\nSimilarly, in a 1971 issue of the LDS Church's publication for its teenage members, the *New Era*, Oaks was again cited as saying:\n\n > The rule against beards and long hair for men stands on a different footing. [. . .] Unlike modesty, which is an eternal value in the sense of rightness or wrongness in the eyes of God, **our rules against beards and long hair are contemporary and pragmatic. They are responsive to conditions and attitudes in our own society at this particular point in time.** \n\n > There is nothing inherently wrong about long hair or beards, any more than there is anything inherently wrong with possessing an empty liquor bottle. But a person with a beard or an empty liquor bottle is susceptible of being misunderstood. Either of these articles may reduce a person’s effectiveness and promote misunderstanding because of what people may reasonably conclude when they view them in proximity to what these articles stand for in our society today.\n\n > **In the minds of most people at this time, the beard and long hair are associated with protest, revolution, and rebellion against authority. They are also symbols of the hippie and drug culture.** Persons who wear beards or long hair, whether they desire it or not, may identify themselves with or emulate and honor the drug culture or the extreme practices of those who have made slovenly appearance a badge of protest and dissent. In addition, unkemptness—which is often (though not always) associated with beards and long hair—is a mark of indifference toward the best in life. \n\n > (Dallin H. Oaks, \"Standards of Dress and Grooming,\" Dec. 1971 *New Era*, [_URL_5_](https://_URL_5_/new-era/1971/12/standards-of-dress-and-grooming?lang=eng), emphasis added.)\n\nThe prohibitions of the LDS Church on facial hair are a product of its members' desire to be [\"in the world, but not of the world\"](_URL_6_); a push by their leaders to separate themselves from \"worldly things\" but remain [\"the light of the world.\"](_URL_2_) And in the late 1960s and 1970s, when counterculture in America was marked a preponderance of beards and facial hair in general, the leaders of the LDS Church wanted their young adult followers to keep a safe distance from counterculture movements that espoused beliefs or practiced activities that did violate LDS commandments, such as drug use or sexual promiscuity. And even though society has moved beyond that, with facial hair rapidly becoming mainstream over the past several years, the unofficial stance of the LDS Church has not drastically changed. (It is worth noting that several publications maintained by the LDS Church have moved towards a more lenient stance, such as the LDS Employment Services' recommendation for [\"Dressing for Success\"](_URL_3_) suggest that job-seekers \"follow appropriate business culture for facial hair.\")\n\n**TL;DR:** Mormons don't have facial hair because of the association it had in the 1960s/1970s with practices they forbid, such as drug use.", "I can't say anything about Jehovah's Witnesses or LDS and their facial hair. I can say that all Abrahamic religions, which would include Jews, Christians, Muslims, and (more to the point of your question) Rastafari, have inherited a ban on cutting the beard from the Torah. \n\nHere, it's stated in [Leviticus 19:27](_URL_2_), two translations: \n\nESV - *You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard.*\n\nDouay-Rheims (older, Catholic) - *Nor shall you cut your hair roundwise: nor shave your beard.*\n\nLeviticus 19 in general spells out other rules of purity and decency, like not creating hybrid animals, not wearing clothing made from blended fabrics, not turning your daughter into a prostitute, so this might be a thing that was seen along those lines - beard-trimming apparently has something in common with dishonesty or following false idols (things also banned in that chapter).\n\nThere are other statements of this prohibition elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible (which is the book that makes Abrahamic religions *Abrahamic*), particularly in the context of mourning traditions - the next verse in Leviticus bans cutting the body in memory of the dead (which I *believe* is where the Jehovah's Witness ban on blood transfusions and tattoos comes from - the idea of penetrating the body with metal - but I couldn't quote anything authoritative on that). \n\nLeviticus 25 further bans the priesthood from [trimming beards](_URL_6_) , which in context appears to be a sign of \"profaning\" oneself. \n\nOutside the Torah, the idea of cutting beards comes up a few times, generally as a kind of debasement or misery, and as a \"foreign\" thing... something the neighboring tribes or nations did, that the People of the Covenant weren't supposed to do.\n\nIn [Jeremiah 41:5](_URL_0_) we've got some unhappy foreigners gashing their bodies and trimming their beards after the (Babylonian-appointed) governor of Israel was assassinated... and a couple of chapters later, we've got the Lord saying he's fixing to destroy \"[those who cut the corners of their hair](_URL_4_)\", meaning the people of Kedar and Hazor, \"men of the East\" who were defeated by Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King. (This is usually interpreted as the hair on the temples - maybe sideburns. The *peot* ringlets you might see on Chasidim are specific to these \"corners\" - Hebrew for \"corner\" being *peah*.)\n\nIsaiah has more [mourning foreigners](_URL_5_), and Second Samuel has [some Israelite envoys being abused by shaving](_URL_3_). They're told by King David to stay away, in fact, until their beards grow back. How humiliating!\n\n[Ezekiel](_URL_1_) and [Isaiah](_URL_7_) also have references to beard-shaving as an almost apocalyptic thing - something that happens when God's judgement is rendered on Israel. An embarrassment and a calamity, in other words. \n\nFrom the way it's written about in the Tanakh, I'd assume there are traces of other Ancient Near Eastern traditions about beards and shaving, but it'll have to be up to /u/yodatsracist or /u/captainhaddock or some other, wiser, head to fill in those spaces. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://policy.byu.edu/view/index.php?p=26", "http://www.sltrib.com/news/3854493-155/the-history-of-byus-honor-code", "https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+5%3A14-16&version=KJV", "https://www.ldsjobs.org/ers/ct/articles/dressing-for-success?lang=eng", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Brigham_Young_by_Charles_William_Carter.jpg", "www.lds.org", "https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+15%3A19&version=KJV", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/First_Presidency_and_Twelve_Apostles_1898.jpg/1137px-First_Presidency_and_Twelve_Apostles_1898.jpg", "https://www.lds.org/manual/missionary-handbook/missionary-conduct?lang=eng", "https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/dallin-h-oaks_honest-behavior/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/George_Albert_Smith.jpg", "https://www.lds.org/new-era/1971/12/standards-of-dress-and-grooming?lang=eng", "speeches.byu.edu" ], [ "http://biblehub.com/jeremiah/41-5.htm", "http://biblehub.com/ezekiel/5-1.htm", "http://biblehub.com/leviticus/19-27.htm", "http://biblehub.com/2_samuel/10-4.htm", "http://biblehub.com/jeremiah/49-32.htm", "http://biblehub.com/isaiah/15-2.htm", "http://biblehub.com/leviticus/21-5.htm", "http://biblehub.com/isaiah/7-20.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cjpv35r" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Also, was/is there any movement to have the UK switch to driving on the right side of the road? I know that some countries have made a switch, so the UK possibly could too." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d3tm2df" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It was illegal to leave the GDR without a special permit, which also stated how and when you had to return. If you failed to do so, you risked criminal prosecution according to § 213 StGB-DDR, up to 5 years in prison (extended to 8 years in 1977). This includes attempts to flee, thus she could face anything from a fine to 8 years in prison for being accomplice in an attempt to flee.\n\nIf the authorities assumed that she organized (or helped to organize) her husbands escape, she could also be persecuted according to § 105 StGB-DDR, in which case she could face between 2 and 15 years in prison (later extended to lifelong prison).\n\nSources:\n § 105. Staatsfeindlicher Menschenhandel\n § 213. Ungesetzlicher Grenzübertritt\n Strafgesetzbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (StGB) vom 12. Januar 1968 in der Fassung vom 7. April 1977.\n\nThese are only the direct criminal persecutions though. If she had known about the attempt, even if she were only likely fined, she would have risked to be deprived of her (future) children's custody or be forced to give their children up for adoption.\n\nSource:\n Marie-Luise Warnecke: Zwangsadoptionen in der DDR, Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, Berlin 2009\n\nFurthermore, she and potential children (or other close relatives) risked occupational bans. In that case, she would only be allowed to work in specifically permitted jobs, which carried the risk of being prosecuted according to § 249 StGB-DDR, which could be punished with up to 5 years in prison.\n\nAccess to higher education for her and her close family could also be limited or completely denied. \n\nSource:\n Danuta Kneipp: Berufsverbote in der DDR? Zur Praxis politisch motivierter beruflicher Ausgrenzung in Ost-Berlin in den 70er und 80er Jahren. in: Potsdamer Bulletin für Zeithistorische Studien Nr. 36-37/2006, Seite 32 ff\n § 249. Gefährdung der öffentlichen Ordnung durch asoziales Verhalten.\n Strafgesetzbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (StGB) vom 12. Januar 1968 in der Fassung vom 7. April 1977." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cnuzom7" ], "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." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22in_your_era.22_or_.22throughout_history.22_questions" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dqksl70" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "One possible thread to investigate is the relationship between Washington and contemporaries like John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young. There are some interesting primary sources that speak to the time the two men were in the same place at the same time and how those interactions lead to changes across the system." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ei8a2a9", "ei8bvma", "ei9jstb" ], "score": [ 330, 53, 257 ], "text": [ "Sort of a tongue-in-cheek follow-up question. Could you be fit early 20s Jewish man and serve in the military and is there any difference in the service required? I'm thinking analogous to African Americans serving in WWII. ", "Related question: How was Wehrkraftzersetzung implemented? Was it applied very strictly? ", "It was possible and there were several reasons why someone in the demographic you described would still be in Germany.\n\nThe first and most obvious was – like in so many draft systems – the question of the job one held, had been trained for or were in training for. Nazi Germany had the term \"unabkömmlich\" – indispensable – for people whose jobs and positions had been deemed indispensable for the functioning of the German political, administrative and economic system and who accordingly would not be called up to military service. The \"unabkömmlich\" designation encompassed a rather large number of jobs and positions: From skilled workers in factories producing munitions and/or weapons to huge swaths of the German civilian administrative apparatus, both in Germany as well as in the occupied countries to people in the internal hierarchy in the Nazi party, such as your local Nazi Party leader – for how could Germany fight a war without the party officials there to indoctrinate the populace.\n\nHowever, who was unabkömmlich and which jobs were in principle designated as such changed over the course of the war. Germany during WWI suffered a massive man power problem. Already in the late 1930s, the German economy began experiencing a severe man power shortage. This was among the prime reasons why the Nazi regime implemented a major escalation of policies and measures of persecution that also affected German laborers during that period. The persecution of so-called asocials, the cooperation between well-fare agencies, labor agencies and Gestapo, the expansion of the Concentration Camps system with camps such as Buchenwald and Mauthausen build around that time are all best understood in the context of the Nazi state trying very hard to mobilize labor reserves through massive imprisonment. Similarly, around the same time the labor agencies were granted a massive choke hold on German workers. Form 1938 on you couldn't just change your job anymore but rather had to get permission from the labor agency, who had also the possibility of sending laborer that in the eyes of their employers didn't conform off to so-called \"labor education camps\", a Gestapo camp where people were imprisoned for 40 to 60 days.\n\nThe reason this is important is because during the course of the war, the regime's strategy was to replace more and more German workers with foreign forced laborers in order to free up the former to serve in the Wehrmacht. This invariably changed which jobs and professions were deemed unabkömmlich during the war. For example, following the German occupation of Poland several hundred thousand German soldiers from agrarian families were released from the Wehrmacht as reservists in order to help their families with the harvest. Many of them remained out of the Wehrmacht and away from active service until the invasion of the USSR in 1941. Once that occurred however, this policy of releasing hundreds of thousands of agrarian laborers from the Wehrmacht stopped because over the course of the war with the Soviets, unskilled agrarian laborers in Germany were simply replaced with Polish or Soviet forced laborers. Over the course of the war, 15 million people came to Germany as forced laborers with 1944 seeing the peak of this massive system when the German economy employed 7 million forced laborers in the month of August. That was almost a quarter of the entire labor force in Germany.\n\nSo, a person could be deemed \"unabkömmlich\" when they couldn't be replaced either by someone of similar qualification working twice as hard or by a foreign forced laborer. This included skilled factory workers like machinists and certain tool makers but also – important for the demographic you are asking about – university students. Although the number of university students had due to political and demographic developments been shrinking during the 1930s – with the lowest number being 28.696 university students in all of Germany in 1939/40 when many volunteered for the Wehrmacht – it still was a significant population that for the most part could earn a significant deferment. While some students such as medical students or those working on research significant for the war effort by way of armament projects were for the most part excused from serving until very late in the war, for many other students their status meant that they were called up to serve only for a short time. Take f. ex. Hans Scholl of White Rose fame: He served on the Ostfront for 15 weeks in 1942 after already having received his military training in the 1930s and having enrolled as a student during the war. Entire student units existed wherein university students were commanded to serve at the front during the semester breaks.\n\nAnd while these were all \"run of the mill\" reasons for why someone from the demographic you described might not serve in Nazi Germany, there was another significant population that wasn't called up: Jews and those imprisoned in concentration camps. For some of those imprisoned in concentration camps, service in the Wehrmacht could indeed be a way out of the camp or a way to free family from the camp. This is a phenomenon that can be observed, interestingly enough, with several members of the Romani community from Austria's Burgenland with regard to the Lackenbach concentration camp. There several men who volunteered for the Wehrmacht were able to free themselves and their families and ultimately save themselves from deportation to Auschwitz. Why this request was granted by the Nazi administrators and who made the decision about which prisoners could volunteer and which couldn't is unfortunately not documented but in a very limited number of cases it was possible.\n\nAlso, I've written about this before [here](_URL_0_) but the Nazis' policy on homosexuals was not as comprehensive as it is sometimes imagined and not all persons arrested or even sentenced for homosexual activities went to Concentration Camps. In fact, many of them also served in the Wehrmacht either in lieu of their prison sentence or after their sentence had been served.\n\nThe only victim group of German nationality consistently not called up were those the Nazi regime regarded as Jews. Although, so-called Mischlinge, meaning people the regime regarded as \"mixed race\" were also drafted. While at several points in time the regime discussed getting rid of those soldiers, in the end that didn't happen, most likely because of practical considerations." ] }

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[ [], [], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vbnxo/how_did_the_nazi_german_legal_system_decide_which/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c63f3ee", "c63fp54", "c63ft41", "c63g1zq", "c63g2rk", "c63g765", "c63g98r", "c63gv3y", "c63haew", "c63hsjh", "c63ivtq", "c63j2yk", "c63j9pn", "c63jips", "c63qobt" ], "score": [ 2, 12, 12, 3, 10, 9, 2, 34, 3, 2, 6, 8, 2, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Would [Yokota Air Base](_URL_2_) count, perhaps? Or [Incirlik AB](_URL_0_)? Military personell often go off-base for shopping and tourism, leading to a lot of multilingual fun in those areas.\n\nA little less recently, I think [South Africa](_URL_1_) counts as a nice coexistance (linguistically, not culturally). [Afrikaans](_URL_3_), of course, is what remains of that linguistic coexistance today - languages will usually combine when they stay together long enough.", "Are French and English too similar for your tastes?\n\nBecause otherwise I'd cast you gaze upon the Canada", "Dutch and french in Belgium?", "Many of North America's Indian nations, like the Iroquois and Creek Confederacies, were multiethnic alliances. \n\nThe Basque language is a unique outlier, and the Basques have a long history of reluctant and strained cooperation with the various nations they've found themselves part of.", "What about Basque? Not only is it completely different from Spanish or French, it's completely unlike any Indo-European language.", "Modern Ireland? Gaeilge and English are very different languages. ", "English and Maori in NZ.", "This is extremely common.\n\nQuechua and Spanish in Peru\n\nGuarani and Spanish in Paraguay\n\nEnglish is a lingua franca through most of south eastern Papua New Guinea, where Oceanic languages are spoken.\n\nHindi/English/local languages in India\n\netc.", "What about Hungary?\n\nHungarian is a very, very different language from the languages of its empire.", "In the Philippines, Tagalog and English are both the main languages. Tagalog, coming from the Austronesian Family (SE Asia) and we have English, which is obviously Anglo-Saxon/West German in origin. Surprisingly, it is easy for Tagalog and English speakers to learn the other language as the sounds are 'somewhat' similar. However, grammatically speaking, they're (half a world) apart, and there are hardly any similarities in sentence structure.\n\nHaving a large band of Filipinos learn English is an interesting phenomenon, as they have 'Tagalogized' many English expressions and grammar rules. Who knows what English will look like among them, say in two hundred or four hundred years from now?\n\nAnyway, probably more than you'd care to know :)", "Arabic and French in Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.", "The official languages of Hong Kong are English and Cantonese, both written and spoken. \n\nThe official languages of Macau are Cantonese and Portuguese.", "Perhaps Welsh and English in Wales?\nWelsh is a development of old the British celtic language, wheras English is West Germanic.\n\nIt enjoys equal status within Wales as English, and it is compulsory that all schoolchildren learn it until age 16.\n\nWelsh was pretty much the only language spoken by the masses in Wales until the vast influx of English workers during the Industrial Revolution.\n\n", "Let me save this thread the hassle:\n\n_URL_0_", "India. The languages of northern and southern India are from completely different language families." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incirlik_Air_Base", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokota_Air_Base", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaans" ], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_diglossic_regions" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "csrrr1b" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "The phenomenon you are noticing is called \"stratigraphy\", which is the idea that things are built on top of older things, and you can tell which things are older by figuring out the order in which each part was laid down. It's one of the most basic and essential parts of archaeology.\n\nNow, why did people build on top of older ruins? There are several reasons. First, when ancient people had a place they built on, and made a settlement or a city, it was because that place was a really good place to build a city. Take some of the major sites in the southern Levant for example, such as Tel Megiddo, which sits right on one of the only pathways through the Carmel mountain range, and is basically a gatekeeper between anyone coming from the south (such as Egypt) to the north (heading to Lebanon or Syria (aka the Phoenicians or the Arameans)). Or Tel Ashkelon, which was a major trading port between Gaza and Jaffa. When people have a good place to build, they want to stay there. It makes no sense to suddenly move a few miles if your water system is still there, and the trade routes are still there. The economy is much less movable than some dirt. So, why build on top instead of tearing everything down?\n\nThe simple answer is it's easier. It is much easier to knock down a broken down building and level it off with dirt than it is to break up the pieces and take them away. This is way before any heavy machinery, there are no backhoes here. And sometimes buildings are built with big, heavy stones, and its so much easier to just cover it over rather than move it. Also, dirt tends to accumulate among settlements, just from people's waste and all the things they bring into their settlement, and the buildings are a wind trap for airborne sediment, so the dirt level is rising already, people just help it along a little bit sometimes. \n\nYou are exactly right about the level of a city rising as time went on, and people built over older things over and over. At Tel Ashkelon, in one of the excavation areas, which was occupied for about 3500 years, you have at least 24 different major rebuilds (not counting minor ones where they just expand a building or add a few walls), all within about 8 meters of vertical accumulation.\n\nThis method of sediment deposition results in a distinctive shape of the hill. Hills which are basically composed of cities built on top of broken cities and on and on have a special name. They are called *tels*. They often have a flattish top and slightly steeper sides, as you can see in [this picture of Tel Megiddo](_URL_0_) and [this picture of Kedesh, a site in Israel](_URL_1_).\n\nSo basically it's really common in the eastern Mediterranean and most ancient societies, because once a settlement is founded, there are lots of good reasons to live there, and so people keep living there, and it's just easier to knock stuff down and build over it than it is to remove it all.\n\nDoes this answer your question?" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101130/images/news468614a-i1.0.jpg", "http://sitemaker.umich.edu/kelseymuseum.digdiary/files/kedesh_tel.gif" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cviw1ar", "cviyqgj" ], "score": [ 7, 4 ], "text": [ "There's always room for discussion, but perhaps the section [Travel and contact across the Atlantic before Columbus](_URL_0_) in our FAQ will answer your inquiry.", "There's [some genetic evidence](_URL_0_) that Native American women (if not men too) reached Iceland, possibly hitching a ride along with the Norse, whether they wanted to or not. This is indicated by the presence of Haplogroup C1 in the Icelandic population. A haplogroup is a genetic marker that can be used to identify particularly lineages (either male or female; female in this case). Haplogroup C1 can be further divided into sub-lineages. C1a is found in indigenous peoples of easternmost Siberia. C1b, C1c, and C1d are found throughout the Americas. Iceland has C1e, which might be descended from C1b-d, because it seems to be relatively recent (only hundreds of years old rather than thousands), but there's a slight chance that it was brought westward into Scandinavia from Siberia, too." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/nativeamerican#wiki_travel_and_contact_across_the_atlantic_before_columbus" ], [ "http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.21419/full" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fkzsf05" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "The \"Southern Question\" is indeed one of the longstanding dilemmas of Italian Economic History. Research into this topic is not as florid as you might initially think: for much of Italy's unitary history the \"Southern Question\" was perceived as a principally political topic, and it's only in last ten or so years that the \"Question\" has received steady attention from a growing cadre of economic historians, especially from those who are themselves located in the universities of the Italian South. Paolo Malanima at the University of Catanzaro, Emanuele Felice at the University of Chieti, and Claudia Sunna at the University of the Salento, are just some of the economic historians whose recent books and papers have been well received by their academic peers both in Italy and abroad, igniting new interest in Italy's lopsided economic development.\n\nThe present academic consensus is that at the time of unification, the North of Italy was slightly more economically developed than the South of Italy. However, the social and institutional apparatus in the north was better positioned to take advantage of imminent industrialization process that would take place after unity, quickly creating a perceptible gap in development between the two halves of the country. By the turn of the 20th century, a political discourse had already emerged around a \"Southern Question\" which has not existed at the time of unification (the terminology of \"Question\" itself seems to have been coined by the influential politician Giustino Fortunato, who served as member of parliament for Melfi between 1880 and 1900).\n\nOf course there is a lot of nuance tied to the study of historic inequality, especially in a late industrializer like Italy. Unfortunately, there are many difficulties tied to creating precisely assessments economic development in Italy immediately before and after unification. While scholars (notably Vera Negri-Zamagni at the University of Bologna) have attempted to quantify economic development by looking over what little data is available with a careful and critical eye, there are still many possible pitfalls: one of many examples is the fact that as late as 1881, southern women who practiced sewing and weaving at home were classified by local censors as “Textile Workers.” When census norms changed and no longer considered work done in the home as \"Employment,\" this caused a precipitous increase in unemployed women to appear in data coming from the South, even though real economic activity hadn't changed much at all.\n\nOne stand-in for institutional and social development that researchers have found good to work with is literacy and primary education. In this measure, the pre-unitary Southern Italian Kingdom suffers from a lack of public education policy, entirely reliant as it was on the clergy and their parochial schools. As a result, at the moment of unification in 1861 90% of southern Italians were illiterate, and only 20% of children were able or willing to enroll in primary education. This stands in stark contrast with Piedmont and Liguria, the most significant territories of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (the polity which would go on to unify Italy) where in 1861 literacy stood at 53%, and, 93% children were enrolled in primary education thanks to universal education policies. The estimates (postulated by the aforementioned Negri-Zamagni in \"*La situazione economica e sociale nel meridione negli anni dell’unificazione: Una rivisitazione*” published in 2013) certainly can have some issues, as in both north and south measures of literacy were inconsistent. However, it this disparity is corroborated by other indicators: in 1862 (immediately after unity) 6.1 letters per inhabitant were mailed in the northern region of Piedmont, while only 1.6 letters per inhabitant were mailed in the former territories of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies.\n\nThe mailing of letters is also reflected in the disparity between professionalized industries in north and south, like banking and insurance, who would be making most use of postal correspondence. Between 1827 and 1848 (thus in the pre-unity period) of the 53 banks chartered all over Italy not one was founded in the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. The south would have to wait till 1850 for its only two commercial banks to be founded (the Bank of Naples and the Bank of Sicily). While we have no fair pre-unity estimates for insurance companies, in the post unity period (in 1865) of the 88 insurance companies registered in Italy only 21 were based in the South, against the 67 in the North. And beyond banking and insurance, in 1865 of the 208 joint-stock industrial corporations in existence in Italy, only 17 were registered in the South; a serious marker of lack of development in a country that was just then joining the industrial revolution (my source is, as above, Negri-Zamagni).\n\nSo what stopped the South from developing the hallmarks of an industrial economy, like banks, insurers, and most critically industrial corporations?\n\nThe consensus is attributable to the lack of legal or institutional framework favoring capital accumulation in the Kingdom of two Sicilies. Indeed, it would seem that the southern monarchy was itself disinterested in favoring industrial growth, preferring to award of letters patent to foreign investors for what few industrial endeavors might take place. Even things like military and naval procurement was outsourced. The railroad, hallmark of the industrial revolution, was only built to connect the King's summer palace to the King's winter palace. Cause and consequence of this lack of initiative was the southern moneyed classes' preference for investing in extensive agriculture, rather than industry.\n\nThe attitude in the north, however, was much different. The Kingdom of Piedmont lived a precarious existence sandwiched between the Austrian and French Empires. A finely honed instinct for survival among its political class, in addition to an influx of political dissidents from the Austrian-held parts of Italy (as well as a few thinkers expelled from the South) fomenting political thought, led the Kingdom to do its best to imitate the great powers of Europe in industrial development. Policies weren't always successful or well thought out, but they were successful enough to turn the maritime city of Genoa into a center of naval construction, connecting Genoa to the capital of Turin via a railroad, and even develop plans for a future connection between Turin and Switzerland.\n\nIn Austrian-held Italy too, a political and entrepreneurial class based in and around the city of Milan worked to imitate their peers in Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, in order to foster economic development: milanese entrepreneurs financed railroads, canalization of waterways, and founded a series of technical and vocational schools (a far cry from the southern system, which as mentioned above relied on parochial schools).\n\nIt is worth keeping in mind, though, that Italy at the time of unification was still a fundamentally agricultural economy. France, Great Britain, and parts of Austria were much more developed. The gap between Northern Italy and the industrialized regions of Europe would not close until the 1980s.\n\nBut why did the gap close in the North and not in the South?\n\nThe question is one of the many that Emanuele Felice tries to answer in his concise but ambitious, \"*Ascesa e Declino*.\" The north was certainly helped by the presence of a great river, the Po, whose tributaries could be turned into canals to water farms and power mills, and which could be navigated by barges, creating a large unified marketplace even before the construction of the railroad. The south had no such hydrographic advantage. The north's cities were also geographically closer to the industrialized regions of Europe, and thus exchanging goods, materials, and ideas was much easier than in the South. The north would also benefit, in the long run, from the two world wars: Haphazard and hurried wartime planning meant that production of wartime materials was focused where there already was productive capacity, thus turning the north's marginal advantage into a much more substantial advantage.\n\nBut Felice also identifies policy decisions taken in the post-war era as important factors. In fact, the gap between north and south seemed to be closing in the wake of the second world war, but would begin increasing again following the Italian response to the global economic slowdown of the 1970s: deliberate decisions were made to direct state-sponsored conglomerates as well as government procurement to favor the country's least developed regions. This created a paternalistic and clientelistic relationship between southern entrepreneurship and the government, with entrepreneurs quickly preferring to follow lucrative subcontracts offered by the state and state-sponsored entities, divesting from existing industries that had driven the south's budding economic growth up to that point.\n\nI'm very bad with conclusions, but that's the summary of the leading academic consensus. Feel free to offer any follow ups or additional questions you may have." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ekhfkvr" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It is interesting how many sites quote these particular lines, but provide no context, or even bother to cite the origin. Most of them do so with the obvious intent of saying that the US is a religious country, and has to be a religious country because John Adams said it had to be religious country. It's useful to look at it in context.\n\nIt's from his [address to the Massachusetts Militia in October of 1798:](_URL_2_)\n\n > While our Country remains untainted with the Principles and manners, which are now producing desolation in so many Parts of the World: while the \\[ USA \\] continues Sincere and incapable of insidious and impious Policy: We shall have the Strongest Reason to rejoice in the local destination assigned Us by Providence. But should the People of America, once become capable of that deep .... simulation towards one another and towards foreign nations, which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance; and displays in the most captivating manner the charming Pictures of Candour frankness & sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and Insolence: this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World. Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition ,Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other\n\nIt is comparatively easy these days to split off \"moral\" from \"religious\". But in this period ( and well into the 20th c.) to say someone was spiritually-guided carried an assumption they were morally-guided as well. Religion was thought to be the main impetus to virtue. Some philosophers like David Hume could argue against that, and show by example that the two did not have to be linked, but the notion of a moral atheist was pretty rare: most people would believe that the only thing that kept humans from doing terrible things was their fear and love of God. Here Adams is using the terms together to make an argument for the Constitution very common to the 1790's: that its success depended upon the active participation in the government by law-abiding honest people. But it also shows one concern that Adams had in particular. Many of the founders, like Madison and Jefferson, thought of Americans as being relatively equal, and content to be equal. Unlike them, Adams ( after the Revolution) thought that humans tended to strive for superiority, and that, even without a hereditary aristocracy in the US, there would arise an aristocratic elite and an unruly mob wishing to loot and supplant it. He was pretty comfortable with the idea of that elite class being a good force ( maybe here, more \"armed with Power\" ) perhaps even thought the US could have the equivalent of a House of Lords. He thought that the balancing of powers in the Constitution also provided some defense against the conflict, but he was always very uneasy about the danger of mob rule. In 1798, he would be quite aware of the French Revolution \"producing desolation\": that certainly would have put him in mind of the possibilities of a populace no longer moral and religious.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nJohn Adams : A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States: [_URL_0_](_URL_1_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://books.google.com/books/about/A\\_Defence\\_of\\_the\\_Constitutions\\_of\\_Govern.html?id=aH0NAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp\\_read\\_button#v=onepage&q&f=false", "https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Defence_of_the_Constitutions_of_Govern.html?id=aH0NAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false", "https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ctbhxed" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "Absolutely, in many major (and minor) American cities, there were wings of what we would call the \"Black Mafia.\" Typically unrelated but very powerful crime syndicates in the African-American parts of town. Phildelphia, Chicago, New York and Detroit each had their own families, syndicates, brothels, and gangs. I'll outline one of the more prominent groups that existed with The Harlem Mafia. \n\n***The Harlem Mob***\n\nOne of the most famous figures that dominated the Harlem scene was Stephanie \"Madame\" St. Clair. A Creole Black Harlemite who ran several rackets and gangs across Harlem, owned the Black police force, and was known as \"The Tiger of Marseille.\" When notorious gangster Dutch Schultz tried to edge in on the numbers games in Harlem, St. Clair reportedly said: “Ze God-damned Dutchman can keees my ass,” she hissed. “He zinks I’m some stupid nigga? I show him he zinks wrong!” St. Clair would use her enemy in Schultz to leverage favor with the Italian mobster Lucky Luciano, having him act as protection for the Harlem mob while only paying the Italians a pittance, insuring Black Mafia control of Harlem. \n\nFollowing (and working with) St. Clair comes probably the most famous black mobster in Ellsworth \"Bumpy\" Johnson, the Black Kingpin of Harlem. He was a Numbers Game operator, enforcer, drug dealer and Mob Boss who operated in Harlem from the 1930's to the 1960's. He became such a prestigious figure that he appeared in Jet Magazine [once](_URL_0_) after he left the hospital for being shot and [again](_URL_1_) when being arrested for selling heroin. It was under the control of St. Clair and Johnson that famous nightclubs like the Cotton Club were able to flourish in Harlem.\n\n\n**Sources**\n\n*Harlem Godfather: The Rap on My Husband, Ellsworth \"Bumpy\" Johnson* Mayme Johnson\n\n*The Cotton Club* James Haskins\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=QUMDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA36&dq=Ellsworth+Raymond+Johnson+%22bumpy%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAGoVChMIyKKNgaPtxgIV4yVyCh0AmwAC#v=onepage&q&f=false", "https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=378DAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA49&dq=Ellsworth+Johnson+%22bumpy%22&hl=en&ei=4UKPTYfRC4HJgQfsuOC_DQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Ellsworth%20Johnson%20%22bumpy%22&f=false" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ell1wos" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "Oh, this is such a good question, I can't believe I let it languish for 25 days! Sorry for not procrastinating on my other work earlier so I could answer this; I mean that sincerely, I love this question :).\n\nFrom the first, I think it's important to mention that Egypt at the very least was aware that Israel had nuclear development, and that it also appeared to have overflown Israel's Dimona nuclear site multiple times even in the 1960s. For a fascinating read on how this might've played into the 1967 tensions before the Six Day War, [Avner Cohen, one of the experts on Israel's nuclear program](_URL_1_), wrote well about it. Another interesting read on that can be found [here, by Ariel Levité and Emily Landau](_URL_0_).\n\nAt any rate, what was known by 1973 was, obviously, different from what was known in 1967. What the Arab states knew, we can only speculate on based on what's been publicly revealed. Secret information has remained secret, for obvious reasons, in both Israeli and Arab archives. However, the nuclear issue is such an open secret by now that we can definitely glean information of use.\n\nFollowing the end of the 1967 war, the Arab states now accepted Israel's conventional military edge. That may explain, to some extent, why they felt powerless to address what they knew was an existing nuclear program, and what many states knew was being developed. Egypt had, in the past, sought to use conventional war as a deterrent and threat to Israel, a sort of last resort in case Israel began to cross the nuclear threshold. They'd also wanted to use their own potential nuclear programs as a deterrent, but that was also out of the question; the war had not only destroyed Egypt militarily, but it was also now suffering an economic issue, and couldn't easily afford a nuclear program. There were no more threats of preventive war that really held water.\n\nThe Arab states thus looked the other way on Israeli development, because they knew Israel's opacity would benefit them. They could do nothing about it, so better to ignore it than afford to look even weaker in the face of that development. That also allowed Israel to adopt its opacity position, using ambiguity in such a way as to ensure that the signals both sides sent to one another didn't lead to escalation neither wanted, but that the Egyptians in particularly really couldn't afford. The primary issue on Israel's nuclear program ceased to be Arab threats, and began to be American pressure instead.\n\nThat is a story of its own, so I'll leave that one out. The important bit is this: by 1970, the nuclear program was largely known. The *New York Times* reported as much in July 1970, revealing that the US government now assumed that Israel either had a nuclear weapon, or could assemble one quickly and easily if needed. The Arab states *knew* in 1973 that Israel possessed nuclear weapons, and they chose to attack anyways. However, that's not to say it had no impact on their decisions. Instead, it appeared to have led to them adopting constrained, limited methods and objectives, as raised by Cohen in *Israel and the Bomb*. At the same time, Egypt miscalculated what Israel would react with to its attack in 1973.\n\nYet Yair Evron in *Israel's Nuclear Dilemma* argues the exact opposite; that Egypt effectively ignored the nuclear issue in 1973, and was limited in its objectives because of its conventional limitations, and that it didn't take nuclear issues into account because it believed their use would not occur. There's also an argument that their actions were consistent with any non-nuclear adversary fighting a war with a nuclear power, and he references the way that China and the Soviet Union acted in relation to the United States before they got their nuclear weapons.\n\nAt any rate, I've seen very few people argue that the Egyptians were unaware of the Israeli capability. Abraham Rabinovich, in *The Yom Kippur War*, mentions quite clearly that Egypt was \"aware of Israel's nuclear potential, but [Egypt's] limited operational goals in Sinai did not threaten Israel's borders and therefore were not seen as risking a doomsday response\".\n\nIt's also important to know that while Egypt and Syria may have seen the public reports, we have no idea what Syria did or did not know beyond that, and whether they had information shared with them by Egypt, at least as far as I've seen. Nevertheless, it's commonly believed that they knew Israel had a nuclear weapon. And it also seems unrealistic that the coordination prior to the war would've left out that Syria would be facing a nuclear power, while Egypt was aware, even if the public reports weren't enough. However, their view of the way to interact knowing that is less understood. How they viewed their war aims was probably shaped by Israel's nuclear policy, but I've seen little knowledge about what that effect was.\n\nHere's the funny thing, and where I'll just go a bit beyond your question: the limited aims, and the way Egypt (and probably Syria) perceived those aims as being a good way to avoid nuclear war, still gave rise to the infamous alleged arming of Israel's nuclear arsenal, as recounted popularly by Seymour Hersh and subsequently investigated/discussed many times over. However, Rabinovich points to many sources saying that the decision to deploy the weapons was greatly overblown. Yuval Ne'eman, a nuclear physicist and former intelligence officer, is quoted saying it would be normal to advance preparedness any time a war occurred, but that there was no deployment for possible use, as was reported. Apparently it was considered during a discussion by generals, but it was also debated quite fiercely, with no resolution. However, it apparently was never debated by the Israeli Cabinet, according to what Rabinovich (a fairly well-respected journalist) called \"reliable Israeli sources\".\n\nAvner Cohen has a different take, citing a source at the war cabinet's meeting on October 9 who apparently claimed that Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had discussed a nuclear demonstration when the war seemed at its worst. The Israeli atomic head was there and ready to discuss, but other ministers chimed in and it ended there. There are plenty of other rumors, and claims, but this seems like a potential one. Cohen also claims that nuclear alerts were declared, twice in the first week of the war and once on October 17, when Soviet SCUD missiles were put on alert in Egypt. The belief is that the missiles were fueled and mobilized, something that requires only the Prime Minister and Defense Minister to agree (the cabinet doesn't have to make a decision, according to Cohen, just those two), but that the Prime Minister never went further than that.\n\nContinued in a response to my own comment." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.jstor.org/stable/30245473", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/4328925" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dod9wcm" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The innovations pioneered around that period were arguably more broadly and popularly *impactful* than other periods, but that doesn't mean they were more numerous. The changes in that era were profound - a way of life that had continued fairly unchanged for many centuries was fundamentally altered in developed nations. Previously, one would travel by horse or foot, burn candles for light, communicate verbally or by writing, and poop in a hole. Suddenly, people had cars and trains, electric light and power, radio, and indoor plumbing. (Some of these were older inventions made popular and affordable by industrialization; this too is part of the innovations.) While innovation has continued, and arguably increased, the \"low hanging fruit\" of changing human lifestyles has pretty much been picked. Cell phones and Internet are wonderful, but they are as much *improvements* of the concept of radio as they are inherently revolutionary. A smart car is vastly more complicated than a Model T, but is still a car. Microwaves are neat, but radiating my hot dogs instead of boiling them is hardly earth-shaking. Moon travel and nuclear weapons don't really effect everyday life the way a light bulb does. I'd argue you may have a bias based on the commonplace impact of earlier industrial innovations, the nature of which arguably made them seem more numerous. Material science or computer coding aren't as apparent or basic of changes as previously." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e62qhem" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "At about 2pm ET the President was in the Yellow Oval Room on the second floor of the White House with friend and aide Harry Hopkins when Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox called and first told him if the reports from Pearl. He was called again a few minutes later by Admiral Stark the Chief of Naval Operations to confirm and expand the reports. Final confirmation came then when Hawaii Governor John Poindexter was put through to the President and the second wave of the attack descended during the conversation.\n\nFDR used the room as a personal study and private space mostly. He kept naval prints and model ships there along with his stamp collection, but would also work out of it. Earlier in the day he had sent regrets to Mrs Roosevelt that he could not attend a reception downstairs, though he would later try to use the attack as his reason for missing out vs just wanting some free time.\n\nThrough the rest of the day he would stay there while his senior military leader's assembled, then in the evening address leader's from Congress, and his full Cabinet. All the while his secretaries had set themselves up in the adjoining rooms with phones and typewriters to deliver copies of the latest news from the Pacific.\n\nIt was also here late in the evening that he would draft the speech he would give to Congress and also spoke to Prime Minister Churchill briefly to confirm that both nation's had been attacked by Japan and reaffirm their support for each other." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cyenchd" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "There was a fairly flourishing US publishing industry by the 1850s. For example, Melville published with Harper and Brothers (which is is extant as HarperCollins), Poe with Putnam (also still extant as an imprint of Penguin), Hawthorne and Thoreau with Ticknor and Fields, Emerson with Philips, Samson.\n\nSource: William Charvat, *Literary Publishing in America, 1790-1850*. U of Massachusetts, 1993" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cj6y3hl" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Not to put off any further answers or follow-up questions, but [this healthy discussion](_URL_0_) may be of help to you." ] }

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[ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Messiah_claimants" ]

[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/24em97/when_did_early_christians_stop_considering/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ccl0wx4", "ccl1jdp", "ccl2hwa", "ccl2ukn", "ccl3e2p", "ccl3vn4" ], "score": [ 23, 92, 2, 3, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "The main, overarching reason was that the Netherlands were just too small. They tried quite hard, and for a while, quite successfully, to be a great naval and colonial power, but England and France and Spain had just too many men and resources for them to compete with. Eventually, They were forced from N. America.", "It's no really a case of decline but more a case of being surpassed in economic growth. This had a number of reasons: \n \n- Mercantilism/Colbertisme (other country's protecting their own trade) Example: Act of Navigation (1651) Banned foreign ships from trading in English ports. \n\n- high wages/ low productivity \n\n- Costly wars and disastrous wars.\n In 1672 an alliance of France, England, Sweden, Munster and Cologne Invaded the Netherlands and almost conquered it. This year is dubbed rampjaar (\"disaster year\") in Dutch. \n\n- Political Corruptness/Laziness\n\n the Netherlands where a republic and governed by a group of people called 'regenten' they where members of rich and influenced families, the most important regent was the *raadpensionaris van het gewest Holland* of *Landsadvocaat* the most important military role was *de Stadhouder* *de facto* was this a hereditary position hold by a member of the House of Orange. \n\n There was always a power struggle between the *Staatsgezinden* ( people who supported the Landsadvocaat ) and the *Prinsgezinden* ( people who supported the Stadhouders ) in times of peace and prosperity the *landsadvocaat* held the most power, between 1650 and 1672 there was no *stadhouders*. when in 1672 the french invaded the people blamed the regents for the state of the army and demanded a *stadhouder*. William III was made *stadhouder* and defended the republic. William had ambitions to become king! and in 1689 he became king of England, this meant safety for the Nederlands but the Bill of Rights prevented that William revoked bills like The Acts of Navigation. But it also meant that The Netherlands needed support England in some large wars, with peace deals that clearly favored British interests. (I'am looking a you Peace of Utrecht (1713)) \n\n In the same period ( early to late 18th centenary) the ruling class became corrupted and lazy they where more busy protecting their interests than protection the Dutch interest, they where becoming also more of a aristocracy/Plutocracy. They where appointing important jobs to each other, it was increasingly harder to join their class.\n\n- Political stability in the rest of Europe\n\n One of the most important factors in the decline of the republic is the growth of other countries. The Netherlands is a small country ( DUH ) and can't produce the same amount of goods than the economic power house France, the same is with manpower and military strength. The Dutch Republic most successful years where in the period that England, France and The Holy Roman Empire where weak. \n \n England had to deal with their civil wars (1639-1651) and the political aftermath. From 1688 there was a fast economic growth. \n\n France became a powerhouse under the rule of Louis XIV (1643-1715) he gave France the largest army in the world, this forced the Dutch to invest in their army what raided the tax burden in the Netherlands.\n\n between 1618-1648 their was the 30 year war in the HRE which devastated much of what is now Germany. The Netherlands where involved in this war, but the war didn't affect the Netherlands that much. After the war the HRE could rebuild them self.\n\n**TL;DR: The rest of Europe gets their shit together and simply out growth the Dutch. While the Dutch lost their edge they didn't had an answer**", "As a side question, is \"golden age\" a valid term anymore? It seems really vague.", "As several have pointed out - being small and having your larger neighbors get their houses in order is a big part of it.\n\nBut another part of it would be the fact that the Netherlands were rich but not powerful enough to defend it against their rivals (England and France, primarily). The Anglo-Dutch wars drained the Dutch economy and stripped away valuable colonies and trading rights, followed by a right thumping from France.\n\nPart of having a golden age means you are doing something better than everyone else - and after the late 1600's, the source of Dutch dominance (trade) was usurped by the English. They were still rich and influential...just simply less so.", "There is an interesting school of thought that claims that the tolerance shown by the Dutch was key to their rise (ex: accepting Jewish merchants was a significant contributor to the rise of modern finance).\n\nBy the same token, as their political and economic fortunes ebbed and flowed there was a movement to return to a more 'pure' time when it was believed things were better. This created slow but steady flight to other more friendly locales (primarily England) which not only welcomed them with open arms but had the size and global scale to magnify their impacts.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhy the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris has a discussion of this as well.\n\nI think its more complex but its an interesting perspective and analysis. Ian Morris puts real #'s to it and maps it to specific political and cultural milestones. The Digital Commons article talks about tolerance and the gradual change in the 18th century.\n\nThis is my first top level post to askhistorians. Sorry if I internet wrong.", "I believe the spice trade became less lucrative as well. The Dutch East India company made their money from the spice trade." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [ "http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1491&context=macintl" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d6qxiho", "d6r3wn0" ], "score": [ 9, 6 ], "text": [ "So the most spectacular example of this going terribly comes in June of 1916.\n\nField Marshall the Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, who was serving as Secretary State for War was traveling to Russia in order to participate in negotiations and planning in person with the distressed Czar's government. He planned to take a RN cruiser up around Scandinavia to Arkhangelsk. He arrived in Scapa Flow in the Orkney's, which was the home base of the Grand Fleet.\n\nAfter meeting with Admiral Jellicoe aboard the Iron Duke he transferred to the cruiser HMS Hampshire. Owing to a terrible gale her 2 escort destroyers were sent back, the idea being ti was unsafe for them and U-Boats were unlikely to be a threat.\n\nUnfortunately about a week before, in the run up to Jutland, U-75 had put down a minefield and she struck one of these. Nearly all of her 700 passengers and crew were lost in the incident. ", "There are a few similar questions in the archives that might be of interest, I'll draw on some of my previous comments to particularly focus on Churchill's journey to Moscow in 1942:\n\n* [How did Churchill get to El Alamein in 1942?] (_URL_2_) \n* [How did world leaders travel to conferences during WWII?] (_URL_7_) \n* [How did the major world leaders travel to the conferences such as the Yalta conference safely?] (_URL_0_) \n\nFor the 1942 journey to Moscow, stopping off in North Africa for a week or so, the aircraft Churchill flew in was a modified B-24 Liberator [named \"Commando\"] (_URL_5_), subject of [an article on the Smithsonian website] (_URL_6_). The long range of the B-24 was important, as the usual route for Allied aircraft to the North African theatre (and the original route proposed for Churchill) started from Takoradi in Ghana (the Gold Coast, as was) and took five or six days travelling across central Africa before heading north to Cairo (as illustrated on [this map] (_URL_3_)). The B-24 could fly directly from Gibraltar to Cairo.\n\nThe first leg of the journey was Lyneham to Gibraltar, arriving the morning August 3rd, which Churchill describes as uneventful in *The Hinge of Fate*. That evening they took off at 6pm, cutting across Spanish and Vichy territory with an escort of four Beaufighters, flying across North Africa largely in darkness, seeing \"in the pale, glimmering dawn the endless winding silver ribbon of the Nile\" (ibid) on the morning of August 4th. Churchill visited the Alamein positions on the 5th, and appointed General Gott to command the Eighth Army. On August 10th Churchill departed Cairo for Tehran, then on to Moscow, arriving on the 12th. The conference lasted until the 17th, the return journey followed the same route in reverse, again including some time on the desert front.\n\nIn general there was little risk of coincidental interception for aircraft avoiding combat zones, especially at night; integrated air defences, radar and night fighters were concentrated in the UK and Germany, and to a lesser extent other active theatres. Air travel always carried an element of risk, though; on August 7th the newly appointed Gott was flying in to Cairo, on a similar route to the one taken by Churchill on the 5th, when his aircraft was shot down and strafed on the ground, killing most of the passengers (somewhat ironic, given Gott's nickname of \"Strafer\"); this resulted in Montgomery being appointed to command the Eighth Army. Knowledge of exact routes was limited as far as possible to the aircrew themselves, as intelligence leaks were a risk (e.g. Yamamoto's aircraft was shot down in 1943 by USAAF P-38s acting on \"Magic\" intelligence). Also in 1943 a BOAC DC-3 airliner was shot down as it flew from Lisbon to Britain, one of the passengers was the actor Leslie Howard; there are [numerous theories] (_URL_4_) that the aircraft may have been deliberated targeted in the belief that Churchill was on board, or that Howard himself was the target due to his work with British Intelligence, or that it was merely a mistake. Air accidents were probably the main danger, numerous high ranking officers were lost in air crashes (e.g. Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Lieutenant General Frank Andrews, Major-General Orde Wingate etc.)\n\nChurchill continued to use \"Commando\" until 1943, when it was replaced by an Avro York (a design derived from the Lancaster) named \"Ascalon\" with a few more creature comforts including a heated lavatory seat (though apparently it was disconnected as it was too hot), then in 1944 he switched to a C-54B Skymaster received via lend-lease; an article [in Flight magazine from November 1945] (_URL_1_) outlines how it was fitted out with rather luxurious passenger compartments, a conference room (with cocktail cabinet) and a well-furnished galley.\n" ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gnoet/how_did_the_major_world_leaders_travel_to_the/", "https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1945/1945%20-%202348.html", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mogn8/how_did_churchill_get_to_el_alamein_in_1942/", "http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/I/maps/AAF-I-10.jpg", "http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/the-shoot-down-of-leslie-howard/", "http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205189669", "http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/travels-with-churchill-136166507/?all", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2syu1b/how_did_world_leaders_travel_to_conferences/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cef75x2" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "According to Eric Arnesen in *The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation* and Richard Valelly in *The Two Reconstructions: the Struggle for Black Enfranchisement*, slaves so despised their masters that one of the first things they did as freemen was change given names. Instead, they adopted names taken from places, trades, and even African relatives. Keeping the master's name was considered a last resort as a means to escape the rampant violence visited on newly freed blacks." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfbl2vn" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I wouldn't say that, even by the High Renaissance, artists had that much freedom over their subject matter. It was still very much a matter of the patron's (whether it be royalty, church, or private) will. The more well-known artists had a bit more input (I'm thinking, for example, of Titian and his portraits for the Spanish kings), and certainly more freedom to choose and be exposed to a wider range of possible patrons, but they weren't truly able to just paint for the sake of it - that shift was still another couple of hundred years away. Everything had to be created for a purpose. \n\nIn terms of patronage, the addition of private citizens (usually middle and upper class) as patrons to the standard patronage of church and royalty coincided with the rise and growing wealth of those classes. You have to remember that at this point, art museums - and publicly accessible art in general - weren't concepts. Art, for a private citizen, was a status symbol: something that the church and royals had had for centuries, that now they could too. The growth of private collecting & commissions also benefitted the artist because citizens tended to have more wide-ranging tastes than the royals or especially the church, based both on personal taste and current fashion, thus giving the artist a bigger scope in which to work, as well as another means of making money.\n\nThe financial aspect of private patronage is one reason that it really flourished in Italy and the North - in a country like Spain, for instance, the financial gap between the royals and their subjects was so wide that there was barely a middle class, let alone one with the disposable income to spend on art. \n\nSo I'd argue that it wasn't really that the role of the artist changed all that much; rather, the *perception* of the artist in society, and the function and purpose of art itself, that benefited most from Renaissance ideals during the period - he was gradually elevated from a craftsman to a serious and in-demand professional, who had access to an ever-growing pool of patrons and ideas than his predecessors. \n\nI really recommend Jay Levenson's *Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration* as a starting point if you're interested in this subject / period. Ann Harris also has a really interesting text on the same topic, but it deals with the period just after the Renaissance. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cw15plt" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Qin was more effective from the middle Warring States onwards. They weren't always more effective.\n\nThat being said I would say the reasons are: \n1) Qin's land was fertile. It wasn't (originally) as populous, but Qin took over the heartland of the Zhou when the Zhou moved east (the event that ushered in the Spring and Autumn period). The Wei river valley was fertile and not hemmed in all sides by hostile states but had places they could expand into. When they go campaigning on their Eastern borders, they don't have to worry about another state taking advantage and attacking from their west (something other states had to put up with all the time) because there was no state on their west. I also read (but for the life of me can't remember where I read it from, might have been Cambridge's History of China) that they also embarked on huge irrigation projects of dikes and canals to make their lands even better and efficiently transfer goods.\n\n2) Legalist reforms. Throughout the Warring States period, all the major players tried to concentrate power in the hand of the state/ruler and take it away from the aristocrats that made up the charioteers of the Spring and Autumn period. The Qin, on advice of Shang Yang, did this most completely. They adapted a very regimented society of five/ten mutually-responsible households (if one commits a crime, all are punished). All middle-men and aristocratic standings were (in theory) abolished. There was (in theory) no hereditary titles except that of the King, and everything was to be done by officers on the state's payroll. Society was to be structured around nuclear families of farmer-soldiers. There was to be no large family groups, and the entire population was to be available for military service. This allowed the Qin to mobilize its resources for war more efficiently than any other state. \nFun fact. If you go read legalist writings by Lord Shang and especially Hanfeizi, it reads like a checklist of what Big Brother is like from Orwell's 1984. The difference is Orwell says this is bad for the people, while Hanfeizi says it's good for the state/ruler.\n\n3) Qin's successful conquest/colonization of the Sichuan basin really tipped the scale towards their favour with the addition of the vast and incredibly fertile Sichuan basin into their realm for the state to exploit, population to expand into, and to farm." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fiexgqy" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "EDIT : u/sunagainstgold's answer on [homosexuality and its perception in medieval Scandinavia](_URL_0_) is certainly interest you on the other part of your question.\n\nWe have litterary evidence that ancient Celts (i.e. more or less people we would call Gauls) practiced homosexuality, to the point it was considered one of their positive qualities by Aristotle.\n\n > \\[...\\] *and yet among the barbarians, a female and a slave are upon a level in the community, the reason for which is, that amongst them there are none qualified by nature to govern, therefore their society can be nothing but between slaves of different sexes. For which reason the poets say, it is proper for the Greeks to govern the barbarians, as if a barbarian and a slave were by nature one.* (Politics, I, \n > \n > *So that in such a state riches will necessarily be in general esteem, particularly if the men are governed by their wives, which has been the case with many a brave and warlike people except the Celts, and those other nations, if there are any such, who openly practise pederasty* (Politics II, 9)\n\nu/cleopatra_philopater wrote [an answer that is necessary](_URL_1_) to understand what Greeks saw in participating to homosexual and pederastic activities : an initiation of the youngest, wild and \"desiring\" members of the upper society by older, experienced and guiding mentors. For Aristotle, it was the marking of a comparatively well-regulated and \"not that Barbaric\" society.\n\nAncient Celts, however, seems to have overdone it in the eyes of the Greeks as Diodorus Siculus\n\n > *Although their wives are comely, they have very little to do with them, but rage with lust, in outlandish fashion, for the embraces of males. It is their practice to sleep upon the ground on the skins of wild beasts and to tumble with a catamite on each side. And the most astonishing thing of all is that they feel no concern for their proper dignity, but prostitute to others without a qualm the flower of their bodies; nor do they consider this a disgraceful thing to do, but rather when anyone of them is thus approached and refuses the favour offered him, this they consider an act of dishonour.*\n\nActually revealing in penetration? Boys serching actively for partners? Lack of a natural desire for women as a \"settled\" man should have? *Threesomes*? That won't do at all : for Diodorus, regardless of their qualities, these are the displays of a deeply disordered people just as human sacrifices are.\n\nThis reputation of Gauls is echoed by Strabo as common knowledge.\n\n > \\[...\\] *one of the things that are repeated over and over again, namely, that not only are all Celts fond of strife, but among them it is considered no disgrace for the young men to be prodigal of their youthful charms*. (Geography, V, 4)\n\nEvidently, Gauls had a different approach on sexual practices among men than Greeks, even if it was still marked by intercourse between older mentors and wild youth. Unfortunately, there are no Celtic sources on this; obviously the lack of written litterature in ancient Gaul prevents a direct understanding, but the lack of pictural sources that we could interpret are an additional problems : Gauls didn't represent themselves, except relatively uncommon hieratic fashion, and sexual depictions are usually subtle.\n\nStill, we can draw something more than their immediatly descriptive meaning from Greek texts : at the partial exception of Strabo (who might have borrowed elements from Poseidonios as much from other authors), their perception of Celts was importantly drawn from the form of contacts Greek had with them. In the IVth to IInd centuries it was often as warring bands, either raiders or mercenaries, whom practices including sexual were thus displayed and known to Greeks (earlier mentions of Celts, from the VIth to the IVth centuries are silent on this topic).\n\nWe'd be thus allowed to preserve a strong association with pedagogic practices comparable to Greek pederasty, as Aristotle understood it.\n\nWe know that warfare was central in Gaulish public life : the social class Caesar describes as equites are determinated by their capacity to wage war as part of the mobilised troop and thus taking an active part into religious rites, political activity and social status among their peers on which personal prestige played the main part until the Ist century BCE. The importance of clientelization and personal relations in the make-up of the *pagus* (the supra-tribal entity from which troops were gathered and mobilised) would have impressed the pedagogic initiation including warring but also social mentorship and sponsorship that would have included gifts, equipment and sexual intercourse; making fully realized men out of \"boys\" able to participate to public life as peers; something that could be part of a larger set of practices in Indo-European peoples (altough certainly not limited to them).\n\nIn Gaul, it appears from sources that young children weren't fully considered part of the overall social sphere : Caesar inform us that it is innappropriate for a Gaul to bring his child with him, and young children aren't properly buried but cast away in some ditch except in the context of important lineage where they were groomed into a future social role. As such, a pubescent male is immediatly taken from childhood to active initiation, instead of it being a \"gateway\" of sorts as in Greece;which might have added to the confusion and reprobation from Greeks, but also something that might have well blurred the distinction between \"sexually-ehanced\" initiation and sexual intercourse among peers, both probably participating from the same set of practices, eventually removing these from strict pederasty and associating virile and social binding among warriors.\n\nThe active part taken by the youngers is interesting as it is uncommon and a shocking behavious for Greeks : it might be interpretable as understanding warfare itself as both central for Gauls but as a \"special\" sphere too. War and mobilisation were made under the auspices of standards taken from sanctuaries, among them the boar-standard or the beastly carnyxes, which had a military and religious meaning : the boar in particular is particularily present in this context while rare in coinage or other displays (where horse are far more common along with cervids).Likewise, Cernunnos as the torque-bearing god and association to cervids could be less a master of nature (and even less a \"god of nature\") than master of the wild whom initiated warriors (the representation of Cernunnos on the Gundestrup Cauldron being associated with a possible symbolical representation of initiation) could drawn from altough being \"harnassed\" by the god trough torque-giving.\n\nThere's an impression that warfare, decidely distinct from the \"normal\" sphere (which, incidentally, is governed by women in time of wars, at least for what matter the political management, as accounted by Plutarch), where the wilderness of young men could find an outlet in aggressive warfare and sexuality along older patrons, or as part of a \"troop of young men\" (or *männerbund).*\n\nWould these practices have been maintained outside warfare? That's possible but sources are lacking and interpretation of what is at disposal is limited. Warfare being the natural and recurring lifestyle of warriors, we can speculate that there were more than enough occasions to practice something that might have been situated between accepted bisexuality and ritualized pederasty.\n\nWere these practices accepted outside warriors? Opposite stances had been supported and argued, from these being limited to a ritual and \"special\" context, to Gaulish culture being essentially accepting of bisexuality. Absence of sources (either positively or negatively pointing this) prevent any form of certainty in spite of enthusiastic support for the latter, such as Celts being considered as \"sin-free\" and \"taboo-free\" (e.g. Pierre Godard)\n\n\\[EDIT : We have nothing, on the other hand, on feminine homosexual intercourse or relationships. It was pretty much a non-topic for ancient authors, who focused on a warring elite they were more likely to met with in Gaul or elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin.Altough Gaulish women in particular, and Celtic women in general, seems to have beneficed from a higher status and more agency in public life than in Greece or Rome, we're badly informed on their everyday or public life itself and it is often in relation with how it differed or completed masculine spheres. Even comparatism with other mythological or historical sources (notably medieval Irish and Welsh ones) doesn't give much which could be the sign lesbianism wasn't acknowledged in ancient Gaul either\\]\n\nWhat we can say, however, is that Gauls were apparently less uptight than Greeks in their sexual approach (some Gaulish names or surnames have possible explicit translations, such as Tarcondimotus, litterally \"his head is like a d\\*\\*g\"), and seems to have, in a context of social upbringing and perpetuation of a male elite, not only tolerated but actively practiced it.\n\n* *Dictionnaire de langue gauloise - Une approche linguistique du vieux-celtique continental*; Xavier Delmarre; éditions Errance; 2003\n* *Homosexualité et initiation chez les peuples indo-européens*; Bernard Sergent; Payot & Rivages, 1996." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5vb166/how_did_pagan_vikings_in_the_813th_centuries_view/de1bo9q/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7lnrh5/how_common_was_homosexuality_or_what_wed_now_see/drptkm5/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cdowpk6" ], "score": [ 22 ], "text": [ "1/2\n\n**Luxembourg, First World War**\n\n\nLuxembourg was [invaded and occupied by Germany](_URL_0_) during the First World War.\n\nBeing able to move their army through Luxembourg, as well as Belgium, was a key part of the Moltke-Schlieffen Plan. On 1st August 1914 the Germans violated Luxembourgish neutrality by using Troisvierges Station in the north of the country and taking control of the telegraph posts there. The Luxembourgish prime minister, Paul Eyschen, telegraphed Berlin, asking what was happening. The German State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Gottlieb von Jagow, responded that there must have been a mistake, and that Germany would respect Luxembourgish neutrality, as had been affirmed at the 1867 Second Treaty of London, providing that France did the same.\n\nOn 2nd August 1914 Germany launched its invasion of Luxembourg, crossing the Moselle (which the border between Germany and Luxembourg follows, excluding a little bit of Luxembourg near Vianden which is east of the river) at Remich and Wasserbillig, and moved on the capital, Luxembourg City. The Luxembourg Army, consisting of 400 mostly ceremonial troops, were ordered by the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, Marie-Adélaïde, not to resist the Germans. At 17:00 a telegram was sent to the Luxembourgish prime minister in which the German government apologised for the invasion, which they said was necessary to protect German military and railway interests, and that Luxembourg would be fully compensated by the Germans for any damage. At the end of the day a fight between German and French troops broke out at Petit-Croix, on the western border of Luxembourg.\n\nOn 3rd August a further telegram was sent, claiming the occupation to be temporary, that the rights of Luxembourgers would be respected, and that France had caused the invasion by sending 650 troops on bicycle into Luxembourg before the invasion. This claim seems unlikely, though possible, and was denied by the government of Luxembourg.\n\n3200 Luxembourgers had left the country before the invasion, and most of these volunteered within the French army. 2800 of these were killed in the course of the war.\n\nDuring the occupation, trees were pulled down in Luxembourg City in order to improve the line of sight for using machine guns, should the Germans have needed to defend Luxembourg. Orchards and farmland were dug up to locate bunkers and gun emplacements. Luxembourgish workers were made to work for the German war effort. In order to prevent trouble brewing among the local population, 'preventive arrests' of possible dissenters were made - it seems that the German secret police had been active in Luxembourg before the war. Most of these prisoners were taken to Trier, just across the border into Germany. Luxembourg was kept under martial law, and there were restrictions on travel, free speech/press and rationing. The country was used by the Germans as a logistical support centre for the German army, and Crown Prince Wilhelm, who was a general in the army, had his headquarters at Luxembourg's second city, Esch-sur-Alzette.\n\nOne of the major events during the occupation was a strike by iron miners on 31st May 1917. As a result of the British naval blockade on Germany, Luxembourg had become very important to German iron production, and contributed one-seventh of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire's pig iron. Generalmajor Richard Karl von Tessmar put down the strike, and arrested the ringleaders, who were sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment.\n\nHad Germany won the war, it has been argued that she intended to annex Luxembourg. There is some evidence to support this. The Septemberprogramm, a draft of German war aims, stated that Luxembourg was to become a member of the German Empire, and this has been used by historian Fritz Fischer in *Germany's Aims in the First World War* to claim that it was German policy to annex Luxembourg. General Friedrich Bronsart von Schellendorf, Chief of General Staff of the Ottoman Army, also talked of annexing Luxembourg. The Septemerprogramm was never official policy, however, and Bronsart von Schellendorf's statements should not be seen as representative of German policy makers' opinion. As it is, no serious attempts were made to annex Luxembourg during occupation.\n\nOn 6th November 1918, Richard von Tessmar announced the withdrawal of German troops from Luxembourg. After the armistice, on 18th November 1918 it was decided that General John Pershing's US Third Army would move through Luxembourg to take up their occupation of the Rhineland, which they did the following day. The American troops were greeted by the Luxembourgers as liberators, and on 22nd November the German army completed its withdrawal from Luxembourg.\n\n\n**Liechtenstein, First World War**\n\nOfficially Liechtenstein was neutral during the First World War, and did not have a standing army. Unlike Luxembourg, its neutrality was largely respected. Liechtenstein was closely tied to Austria-Hungary, however: since 1852 Austrian customs officials were in charge of collecting duties at border crossings; since 1872 the Vienna-Zürich train line which passed through the country had been under the control of the Imperial Austrian State Railway; since 1880 Austrian diplomats were able to represent Liechtensteiner interests abroad. As a result, the Allies saw Liechtenstein as being so closely integrated into the Austro-Hungarian economy that it too was subjected to embargo by the Allies. This caused hardships in Liechtenstein, and the Allies even denied the Swiss their requests to send food to the principality. As a result, after the armistice and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Liechtenstein concluded much the same treaties (customs, consular etc.) with Switzerland in the place of Austria, and adopted the Swiss Franc, which is still the currency today." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Luxembourg_in_World_War_I" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "chzk2u4" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The German occupation was significantly more brutal, considering Germany suffered some million or so civilian casualties from all military actions (including those of the western allies,) compared to the 8-12 million inflicted in the Soviet Union.\n\nThe Russian occupation is, I feel, often played up due to the political concerns of the time. Yes, there are accounts of rapes by Russian soldiers, but there are also accounts of Soviet troops handing out food to orphans.\n\nThe thing is, the Russian plan wasn't to murder 2/3 of the German population. The Nazi plan for Russia was to do just that. The Soviet high command issued orders against rape and murder, although depending on commander this was sometimes not enforced (as in all the allied armies.) It may have been more of a problem for Soviet forces, but then, virtually every Russian soldier would have personally known somebody who had been killed by the Germans.\n\nThe difficulty in finding good sources on this issue is that it has become highly politicized. It's difficult to find a middle ground between \"the Russians were barbecuing babies in the street\" and \"glorious Soviet soldiers were all angels and did nothing but help the German civilians.\" The truth is probably somewhere inbetween.\n\nHowever, I do firmly believe that the \"Stalin's army of rapists\" line can be firmly dismissed as Cold War era propaganda. This is not to say that the Soviet occupation was not brutal and that rape did not happen, but the scale which is hinted at (but seldom given a hard number,) in English sources is probably exaggerated. Sadly, it would be difficult to exaggerate the horror of the holocaust in Russia." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dhyuoah" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I recommend the following five works as the rock on which to build your understanding of medieval warfare. They are not all easy to read, *Warfare in Medieval Europe 400-1453* is particularly dense, but they will all add to your understanding of the subject. In general, the newer works supersede the older works when it comes to facts, so when there is a contradiction, then the newer work is usually the correct one. I don't believe that this is always the case, but this usually comes down to differences of opinion, not fact. If you only read one of the books, then *Medieval Warfare* will provide the best overview, though I disagree entirely with Timothy Reuter's section of the book.\n\n* *History of the Art of War, Volumes 1-3*, by Hans Delbrück, for insight into infantry and cavalry dynamics, how to use topography and logistics to examine the veracity of battle accounts and various useful miscellaneous pieces of information and primary source quotations.\n\n* *The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages*, by J.F. Verbruggen for detail on the psychology of medieval warriors.\n\n* *War in the Middle Ages*, by Philippe Contamine for some of the societal aspects of warfare.\n\n* *Medieval Warfare*, edited by Maurice Keen for early medieval Scandinavian warfare, warfare in the High and Late Middle Ages, equipment, sieges, naval warfare, use of mercenaries and the effects of warfare on civilians.\n\n* *Warfare in Medieval Europe 400-1453*, by Bernard and David Bachrach for how to use primary sources, logistics, finance and Carolingian and Ottonian warfare.\n\nIf you want a look at the mind of the medieval warrior, the primary sources are excellent for this. Jean de Joinville's *The Life of Saint Louis* and Geoffrey of Villehardouin's​ *On the Conquest of Constantinople* are two valuable looks into the mind of a medieval knight.\n\nFor a look at the kinds of questions and moral dilemmas medieval warriors had, then Christine de Pizan's *The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry* has a large section devoted to both the questions and answers of this nature, as well as being an important source on early 15th century warfare.\n\n**Edit:** I've just now been reading *Bloodied Banners: Martial Display on the Medieval Battlefield*, by Robert W Jones, and I think this would also suit your needs, as it delves quite deeply into the psychology surrounding arms and armour and their effect on opponents." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dt1ux8j", "dt27wct", "dt2dd0t" ], "score": [ 213, 714, 72 ], "text": [ "Hi there! \n\nIf you've come to the thread and are wondering why there's no answer yet, please be patient: [we have found](_URL_4_) that it takes an average of 9 hours for a good answer to appear on a popular thread - properly researching and writing an answer takes time. Additionally, it's currently well past midnight on the East Coast of the US right now, which means that plenty of the historians interested in this topic might already be asleep. Please be patient! If you want to be reminded of this thread in 24 hours, [please see here for information on how to send a private message to RemindMeBot](_URL_1_) to remind you about this thread.\n\nIf you're wondering what's in the 14 removed comments at the time of writing, there are four separate smartarses who've posted a one word reply ('Yes') or a variant ('I guess so'). One other clever chap made a joke imitating the English accent. There is also already a complaint about removed comments. Some of these attracted replies saying \"in before this gets deleted\" and the like. There is also one attempt at an answer which was too vague and short to reach our standards. You're not missing anything great, we promise.\n\nAll of these comments get removed on /r/AskHistorians because the huge majority of our subscribers really do 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 (if you see it, report it!) \n\nPlease see [our subreddit rules](_URL_6_) for more information on how to write an answer up to our standards. 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_5_). This is why we encourage [the use of primary and secondary sources in answering questions](_URL_2_), 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 removing the short, quick, bad answers that would otherwise crowd them out, the well-researched in-depth answers (that take people time to research and write) are more likely to be seen ([see this graph for more detail](_URL_0_)). The downside to this is that we have to remove a lot of shitposts and comments wondering what happened to the removed comments. The upside is that our contributors consistently post amazing stuff to /r/AskHistorians (which we collate the best of every week in our [Sunday Digest](_URL_3_)). Alternatively, if you want to discuss history without these constraints, /r/history or /r/askhistory might be more appropriate subreddits for you than /r/AskHistorians. \n", "This is an interesting question and something that people have been wondering about for a long time. Before I can answer it, I feel like it is worth disclaiming that I am not British, in terms of national origin. I am American, was educated from elementary school through my graduate program entirely in America, so when I speak here, I am talking about what academic historians say about the American Revolution on the university level stage. I have no knowledge what schools, books, or teachers say for students beneath college level. Fortunately, since the American Revolution is something studied globally, I’ve studied historiographical debates of modern and previous historians in Britain, and I will be happy to discuss that here.\n\nOverall, the majority of historians who studied and reported on the American Revolution currently have no major conflicts with American historians who study the same time period, but this is not true for all of the last two centuries. The first person to tackle this question was British historian Richard Middleton, who conducted research and wrote about it in his article, [“British Historians and the American Revolution”](_URL_0_) . His article mainly seeks to study what early British historians said and reported on the American Revolution. I feel obligated to point out that in these early days of the discipline of academic history scholarship, being objective was not something that was desired. \n\nEarly historians, generally speaking had very little problem with letting their biases show. This drastically changed during the middle of the 20th century, as historians sought to become more objective in their study and reporting of history. It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of British scholarship in the first century and a half after the American Revolution took place was mainly focused on British perspectives; such as British politics and economics during that period. Americans, especially during the 19th century conducted a lot of history related to the biographies of the \"Founding Fathers\" and also many sub-topics within the war itself (like military history of the Continental Army). Far fewer British historians studied American perspectives on the war, such as the Continental Congress, the Founding Fathers, or the Contiental Army. \n\nMiddleton noted that many British historians were British apologists, who did side more favorably with the British Crown's decisions during the war and were very critical of the rebelling colonists. This article does a few interesting things, first it accounts for a history of early British Historians who studied the American Revolution and notes that some of the early historians from the late 18th century were in fact more favorable in their views of the rebelling colonists, but they were the minority. Historians tended to be torn between two radical positions in the U.K. One historian, Sir George Otto Trevelyan created a three-volumne account of the American Revolutionary War between 1874 and 1880. Trevelyan, a liberal, reported that the first twenty years of King George III’s reign was a period of regression for English laws and and rights. His writing reflects that the Americans were justified in overthrowing the British government, calling the Americans “law respecting people, who did not care to encroach on the privileges of others and liked still less to have their own rights invaded.’ [Middleton, 50]. This created one of the first historiographical debates in this particular field, with other men, like William Massey and William Lecky arguing for the traditional “Tory” view of the war. Where Trevelyan came down hard on royal governors and British officials in America, historians like Lecky was much more gentle on them, saying that they were just loyal men trying to fulfil their duties to the King. [Middleton 51]. Ultimtely, Middleton noted a few key differences between these earlier types of scholarship between American and British scholarship on the war:\n\n > From this study of British historians and the American Revolution, one or ore general conclusions can be drawn. In the first place, there has bee na curious dichotomy between scholars on both sides of the Atlantic as to what actually constituted the Revolution. Most British writers do not appear to consider it to be properly underway until the fateful year of 1775, while for most American writers, it was then merely a matter of dotting the ‘i’s’ and crossing the ‘t’s’ on the declaration of independence [sic]. There has also been little attempt to understand the revolt of the thirteen colonies by analysis of their social, economic, or politiocal development, lines of approach for so long popular with the American historians. [Middleton, 58]\n\nHistorians during the 20th century, especially in the post World War II era appeared to settle more soundly into the more objective approach to history. Middleton spoke also of, at the time of the publication of that article in 1971, how there was a revival of the British study of the American Revolution during his present because of the infusion of American culture, history, and politics that exploded in those preceding decades. [Middleton, 56]\nIn recent history, the vast majority of historical scholarship that has come out (at least as what I’ve seen and studied] has not conflicted with the current consensus of scholarship coming out of the United States. Some British historians, like Stanley Weintraub’s *Iron Tears* has [pointed out some differences that he sees in views of the American Revolution](_URL_1_), but nothing really seems too far out that it would conflict with what other historians would say. For instance, he shows that from the British perspective, the “taxation without representation” rallying cry of the colonists was a bit weak of an argument from the British perspective because many of the Englishmen living in England were not represented in Parliament either. (His book though more-so focuses on how the Average person in Britain felt about the war, rather than focusing on Historians studying that period).\n\nOverall, modern scholarship between historians of the United States and Britain tends to add to the historical conversation in general on this topic, rather than causing conflict between them. Historians will disagree in every field, it's why consensus does not have the same power as a fact, but there isn't anything fundamentally different between scholarship coming out of the U.K. versus what is coming out of the United States or other countries. \n\nEdit: fixed typos", "Quick preface: I see uncovered-history wrote a response while I was typing up mine. I think they complement each other nicely. \n\nWhile there are certainly still major disagreements about the American Revolution, I cannot think of any that break down primarily along those geographic/national lines. The context in which we live and our backgrounds do shape the kinds of questions we ask about history, though especially in our globalized world today, I don't see any areas in which we are talking past one another. \n\nI do think the differences in our approaches used to be more distinctive. In the mid-twentieth century, the major schools explaining the origins of the American Revolution were generally aligned with one's political sentiments. A conservative approach emerged after WWII aligning with Cold War-era thinking. Historians (for example, Richard Hofstader) argued that the Revolution was fundamentally not as a radical overthrow of the social order but instead an attempt by Americans to preserve their rights and liberties. They emphasize the democratic, literate, informed nature of Revolutionary-era Americans. \n\nHistorians in the neo-whig school disagreed and argued that the American Revolution was fundamentally a political and social upheaval generated by political ideas. The paradigmatic work in this vein would be Bernard Bailyn's *The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.* Other historians in this vein include Pauline Maier (a Bailyn student) and Gordon Wood (though I personally think Wood is a bit more liberal and writes a bit more toward consensus than the other historians in this school). \n\nThe neo-Whig approach, which focused on the political and intellectual worlds of middling and upper-class people, was challenged as the academy itself expanded and diversified in the 1970s. Historians on the left have emphasized the role of ordinary people and devoted more attention to aspects of race, class, and gender. These historians focus on economic and social explanations for the Revolution and often regard ideological or political rhetoric of the period as hollow. Instead of seeing the Revolution as a contest for independence (home rule), they see it as a question of power on the ground in America (who would rule at home). Historians in this vein include people like Jesse Lemisch, Gary Nash, Woody Holton, and Tim Breen. \n\nWhile Britain had some parallel experiences in the twentieth century, the above examples are of American scholars writing in the context of American debates and issues. (By contrast, during the mid-twentieth century, British attention on the period surrounding the American Revolution was centered around the work of Lewis Namier, a Polish-Jewish emigrant to Britain. His approach was heavily influenced by the context of the world wars, and in particular, he saw the British state as one that would never fall to absolutism. He focused on the personal biographies of individual politicians, showing how alliances shifted and how the party system was based on personal animosities, loyalties, and local issues, rather than any larger ideological positioning.)\n\nConstitutional explanations for the Revolution seem to have maintained more popularity among historians in the U.K. I don't think it's unfair for us to say that British scholars probably inherently care more about the British constitution and probably understood it better, especially in the days when early Americanists were trained solely in colonial American history. The constitutional approach was in fact an old way of explaining the conflict. (The work of Charles McIlwain in the 1920s is probably the best-known example). However, Harry Dickinson, an English historian working in Edinburgh, has been explaining the constitutional origins of the crisis since the 1970s. More recently though, prominent U.S. historians (including Jack Greene, Patrick Griffin, and Brendan McConville) have picked up on this line of thought. \n\nOne of the current trends in scholarship about the American Revolution is placing the conflict within the imperial context. Scholars on/from both sides of the Atlantic are doing this work (e.g. Stephen Conway, Andrew O'Shaughnessy, Eric Nelson, Justin Du Rivage). Advances in technology, I would argue, both in ease of travel to archives and digitization of records, have made this approach more doable in recent years. \n\nI would argue, perhaps, that perhaps one way the American and British views of the war had differed was in valuing the competence of British military strategy during the conflict. The book *The Men who Lost America* by Andrew O'Shaughnessy (a British-born scholar who's now based in the U.S.) demonstrated that we have drastically underestimated the skill of British politicians and officers in addressing the complexities of the war. I mention it as an example of how our backgrounds do influence what we see and how we approach this very well-trodden historical ground. For instance, scholarship on the place of Native people in the Revolution has been led almost entirely by scholars from the U.S. (e.g. Peter Silver, Greg Dowd), though historians working on the American Revolution in the U.K. would not deny the importance of that work. Ultimately, we are all reading one another's work, as well working, traveling, and conversing across the Atlantic. \n\n(Edit for a few typos.)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/64y44g/the_mostupvoted_comments_in_reddit_threads_arent/#", "https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/24duzp/remindmebot_info/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_sources", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=title%3A%22Sunday+Digest%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6a5duv/a_statistical_analysis_of_10000_raskhistorians/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_write_an_in-depth_answer", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules" ], [ "http://www.jstor.org/stable/2767062", "https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4727956" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "csfr5in", "csfr6kf", "csfrkuo", "csfspni" ], "score": [ 114, 21, 46, 6 ], "text": [ "I can't tell you much about the numerological implications of the number and the interpretation of Johannes, but I'm going to say something about Roman numbers that might be helpful: \n\nRoman numerals don't use positional notation, but they still represent base-10 - there are symbols for the decimal powers: I, X, C, CD (= later M) and so on, combined with symbols for half of them: V, L, D. Fun fact: the symbols for the half of the decimal powers are simply the letters chopped in half: X > V; C > L; CD > D. DCLXVI (or ΧΞϚ in Greek numerals) when spoken or written out it is *sexcentos sexaginta sex*, *hexakosioi hexekonta hex* in Ancient Greek, (sixhundred sixty six), so it loses none of that remarkableness and in fact has much to do with the number 6. In fact, it allows additional interpretations when written that way, since numbers are written with the same symbols as names are - Johannes remarks that:\n\n > ἀριθμὸς γὰρ ἀνθρώπου ἐστί, καὶ ὁ ἀριθμὸς αὐτοῦ ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ\n\n\"for it is the number of a human, and his number is sixhundredsixtysix\", one interpretation being that you can reconstruct it into the name of a human.\n\nSee also /u/talondearg's answer on Greek numbers and the numerological implications. \n", "The number of the beast appears in our earliest fragment of Revelation, [the Oxyrhynchus Papyri](_URL_0_), as 616, not 666 and both numbers were used by the early church. \n\nIt is thought the numbers are derived from giving numerical values to letters, as a code, and the two different values come from the different Greek and Latin spellings of the name and title \"Nero Caesar\". \n\nAcccording to Bruce M. Metzger in *\"A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament\"*: \n\"Perhaps the change was intentional, seeing that the Greek form Neron Caesar written in Hebrew characters (nrwn qsr) is equivalent to 666, whereas the Latin form Nero Caesar (nrw qsr) is equivalent to 616.\" \n", "To build and complement two quite good answers:\n\nThe text this is derived from is Revelation 13:18, I quote below the Greek and an English translation:\n18 ὧδε ἡ σοφία ἐστίν· ὁ ἔχων νοῦν ψηφισάτω τὸν ἀριθμὸν τοῦ θηρίου, ἀριθμὸς γὰρ ἀνθρώπου ἐστίν· καὶ ὁ ἀριθμὸς αὐτοῦ ἑξακόσιοι ἑξήκοντα ἕξ. \n\nHere is wisdom: let the one that has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for is a human number: and its number is 666.\n\nGreek numbers can be represented by words, as in this edition, but it was more common to use letters to symbolise them. P47 reads χ̅ξ̅ϛ̅ whereas a manuscript such as P115 reads χ̅ι̅ϛ̅. The former works out to 666, the latter to 616. Overall the textual tradition for 666 is relatively stronger than that for 616. \nMost attempts to explain the number centre on three methods: (1) That it is purely symbolic, and so should be taken just ‘as is’; (2) that it is chronological, indicating some kind of duration of the beast’s reign, (3) some use of Gematria, in which the correspondence of letters and numbers is used to represent words by the sum of their numerical equivalents.\n\nIn the case of 666, the most common attempt is to identify 666 with Nero. But this depends upon transliterating the Greek form of Nero Caesar into Hebrew and then performing the calculation with this spelling, nrôn qsr. And even this spelling is generally considered a defective form of nrôn qysr, with the letter yodh missing (which is permissible, but not well attested in Hebrew texts with the name of Caesar in them.\nYou can see that this is getting problematic: it assumes that readers, at least some readers, have knowledge of Hebrew not only Greek, and would choose both the right name to transliterate and the appropriate way to transliterate. A lot of contingencies.\n\nA host of other name possibilities, generally in Greek, have also been suggested. \n\nAnyway, I am getting a little beyond your question. In short, there was a base-10 system in use, the number would have been represented with Greek letters (and is in the earliest manuscripts), and 666 is a superior textual tradition.\n\n", "As a follow up, have humans generally used base 10? and is it for the obvious reason that we have 10 fingers?" ] }

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[ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eo7z6m9", "eo8046t" ], "score": [ 16, 3 ], "text": [ "I hope no one minds an Eastern Orthodox deacon commenting? \n\n\nThe Churches you mention are known as the Oriental Orthodox churches, and are not, in fact, older than the Byzantine and Latin churches. In fact, they split off from the Latin and Byzantine Church during the \u0014[Council of Chalcedon](_URL_0_) over what today is considered simply a gross misunderstanding. As such, both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches are working very hard to restore communion with the Orientals.\u0014 \n\n\nAs far as the theological split goes,it was about the nature of Christ.\n\n\u0014The Chalcedonian orthodox position on Christ, that both Eastern Orthodox and Latin Catholics hold, is that Christ has a human nature and a divine nature. That is to say, he is fully man, and also fully God.\n\nThink of it this way: He's not some specially anointed human, a super-prophet if you will, that just happens to be good at following God's will. He's also not just God walking among mortals, being shielded from the human experiences of temptation or suffering, overpowering evil with his mere presence. No, he's fully man - experiencing all the hardships and sorrows and doubts of human life and death. But also fully God, divine and just and merciful and all that.\n\nThe Orientals insisted that Christ has ONE nature. But, then, which one? Was he man? Or was he God? If we was man, then it makes no sense to worship him. It invalidates everything from the Nicene creed onwards. But, if he was God, then he knows nothing of what humanity is like. How could He, then, have suffered? What meaning does His passion have, and also his resurrection? It also invalidates everything, from the Nicene creed onwards.\n\nIt turns out, after so long, that the Orientals have (ahem) clarified their position. Christ is fully man and fully God. It's just that they didn't think these two aspects of him were ever in conflict. That is to say, he was never divided in opinion, the God side wanting to do one thing, and the Man side wanting to do another. So, it's not *really* one nature, it's just that t*he two natures of mankind and divinity are blended into one perfectly* (miaphysite position).\n\nThe official position today is that the old problem was really just a mistranslation and misunderstanding. Who knows, that might be true - or it may be the greatest retcon in history. I don't know. But, it has allowed both sides of the conflict to make great strides towards unity, at least on the parish level. Many of our priests will now follow a *don't ask, don't tell* policy on receiving orientals into communion because of it, and so will theirs.", "Your question is based on an incorrect premise and Diarmaid Macolluch's claim (as stated in your post) is incorrect. There oldest church is the One-Holy Apostolic Catholic Church, today with two branches (both claiming to be the original): the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Catholic Church (aka the Eastern Orthodox Church). \n\nThere have been dozens of schisms and heresies in Christian history, such as Donatists and Arians, but these never became their own churches and all eventually faded or healed their schism. The only ones to do that have been the Protestants and the Oriental Orthodox, both of which are far younger than the original Catholic Churches. \n\nEthiopian Christians are most commonly Orthodox, and some would adhere to a splinter of the Orthodox Church called the Oriental Orthodox Church. /u/codesharp answered the Theological differences of the Oriental Orthodox plenty. As far as interaction, there was very little and this is part of why they remained split. The spread of the Caliphates strangled communication between Eastern Christianity and at some point the Orthodox churches were completely cut off from one another." ] }

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[ [ "https://books.google.nl/books?id=6IUaOOT1G3UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=council+of+chalcedon+book&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjq5MD3gqriAhWHDewKHWAVBZ4Q6AEIKDAA" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ciw8z2l", "ciwardw" ], "score": [ 807, 12 ], "text": [ "I'd like to point to [this post I made a few days ago](_URL_0_) for reference.\n\nNotably this bit: \n\n > 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. \n\n > Where you fought doesn't really matter, your life would be hell. Supply issues were rampant as the Royal Armies rather sophisticated supply system would be sacked entirely for being part of the old system. A new administrative service would be created which had a semi-independent status, its *commissaires-ordonnateurs* only responsible to the Republic itself and not the commanders it served. These men, responsible for collecting, storing, preparing, and issuing foodstuffs and clothing along with disbursing money were filled with endless opportunities of larceny. Supplies and cash would frequently vanish before reaching the troops going into the pockets of Revolutionary leaders in Paris. Vincentius Zahn, a pastor in Hinterzarten, watched a French army pass through in 1796 which would be about when the supply issue began to stabilize. So this is the best case scenario you're about to read:\n\n > > One did not see [compared to the Austrian army] so many wagons or so much baggage, such elegant cavalry, or any infantry officers on horseback below the grade of major. [Austrian infantry lieutenants had their own mounts] Everything about these Frenchman was supple and light -- movements, clothing, arms, and baggage, In their ranks marched boys of fourteen and fifteen; the greater part of their infantry was without uniforms, shoes, money, and apparently lacking all organization, if one were to judge by appearances alone. . . These French resembled a savage horde [but] they kept good order, only some marauders who followed the army at a distance . . . terrified the inhabitants.\n\n > You had no shoes most certainly. The Directory in '95 had to pass a special order just to give all the Officers their own shoes and even that wasn't filled out entirely. Your uniform was nonexistent as is mentioned but just a loose collection of tattered blue or white with the French tricolor somewhere on it if you could manage. You had no regular supply of food from the country itself but had to survive off of war. Most early campaigns you would fight in would not be explicit offensives but 'liberating' nearby towns across the Rhine or in North Italy for supplies. Soldiers had no issue foraging on their own French lands as well. If you were a conscript you would most likely abandon your men while marching through familiar land. Many Divisions would lose half their men on extended marches through attrition and desertion alone. \n\n > Artillery and cavalry was restricted mostly to pre-war soldiers who had the training and knowledge to perform those duties. If you were conscripted you were almost certainly put into one of two areas -- light infantry or regular infantry. *Tirailleur* and *Fusilier* respectively. Assuming you did not desert after being thrown into one of these two sections you would get two very separate combat experiences. The post-Revolutionary army was very fond of skirmisher forces for some inexplicable reason. I say that mainly because inexperienced troops are very poor skirmishers. They generally aren't crack shots and flee at the slightest sign of trouble. Yet whole battalions were frequently deployed as entirely skirmishers, a tactic dubbed *\"tirailleur en grandes bandes.\"* If you were part of a skirmisher force you would likely not be thrown directly into the fray. You would be sent on small scale raiding 'missions' with a small number of other skirmisher comrades and an officer as a sort of training exercise. You would raid storage caches or small villages so that you would get used to being under fire in a more controlled environment for your officer to control you. As you would go into battle against a formal Austrian, British, Italian or Prussian army your duty would be constant harassment. \n\n > If you were thrown into the fusiliers you would be heavily drilled about formation. The common trope about Napoleonic warfare are two sides standing in line formation staring each other down 50-100 yards apart and shooting at each other. This is a shitty strategy for the French, pardon my French. Line formation is inefficient for untrained conscripts because, like a phalanx, it requires holding formation and firing in concert -- two things conscripts will not be capable of doing on a few weeks of training under heavy fire. The French military doctrine of this time was one of constant attack -- always being on the offensive. It was the only way they would abuse their manpower advantage. You would be organized into a column of just a few men wide and dozens of men deep. You likely would not fire your weapon once or just once in a battle, as you were charging at full sprint into the enemy line. That is what the column provided -- it gave depth to the line, did not require a lot of organization, and was only used as a formality to charge into shattered and notably *thin* lines of the enemy. British, Austrian, Italian and Prussian troops were professional armies and would fight in that line formation. It would not stand up to constant column charges. \n\n > How would a normal battle go? Well, again, it depended on your position in the army. Again you were most certainly in the infantry if you were just a farmer. Let's imagine it from the enemies shoes. Swarms of skirmishers would begin to envelop your tight, strictly dressed formations firing from cover in completely disorderly formations. When I say swarm, we're talking 2:1 or 3:1 ratios at times. If you stand still, you will be continuously picked off. If you try to fire on them, you will only hit a few as they were extremely scattered. If you tried to charge them they would drift away, still shooting, and follow you when you try to fall back into your strictly disciplined line. \n\n > Eventually your line would be in tatters you, a Brit or Austrian alike, would look up across the horizon. Out of the smoke comes a howling, trampling, massive rush of thousands of men with bayonets extended with the weight of 12 men against every yard of your exhausted line (which were only 3 deep when it all began). Your professional, organized, and chivalrous armies would try their best but they would keep running into issues. A French NCO who was completely outnumbered and outmaneuvered that just failed to recognize his hopeless situation and charged anyway, killing thousands in a last stand. Inexperienced French officers who would show a shocking disregard of accepted military strategy and turn every engagement into a mindless, all out slugfest where fancy tactics and strategy of the non-Revolutionary sides meant nothing and would buckle under the weight of thousands of Frenchmen bearing down on them.\n\n > Back to the French perspective. Let's say, somehow, you survive all of this. It's not unreasonable, many did. You did not get poked with a bayonet or shot in a charge or desert your men or didn't get caught hoarding anything. You survived the '90's into 1799 when the Directory would fall. A hundred battles would harrow you. You would time and time again throw the English and Austrians back in particular. What many tens of thousands died of combat many more would die of your governments incompetence. The patriotic enthusiasm you held in '91 seemed immature and stupid to the ragged veterans of 1799. The bands would play the patriotic airs of those first years of revolution -- *Chant du Départ*, *Ah ça Ira*, and the *Marseillaise*. \n\n > The bands would play and you would sing, but they would mean nothing to you. You were a professional soldier in a professional army now. You, who fought out of pride and comradeship in '91 had spent the last decade learning to loot and murder to survive and would hold little reverence for any person or any idea and especially for that damn Revolution. Your Generals would be a wolf-breed, disrespectful of authority and independent minded. All of you, officers and men together, were survivors. Men of steel, toughened to all the hardship and conditions of the worst wars in history up to that point, thoroughly fed up with the *gros-ventres* -- big bellies -- of the Revolutionary government in Paris who had used and abused you. You had won dozens of victories and thrown the entirety of Europe onto its backfoot but you had no peace, no shoes, and not a square meal in nearly 10 years. It was this army that would make Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul at the beginning of the 19th century. And this army was comprised of you, dangerous metal which would be forged into the Grand Armée -- the greatest military force the world would ever see.\n\nBasically, if I had to make a **tl;dr** of it all? The Revolutionary Armies early on would conscript basically everyone and the more professional, more 'efficient' European armies would simply be overwhelmed. Maneuver and tactics went out the window when you have 3x as many people swarming down on you all shooting wildly into your formation and charging into you, disregarding all casualties. Sheer force of numbers would push the primarily Austrians and British back and allow the French to get early territorial gains in the 1792-1797 First Coalition War. \n\nBy the time of the Second Coalition War between 1798-1802, the goal was not to reinstate the Monarchy but to just at least contain the French from taking more land and at best taking back some of what they gained. Despite getting many early victories with the help of the Russians, they would eventually back out and the British and Austrians primarily would face the reality -- Napoleon was now in charge and was the military genius he is. At his feet lay a military which had been fighting for a decade straight, easily the most experienced and battle hardened group in Europe. As the rest of Europe was playing catch up with the idea of mass conscripted armies, France had perfected it over the past decade of failure and death and had a horrifying combination -- an experienced conscript army led by arguably the most talented general in history. This would allow them to wage multiple wars of aggression throughout the early 19th century and convincingly win them and conquer most of Europe.\n\n----\n\nNotes:\n\nElting, John, *\"Swords Around a Throne: Napoleons Grand Armee\"*\n\nRothenberg, Gunther, *\"The Napoleonic Wars\"*", "If all men into their 30's were fighting, wouldn't that cause a catastrophic drop in births?" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29tqot/say_im_a_farmer_in_1791_france_and_the_revolution/ciolxd6?context=3" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c5x8pgl", "c5xey56" ], "score": [ 3, 6 ], "text": [ "Soldier and amateur military historian here. \n\nFirst we need to talk about load type. Depending on the time frame of resupply and mission. They break down in the following:\n\nFighting Load- Everything a soldier needs as mission essential to enter combat. It is the bare minimum of gear including personal protective equipment, first aid kit, weapon, ammo, water, web gear, and worn clothing. \n\nCombat Load- includes other mission essential gear that can be dropped upon contact with the enemy. This includes extra water, food, and ammo along with some cold and wet weather gear.\n\nThen there is a Sustainment Load, which is what you'd expect to carry long term (3-5 days) on expended ops. Things like portable shelter, change of clothing, personal effects and so forth. \n\nTo do a real basic comparison it might be best to compare what was carried in the fighting load in Normandy vs my experience in Iraq 2003 vs Afghanistan 2011. \n\nA soldier's fighting load at Normandy might include:\n\nM1 Rifle, 80 rounds of .30-06 ball, 2 hand grenades, 1 mine, cartridge belt, bayonet, canteen w/ carrier, helmet, gas mask w/carrier, first aid kit.\n\nIn the invasion of Iraq I carried the following: M16A2 Rifle, 210 rounds of 5.56mm ball and tracer, 7 magazines, Interceptor body armor, fighting load carrier (harness that carries magazine, grenade, and canteen pouches), 2 canteens, 1 grenade, gas mask with carrier, first aid kit, night vision goggles, dust goggles, neck gaiter, ear plugs, camel back, kevlar helmet, and uniform (boots, socks, underwear, undershirt, shirt, trousers). \n\nThis is a fairly straight forward evolution, with the biggest changes being the materials of the equipment becoming more advance, the kevlar vest and helmet, and the night vision equipment. Sometime in the intervening 8 years since I went to Iraq the Defense Department and American public began placing a premium on the protect of our personnel. Most of the equipment I took outside the wire in Afghanistan was to keep me safe. In addition material advances were considerable in the nearly complete decade. Things were made of even more advance materials, and things began to interface as complete systems. It breaks down as follows:\n\nM4A1 rifle (with rail mounting system), 210 rounds of M855A1 enhanced performance round, 7 advance M4/16 magazines, a close combat optic attached to rifle, Improved Outer Tactical Vest (body armor), E-SAPI plates (ceramic protective plates to cover front, back and sides), Advance Combat Helmet w/ protect neck nape and night vision mount, eye protection (ballistic sun glasses), individual first aid kit, tornequet, combat gloves, ammo pouches, theater specific fire retardant uniform (boots, socks, undergarments, trousers, combat shirt), night vision equipment, camel back and squad radio.\n\nedit: Basically the modern soldier still carries all the equivalent equipment as our WW2 counterparts. Those pieces of equipment have evolved to be made of more advance materials that are either tougher, water or fire resistant, lighter, or modular. A smaller portion of equipment would have been too bulky to carry back then (eg pushing radios down to the lowest echelons, rifle optics, and night vision equipment). Most of the new stuff that we carry now is related to personnel protective equipment because who wants to die? This equipment is the heaviest and most expensive portion of individual equipment, excluding weapons. I know of hand that the list price of the IOTV with plates is around $2,500. The ballistic sun glasses are around a hundred. All this protection is expensive, but pays off.\n ", "Right...a lot of this has been covered already in this thread, but I'll add what I know.\n\nBy \"average infantry[man]\" I'm going to guess that you're referring to a standard enlisted rifleman. Since the American aspect has been dealt with, I'm going to talk about the evolution of arms and equipment for the two most influential military bodies post-World War II: NATO and the Warsaw Pact.\n\nA caveat before I begin: I know the graphic of which you speak, and the one thing it doesn't account for is inflation. That's the important thing here - even though the cost seems to have gone up dramatically in the last 70 years, in adjusted dollar amounts the growth isn't nearly so dramatic.\n\nNow, to understand the ballooning expenses of equipping the average rifleman in modern militaries, we have to examine the reasons for which their equipment was changed in the first place. So let's go back to World War II, or specifically 1942. This year is critical for the way modern infantry is equipped, for two reasons: the M1 Garand becomes standardized as the US primary infantry weapon, and the MG42 is put into production. On the surface these don't seem like big events, but looks can be deceiving.\n\nThe M1 Garand, built by Mr. John Garand of Quebec, Canada, was actually adopted by the US Army in 1936 as their standard weapon, but American isolationism meant that many units hadn't actually been equipped with this rifle by the outbreak of war in 1941. The branch who got the shortest end of this stick was, as ever, the Marines, who were fighting as late as the summer of 1942 on Guadalcanal with M1903 Springfield rifles which, while excellent, were still slow-firing bolt-action rifles, just like those of the rest of the world.\n\nNow, hold on, if the rest of the world was using these, what's the importance of changing to a new type of firearm?\n\nThe truth is, the M1 Garand was a kind of rifle unseen by the rest of the world: it was *semi-automatic*, which meant that every time you pulled the trigger a round would come out the end, and you could pull that trigger up to eight times before ever having to move either hand to reload. This was a huge advantage over the pull-trigger-grab-bolt-handle-work-bolt-close-bolt-replace-hand-pull-trigger tedium of a bolt action rifle. George S. Patton himself called the M1 Garand \"the greatest battle implement ever devised by man\". To get a sense of how much of an advantage this rifle provided, go watch the ultimate battle of *Saving Private Ryan*. You'll notice that Captain Miller's troops are able to fire a relatively huge amount of rounds as opposed to the Germans, an advantage not to be taken lightly. In fact, the other Great Powers of the war saw this, and by 1943/44 the Soviets and Germans had semi-auto rifles of their own (the G43 and SVT-40). This race for firing speed becomes important in a moment.\n\nThe MG42, on the other hand, is widely considered to be the first \"general purpose machine gun\", or GPMG. These weapons form the backbone of modern infantry formations, but in 1942 they were unheard of. Many nations still relied on water cooled machine guns, which required a team of anywhere from 3-5 men to move and set up, and generally they were pretty unwieldy. Some nations had air cooled machine guns, but these tended to overheat or jam a lot. And then the Germans developed a reliable, but more complicated roller-lock mechanism. This system still forms the basis of many modern weapons, but, as you might guess, it's a hell of a lot more precise and involved than your average bolt-action of the period.\n\nBack to the race in weapons. At the end of World War II, there were really only three nations left in the arms manufacturing business: Britain, the US, and the USSR. And all of them had captured obscene quantities of German technology, and with that came the brass of each nation dreaming of what kind of applications these crazy-Nazi-science prototypes could have. In particular, two weapons were of keen interest to these men: the Fallschirmjagergewehr 42 (FG42) and Sturmtruppengewehr 44 (StG 44). The former was complicated to the point of ostentation, but the latter was quite interesting, primarily because the Germans had, towards the end, cracked the secret of the modern assault rifle: a medium-sized round fed by detachable magazine into a select-fire receiver.\n\nExplaining how far ahead of its time this weapon was is kind of like comparing a Walkman to an iPod: they serve the same basic function, but one is so much more compact and so much more efficient and just so much *better* that nobody ever wants to go back to the old one (hipsters excluded). And this is precisely what happens. By the late 1940s both sides have experimented with the old style of battle rifles with new models: Britain tries one last update in the hopes of reviving its venerable Lee-Enfield, the USSR adopts the SKS, and the US continues with the M1. But this just isn't enough, and in 1947 the Soviets change the game with the AK-47. NATO panics and rushes their new rifle into service; a roughly similar weapon to the Kalashnikov, the FN FAL. Both these rifles are developed fully by 1950, but both take as long as 1955 to be adopted by their developer nations and as long as the 60s for everyone else in their respective spheres of influence to catch on. Only the US resists the trend, sticking with the M14 - essentially an upgraded M1 - until the height of the Vietnam War in the late 60s.\n\nBut even though expenses rack up on these new rifles, the cost isn't actually drastically higher than it was for the World War II era versions. Where equipment gets expensive is in the new essential equipment for Western infantrymen: body armor.\n\nIt's good to note that the Soviets never really liked the idea of body armor. They continued to equip their troops with basically a WWII-style loadout: helmet, rifle, clothes, pack, shovel, etc. Their per-head cost for the infantry was never that much, but then again they had so many people to throw headlong into a war that they didn't really care about survivability of single combatants. NATO did *not* have this luxury: it was pretty well realized by the 70s and 80s that if war ever broke out with the USSR, the Red Army was going to come down on East Germany like a steam roller, and that stopping them would require Allied forces on the ground to hold together longer than seemed humanly possible on an equal playing field. So NATO changed the odds and began relying on what we now call the \"force-multiplier\". This involved increasing both the survivability of individual men and giving them access to ungodly amounts of firepower, namely in the form of fire support.\n\nBy the time of the Vietnam War, the US Army was investing huge amounts of money into developing technologies like Kevlar and in giving radios to units as small as squads and platoons. It's a small wonder that one of the symbols of the Vietnam War is the napalm strike: units as small as a dozen men now had thousands of pounds of high explosives on call, along with their own personal claymore mines, rifles, sidearms (which is a fancy term for pistols or submachine guns), and assorted other items. Special forces were just starting to get access to early forms of night vision. This trend of giving infantrymen eyes and fists in the sky much larger than his own has been steadily increasing for many years, and coupled with the modern necessities that are protective gear like kevlar helmets and body armor, it is probably one of the largest contributions to increased spending per capita for our riflemen.\n\nNow, all that being said, it's probably good to note that you shouldn't trust everything you see on the internet. Even though we do spend more on infantry today than we did three-quarters of a century ago, the real costs in our military are in tanks and aircraft and helicopters and ships and, most of all, maintenance. Good God, most people have no idea how much time and money this last bit really takes. But because military balance sheets aren't public knowledge, we tend to misallocate costs into areas where we only suspect money is going, and this leads to the wildly discrepant figures one finds from a wide variety of sources regarding current military spending. Perhaps we shouldn't try speculating on things on which our frame of reference is quite limited, hmm?\n\nThis is a very Coles notes version, and I've mostly covered rifles, but feel free to ask about anything else regarding this subject you might be inquiring about.\n\nSources: Far too much time reading about the development of modern military equipment." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "crb8z2s" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Well, to quote Kipling: \"There is no discharge in the war!\"\nYou didn't go on deployment in the Wehrmacht, you were entitled to, under the best of circumstances, two weeks of leave twice a year (for the Field Army/ combat troops) or once a year (for the Replacement Army/reserves, garrison personnel and other non-combat elements) respectively. Other than that, you served until you were either dead or physically/mentally incapable of performing both, front line(KV) and garrison(GV) duties.\n\nThere were, however, a lot of caveats:\nThere was a certain amount of travel time calculated and added (two days from Russia to western Germany in 1941), but depending on the unpredictable nature of reasons for transportation delays, that time wasn't always enough. So depending on where you were from (leave was always to your home region where you had to \"report in\" once you arrived), where your unit was deployed, and how the transport situation was (overcrowded trains [transportation towards the front had priority over anything going in the other direction], no available ships, delays due to partisan activity and air raids), you might have considerably less time at home. you could also be recalled early, though that was a measure the regime tried to avoid at pretty much all costs, as it was seen as potentially damaging morale not only of the soldiers, but also on the \"homefront\".\n\nextra vacation time of varying length was given for a host of reasons, among them: \n\n* aditional recuperation time from injury/sickness/wounds\n* getting promoted/ receiving an award/ exceptionally good conduct\n* family emergency at home (mostly the really bad stuff - deaths, family bombed out, etc.)\n* reassignment to a new unit/billet\n\nall this, of course, operational situation permitting and at the discretion of you superiors - usually your company command.\n\nas there was extra vacation time, there were also, of course, blanket cancellations of leave for all units for a fixed time (Urlaubssperre). Almost exclusively for operational reasons, this could result in entire army groups/corps' not getting any leave for well over a year. Oftentimes, this coincided with a general news blackout (Nachrichtensperre), which meant that on top of your leave and rest time being cancelled, there was also no mail to be sent or received.\n\nThat covers actual leave (Fronturlaub/Heimaturlaub). A different beast entirely was the time spent away from front line duty, either with the unit (refreshment/refitting/training/deployment to a different theater of operations etc.) or individually (assignment to a different unit, hospital and recuperation time, time-limited teaching assignments and so on). \n\nGenerally, leave was granted liberally and fairly (those who had been without leave the longest would be the next to go on leave), whenever the operational situation permitted it, chiefly for reasons of morale both at home and among the troops. If you didn't fall afoul of the system (revokation of leave was a popular form of non-judicial punishment), and were exceptionally unlucky with your unit/travel situation, you'd seldomly see less than three weeks of accumulated leave time per year, at least until the war started truly turning for Germany - around, say, 1942 or so. Please note that this last number is an educated guess - I've never come across a definitive number, it is my best estimate deduced from a knowledge of the various variables mentioned above and a lot of reading. In the end, it all very much depends on the unit and individual soldier in question. The 4th Panzer Division, just to provide an example, only saw 5 1/2 official rest days on the Eastern Front between June 1941 and March 1942, and the majority of their personnell hadn't been on leave since fall/winter of 1940. At times severe performance issues due to simple burn-out of even the most tried and tested troops were a common theme for combat commanders, especially on the Eastern Front.\n\nSources:\n\nLots of bits and pieces from all kinds of primary and secondary sources, but especially:\n\nC. Hartmann: *Wehrmacht im Ostkrieg*\nK. Richer: *Kavallerie der Wehrmacht*\nM. van Creveld: *Kampfkraft*" ] }

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[ "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1883092/" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "dka5r21", "dkbs1ox" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "In short, yes. [This section] (_URL_0_) of the FAQ may be helpful.", "Never heard of accidental genocides. Do they exist? " ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe#wiki_the_armenian_genocide" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cf5643d" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "What books or what were you reading that said that? There were definitely soldiers who served the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who then served in WW2 for America. \n\nHere's one example: _URL_0_\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://hermannbottcher.org/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f0xmmzp" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I touch on the fallout some in [this broader answer](_URL_0_) which may be of interest." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/achn2i/how_were_native_americans_impacted_during_the/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d33ktjv", "d33r5gw" ], "score": [ 5, 5 ], "text": [ "It's easy to look back and wonder what they were thinking, I agree. Temperance advocates had various advantages. There does seem to have been enormous enthusiasm, a deep conviction among the Temperance forces that banning alcohol would save most families from destruction, enable men to lead productive, long lives, and save huge mounts of money ( at a time when most manufacturing jobs were pretty harsh and life pretty hard, it was also easier to point a finger at alcoholism being a cause of so much misery, instead of questioning if perhaps working hours were too long and wages too low). The movement itself was also tied to Christianity ( ergo, The Women's Christian Temperance Union) at a time when perhaps most Americans' social lives, friends, were tied to belonging to a church ( though some churches, like the Lutherans and Episcopalians, were not keen on the idea). But maybe one of the key political reasons was the strategy developed by Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League to campaign against any politician who did not toe the line and sign onto the Temperance movement. Once political leaders learned that a stellar record of public service didn't matter to the ASL, that they would try ( and often would succeed) in turning out of office any senator, congressman, governor, etc. who did not vote their way, they were immensely powerful. It was the first single-issue advocacy group: decades later Gun Rights and Anti-abortion groups would use the same technique.\n\nThere was also not a very unified, strong opposition.The brewers and distillers didn't really mount an effective counter-campaign, and people who simply liked to drink did not form into cohesive advocacy groups, either.\n\nOkrent: Last Call\n", "Just as a general comment, there are lots of events in history that seem \"crazy\" to a contemporary observer. One of the lessons of history that for some reason is difficult to stick is that people in different cultures and times had wildly different values from the ones you or I may have. To project our values back on them is a common fallacy and leads to second-hand interpretations that are at odds with the primary sources of the time.\n\nSo while the passing of Prohibition might seem incredible to you today, and sparks a natural curiousity to be encouraged, it should also be a good reminder that your answer lies in realizing first that what those people thought and believed and valued was probably just completely different from you, and your answer will be partially in finding out just what those differences are." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ddnt1gd" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ " > **Why didnt the civil war have armor?**\n\nThe American Civil War did see many experiments in body armor; Bashford Dean in [Helmets and Armor in Modern Warfare](_URL_1_) 58-59 notes:\n\n > It is known that breastplates were worn more or less frequently during the American Civil War. In the museum in Richmond, there is preserved such a \"suit\" of armor, Fig. 15, which at the time of the siege was taken from a dead soldier in one of the trenches. He was shot in the side or back, for the breastplate, it appears, was not penetrated. This armor was of northern origin. Further inquiry shows that a factory for the making of such defenses was established at New Haven about 1862. The metal employed was a mild steel, .057 inch thick, and the \"suit\" weighed about seven and one half pounds. While no tests of this armor are available, we estimate from the thickness of its metal, assuming that it is a \"mild\" steel, that it would have stopped a 230-grain pistol ball traveling at the rate of 500 foot seconds.\n\nWhat the American Civil War did not see was formal adoption and issuing of such armor to all troops; and with good reason. The South faced shortages of metal and material throughout the war, and couldn't afford it; the North probably could have afforded it, but it wasn't worth it. To quote [Sarah Weicksel](_URL_0_):\n\n > In theory, the vests were appealing. As one soldier wrote: \"To be 'iron clad' when the bullets should fly as thick as hail! What more could a soldier ask?\" (Walker, History of the Eighteenth Regiment Conn. Volunteers, 21). In actuality, however, the vests proved to be failed objects on multiple levels, ranging from ease of use to their effectiveness. Although advertisers claimed that the vests were \"simple\" and \"light,\" soldiers found them extremely cumbersome due to their inflexibility and weight. Colonel Charles F. Johnson of New Jersey explained to his wife: \"the only objection that I have to them is that they are so confounded heavy for this season of the year\" (quoted in Pelka, ed., The Civil War Letters of Colonel Charles F. Johnson, 112). Many soldiers' letters and memoirs recounted the abandonment of bullet proof vests along the march, where they littered the side of the road along with other unwanted gear. [...] The vests did provide some degree of protection, judging from the bullet-shaped dents in surviving vests. But they were ineffective in close combat, and, as Johnson rightly pointed out, wearing a vest could have resulted in an even more deadly wound if a man was shot at close range, whether from immediate impact, or an infection festering around the bits of cloth and metal that the bullet pushed into his body.\n\nThese are more or less the same issues Dean noted that soldiers and military armorers faced in WWI (and why, he also says, armor was generally abandoned in the first place): against firearms, any kind of body armor that was thick enough to be of any protective value was, generally, too heavy and cumbersome to be born for long, and probably too expensive to equip troops with.\n\n > **Wasn't close quarters fighting common?**\n\nNot really. While it is true that some fighting did undoubtedly come down to hand-to-hand and bayonet fencing, there were very few bayonet wounds during the Civil War, and fewer wounds from swords, the troops just rarely came in to that kind of contact. Robert L. O'Connell in [Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression](_URL_2_) wrote:\n\n > Despite frequent expressions of confidence by commanders on both sides, the bayonet played a minuscule role in the killing during the Civil War. Not only were most bayonet charges turned aside by rifle fire, but even when they did succeed, the defending troops almost invariably ran away before these weapons could be employed.\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/2013/04/failed-objects-bullet-proof-vests-and-design-in-the-american-civil-war.html", "https://archive.org/details/helmetsbodyarmor00deanuoft", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/of-arms-and-men-a-history-of-war-weapons-and-aggression/oclc/476010542" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c742edw" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "A very similar question was just asked a few days ago, you may want to search for answers here:\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13ebo4/how_have_the_microsmall_states_of_europe_andorra/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "de4wfo2" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Point of clarification. What are you looking for when you say \"a general history of *the Reconquista*?\" Although the underlying crusade ideology is there for the Christians, and as time wore on Muslims definitely realized their al-Andalus (by then comprised of many little kingdoms) was losing ground to a bunch of Christians, overall it's hardly a unified campaign or even always primarily making progress. There are larger swathes of time where territory either isn't changing hands, or already conquered territory is being filled in (most of the Iberian interior was fairly empty), or Christian and Muslim statelets alike are batting away at each other, making and breaking alliances. \"Reconquista\" is kind of a convenient name, but the point is, it's not really separate from the political and social history of later medieval Iberia.\n\nIs that what you're looking for? Or are you looking for more, military history-style accounts of battles, sieges, civil wars?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ca16o1u" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The Romans celebrated plenty of festivals, and I'll highlight a couple of the more important ones for you.\n\n* **Lupercalia:** This is possibly the most famous Roman festival, along with Saturnalia. It was celebrated during February (13-15) and it was a celebration of the health and fertility of the city of Rome. Probably the most famous ceremony of this festival is when two young men run around the Palatine clad in goatskin, holding strips of the skin of animals sacrificed earlier in the day. Crowds gathered to watch and women hoped to be whipped with these skins, believing it would make them fertile. An interesting anecdote occurred in 44BC, when the then-consul Mark Antony refused to participate in this Lupercalia tradition.\n\n\n* **Saturnalia:** Along with Lupercalia, this is a very famous Roman festival. Unsurprisingly, this was a festival honoring the god Saturn and was originally celebrated on December 17th, the solstice, but over the centuries the festivities spread between the 17th and 23rd. Everyone loved this festival, especially servants because on this feast day, their masters would wait on them in a fun (ish) role reversal. Also, gambling was permitted during these festivities, but was back to restricted for the rest of the year.\n\nedit; forgot a word!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d756slw" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The Second Industrial Revolution happened.\n\nGenerally considered to have started in 1870, the Second Industrial Revolution saw the development of a wide range of technologies, manufacturing techniques and chemicals that made many of the weapons and technologies of the First World War possible.\n\nMore efficient means of producing steel (and higher quality steel as well), the internal combustion engine, electrification, pneumatic tires, highly efficient steam engines for ships, increased mechanisation of manufacturing including the mechanical manufacturing of parts for manufacturing machines making them cheaper and standardising them, incandescent lightbulbs, increased production of petroleum, increased understandings of thermodynamics and metallurgy, ball bearings, fertilisers, bicycles, the telephone and much much more emerged from the is period.\n\nYou can probably see how these technologies contributed to the First World War, better steel coupled with better steam engines led to the expansion of ironclad ships and ultimately the first modern modern battleship HMS Dreadnought which kicked off a naval arms race. Developments in manufacturing coupled with increased understanding of metallurgy and new chemicals allowed bigger, more powerful guns to be created. Internal combustion led to powered flight and then the land ship more commonly known as the tank. The development of fertiliser cannot be underestimated as well. By being able to artificially replenish the nutrients in soil, crops could be reason in the same fields leading to an increase in food production which increases supply and in turn drives down prices. This allows nations to feed their people and keep their armies fed. It also allows them to have bigger armies and better manufacturing allows them to equip their armies with newer and bigger weapons. \n\nThis is an extremely vast topic and deserves a much more in depth answer then I have time to give but I'm sure a resident expert will be along shortly to provide a far better answer then this." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ck2b6ak", "ck2ibtq" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "I can't answer your question directly, but you might try x-posting this /r/japan", "I can't read all of it--the vertical text on the sides is quite difficult and I will leave it to somebody else. But the text on the top 国報身 献、is a wartime slogan that means something like 'serve the country, give up one's body' and the name of the soldier on the bottom horizontal text, I think, is Hisanaga Takeshi. It also gives the family name of the Lieutenant General of his unit (I'm assuming), which was Tominaga and would probably help in locating his family. It's also dated Showa 18 or 1943. " ] }

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[ "http://snag.gy/IgeZO.jpg" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "c82yjqy", "c833wvz", "c833zp2" ], "score": [ 13, 11, 52 ], "text": [ "In terms of quality and variety, I would assume you are right. Although, they had vats of wine, honey, and all sorts of cheeses and wild game, I imagine the quality was not great. \n\nIt's also interesting how the gap between leaders and citizens has been closed / widened since then. \n\nThis White House State Dinner menu is great, but in-line with any business dinner I would have here in NYC. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nWhereas in several countries, say, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, India, China, Brazil, the citizens are eating way worse than leaders. \n", "Whether the food itself was of a higher quality is pretty subjective, I suppose, although I'd venture that health standards are a lot better in your modern kitchen than a medieval one. There have been some pretty infamous cases of badly-cooked medieval food - most notoriously Henry I's supposed demise after a case of serious indigestion following a meal of Lamprey pie, his favourite dish (albeit against the advice of his doctor - Lamprey is very easy to cook badly, as it goes off very easily). However, what you should consider is just how rich medieval royal food tended to be, and how predominantly meaty it was - that alone, I'd argue, meant that the medieval monarch ate far worse than the modern man, even if his food tasted better. Vegetables were not common to the table as meat was, and what meat there was tended to be roasted and dripping with fat. Honestly, an enjoyable look at the diet of the medieval royals is the _URL_0_ Supersizers Medieval program. It's witty and informative, so give it a look!\n\nDo remember, however, that considering the outliers of modern people will give you examples of people who ate less healthily than monarchs - but in doing so you'd be considering a sample size of about seven billion in comparison with one that's probably in the thousands. On average, I'd venture, someone today **will** eat better than your typical medieval royal.", "Actually, the quality of the cuisine was generally pretty good, if you're talking about how good it would have tasted. As (and it's embarrassing to admit) a Medieval food enthusiast, I can personally vouch for how tasty the food was. It was generally very similar to the modern foods of whatever country you're looking at. Pasties have been around, in one form or another, for a *very* long time. The major documents like the Forme of Cury were recorded because they were the king's, and so forth, so we know less about the smaller manors (much less about food that wasn't being consumed by VIPs), but they probably ate similar foods.\n\nThe flavoring ingredients, the spices and herbs, were imported from all over, and they would have been dried, so they'd keep a long time. Vinegar and oil keep well, too. And there was probably a bigger variety of spices back then! As (I think) a status symbol, courtly food often called for very exotic spices like cubebs, imported from (I think) Madagascar, and grains of paradise, from Ethiopia, which are very hard to find nowadays. Cinnamon and ginger, brought from the East, were especially popular. \n\nAs for variety in the diet, royalty actually did pretty well with that, too. There were large varieties of meats and fish available. Hunting was a regular occurrence and people ate, if anything, more varieties of meat than they do now. Because of religious days, fish was mandated many, many days of the year, and fish is pretty good for you. Apparently fish was called for so often that there are books with writing in the margins that say \"I am so sick of fish,\" and some recipe books suggest that beavers, since they lived in the water, could be considered fish.\n\nVegetables were also pretty varied within the diet, although more things are available now. Again, the kings and queens would have had large gardens to supply whatever was in season. Medieval recipes don't include as many vegetables as modern ones, but they were there. Medieval palates seem to have loved sweetness, as a lot of dishes, sweet and savory, include fruit.\n\nThere was also cheese and other dairy. Cheese tends to keep pretty well. Different countries have different kinds of cheese, and hard cheeses keep better than the others. Again, since stuff was consumed in quantity, I would imagine spoilage wasn't an issue with stuff like milk and cream.\n\nThere were also plenty of starches - there was lots of bread. As a side note, whole grains were actually good for medieval teeth, as they have a scouring effect on the teeth.\n\nSince we're talking about royalty, meat/fish spoilage wouldn't have been an issue, as the meat and fish would be consumed right away in large quantities. Plus, there was available game year-round. Certain vegetables would be kept in root cellars, etc, and they did find ways to keep things from spoiling (after all, it's not like rotten fruit or veg tastes very good).\n\nIn general, we know more about nutrition than people did back then, so we are more conscious of bringing variety into our diets, whereas Medieval royalty was more about flavor and flash (banquets could, for example, feature porpoise as a dish, no doubt served whole as a dramatic platter). Because the more expensive things like meat, cheese, etc taste better, the diet was probably not as balanced between meat and non-meat as it is now.\n\nStill, the Medieval palate had some interesting tastes, and I find it pretty enjoyable to connect with history in such a sensory way. If you're interested, I can post some recipes, etc.\n\nedit: clarity" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.slideshare.net/whitehouse/menu-2012-uk-state-dinner" ], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oH5O_fCstyI" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cefnlcu", "cefol63", "cefs5sy" ], "score": [ 86, 7, 26 ], "text": [ "^I'm ^not ^sure ^what ^you ^mean ^by ^\"examining ^Rome\". ^If ^you ^mean ^something ^like ^walking ^through ^the ^city ^of ^Rome, ^this ^would ^be ^my ^answer:\n\n & nbsp;\n\nRome has changed massively between the reign of Augustus (27 BCE - 14) and that of Constantine (306-337). Most major monuments are completely new to you. A short list of prominent examples:\n\n & nbsp;\n\n*First century* \n\n* The Colosseum would stand where houses stood during your time, it was built by the Flavian emperors (69-96)\n* Several new forums would have been added near the Forum Romanum and the already familiar forums of Caesar and Augustus\n* The Arch of Titus, celebrating Rome's victory in the Jewish Revolt\n\n*Second century*\n\n* The Pantheon would not be the one you know, built by Agrippa, but a completely different (and more impressive) building built by Hadrian. Surprisingly the original inscription remains\n* Trajan's Market\n* The Column of Trajan depicting victories in Dacia, an area that didn't yet belong to the Roman Empire in your time\n* The Column of Marcus Aurelius\n* The Temple of Faustina and Antoninus Pius on the Forum Romanum\n\n*Third century*\n\n* The Aurelian Wall, a new city wall\n* The enormous Baths of Diocletian\n* The likewise enormous Baths of Caracalla\n\n*Fourth century (up until the end of Constantine's reign)*\n\n* The Old St. Peter's Basilica would be under construction, a church being built by emperor Constantine for a religion you've never heard of\n* The Arch of Constantine, celebrating a victory in the civil war against Maxentius\n* The Basilica of Constantine and Maxentius on the Forum Romanum\n\n*Some other differences*\n\n* The coins have largely different names from the ones you knew, they're also heavily debased compared to the Augustan age\n* People from all over the empire are citizens now due to the Edict of Caracalla in 212\n\n*Some similarities*\n\nIt may surprise you to learn that some things would be very much recognizable to you. For example:\n\n* The number of people in Rome would be roughly the same, although Augustus' age was before the population reached a peak while Constantine reigns after it reached its peak. \n* The Circus Maximus has been improved upon, but has kept most of its original design\n* The Curia Julia, where the Senate debates on the Forum Romanum is pretty much the same building you know\n* The Theatre of Pompey\n* Emperors are still calling themselves \"Caesar\" and \"Augustus\", even though no-one of the Julio-Claudian family remains\n* The city of Ostia is probably still Rome's dominant harbour, although it is in heavy competition with Portus (which is entirely unfamiliar to you)", "If I could ask a follow up, what would have been different *for the entire Empire*, rather than just for the city of Rome?", "Ok, first things first I am promoting you to Senator, because the Equestrian Order is a rather difficult group to define. In many ways it is essentially a tax bracket rather than a socio-political organization as such, and most of the stuff we have is about Senators and the associated social circles anyway, and I think that is what you are looking for. So congratulations!\n\nPerhaps the first thing you notice as you step into the Curia is that there is a much more diverse bunch inhabiting it. The ruling class of Augustus was by no means homogeneous, and one of his great policies was in using local elites rather than running roughshod over them, but he was at the beginning of a process and you are at the end. The current emperor is from Moesia, basically the modern Balkans, and he grew up in Britain. When you disappeared mysteriously Moesia was a semi-Roman region of barbarians and bandits, and Britain wasn't even Roman. In a very immediate way, the accent Constantine and his inner circle speaks with did not exist in your time, but even outside of that the Senate is thronged with Greeks, North Africans, Spanish, Gauls and Syrians--although still favoring the Latin West. On the other hand, these people would be much more similar to each other than an equivalent group would have been in Augustan time, because again, that is at the beginning of a process you are seeing the end of.\n\nFor government service, you will see immediately that things are more bureaucratized. The early Empire was essentially run through overlapping personal connections and the main job of, say, a provincial governor was to ensure that the conflict resulting from this would not erupt in violence, or at least would be pushed towards productive ends. The government now is much more concerned about centralization, and from that a new class of elite has arisen. In the Augustan period one could say that the Empire was run by traditional elites transformed by an Imperial culture, but now the highest officials are truly political and truly imperial. They are, in a sense, mandarins or literatti rather than *nobiles*.\n\nFor religion, to an extent the emperor and his inner circle follow a teaching that did not exist for you, but more importantly the nature of imperial religions had changed. In the Augustan period, worship was still dominated by local practices, but now those have been transformed by a large series of massive, Imperial wide cults. Neither Christ, nor Mithras, nor Sol Invictus existed in a substantial was in the Augustan period, but they are now a crucial part of imperial culture.\n\nThese are just three things, but I hope it gives you an idea of how society became more \"imperial.\" Greg Woolf is certainly the scholar to see for this, and I have heard his new *Rome: An Empire's Story* is intended for a more non-academic audience." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "efqbjcd" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "A very brief answer can come from looking at patterns of European colonialism. The Mississippi river, the St. Lawrence, the Columbia, the Fraser, all these are rivers that when they reach the ocean they come out in the middle of a political unit rather than as a boundary. This is largely because while rivers can represent borders, they more commonly represent the center of a drainage system, whose inhabitants move back and forth, and colonial powers tend to compete for control of the mouth of these systems, and to develop settlement around them. \n\nIn the case of the St. Lawrence, this meant that France brought settlers to the river, who settled it on both sides up the river, forming a political unit, and while later an international border was created along a portion of the river, it was largely undeveloped land further upstream than these communities that was able to be divided in such a way. This portion of the boundary was determined in 1783 at the treaty of Paris." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cbnaghm", "cbnd87i", "cbo71gh" ], "score": [ 2, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "A peasant levy was not often called upon but there does exists various folk wrestling and stick fighting traditions that may vary from region to region. \n\nPaulus Hector Mair collected fighting treatises of everything he could get his hands on in the 16th century and includes a number of 'exoctic' weapons in his manuscripts; they range from staffs, to flails, sickles and an amusing 'peasant staff' which resembles an uprooted sapling. _URL_0_", "Many of them would have access to spears, which would probably constitute the bulk of their weaponry. Also, depending on the time and place, many would also be equipped as archers. Many small villages had competitions for archery on a regular basis, especially in England. The spears, in particular, are easy and super-cheap to make. Swords and specialized weaponry were very expensive to create.\n\nBut that being said, the idea of a \"peasant levy\" as a regular feature of armies is not really accurate. There are notable examples (Hussites, various town militias, etc.), but the bulk would be a kind-of \"middle class\" or mercenaries. Most feudal societies had requirements for providing arms, armor, equipment, and men based on wealth/land size. (The term \"Knight's Fee\" is a good example, as it represents the amount of land necessary to support a knight and his retinue.). You don't really want to plop the raw labor force for your agriculture (and source of your income) into a situation where they are likely to all die. The feudal system was definitely propped-up by the creation of a military \"caste\" that protected it.\n\nThis also varies widely based on where and when you're looking for. \"Peasants\" don't necessarily exist everywhere. To use a different region, the warriors of most Steppe-based armies would be equipped to use Bows, Spears, and/or Lassos, particularly bows. On the counter, many of the militias bordering the Steppes would be focused on utilizing light cavalry, hiring other contingents of Steppe tribes, or trained in ranged weapons.", "The majority of Anglo-Saxon soldiers, who served in a semi-professional militia called the fyrd, would have carried spears. Most would have also carried axes, as these were relatively cheap and easy to make in terms of the metal involved, and would also have non-military uses.\n\nProfessional household soldiers known as Huscarls traditionally carried long axes designed to cut a man in two and even stop horses. These can be seen in the Bayeux Tapestry. For an equivalent in popular culture, think Areoh Hotah in A Song of Ice and Fire." ] }

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[ [ "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Paulus_Hector_Mair" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cwjm0qq", "cwjrak0" ], "score": [ 3, 9 ], "text": [ "I think Thornton's [American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492] (_URL_5_) would probably be a good resource for answering your question (it's at my work office atm, so I'm reluctant to give a more definitive answer to your question lest I answer it incorrectly.)\n\nClearly, the shift didn't take place all at once - it would have been somewhat gradual, from geographic region to geographic region, as peoples came into contact either with one another and got into it over land, or (as in the case of the Columbia River region) came into contact with diseases that decimated their populations before they ever even saw a non-Native. Lewis and Clark's journals report coming into contact with the [Clatsop] (_URL_2_) at the mouth of the Columbia in 1804 as an [already decimated people] (_URL_6_).\n\nThe Dakota *definitely* seemed to be aware of their being a population tipping point for them getting outnumbered, and that that was a very dangerous moment: [Thaóyate Dúta] (_URL_4_) repeatedly warned his people, other Dakota leaders, and non-Native leaders in Minnesota Territory, that the displacement of the Native population by White settlers and the subsequent loss of Native lands would lead to war. That's [exactly what happened] (_URL_0_), with dire consequences for the Dakota that have repercussions to this very day.\n\nThere are certainly [parts of the United States where it's still not true that Natives are outnumbered] (_URL_3_), but I understand that you mean the US as a whole. \n\nEdit: [Here's] (_URL_1_) a cartoon about this exact situation that's so relevant I had just assumed it was by Dine cartoonist Jack Ahasteen, but - nope, it's by non-Native cartoonist Matt Bors. I remember when this cartoon came out, it really struck a chord with all of us it was so on-point.", "This is a huge, and interesting, question. I'm afraid our current data can only go so far in providing an answer. What follows is an analysis of the data, and the pitfalls of trying to definitively answer this question due to everything from notions of identity, evolving racial categories, and lack of solid sources. I will first address the research surrounding Native North American population size at contact, then the issues with calculating the rate of decline until the numbers hit a nadir around 1900. I will then address historical census numbers for the European and African descent populations of the United States. Finally, I will emphasize how all of this is simply an educated guess, based on flawed sources, that reflects a dark history of our nation’s interaction with Native Americans.\n\nFirst, gallons of ink have been spilled debating Native American population size at the time of contact. There are two main camps, “high counters” and “low counters”. In the early 1900s scholars like Kroeber and Mooney looked at the Native American population size during their time, and assumed little changed in Native American lifeways between contact and 1900. They didn’t factor in mortality from disease, warfare, and famine. Kroeber estimated 900,000 people lived in North America, and 8.4 million lived in the entire New World. That is a population density of less than 1 person for every six miles. Other scholars, like Dobyns, formed a group called “high counters”. The high counters held the New World was richly populated at contact, but catastrophic disease spread ahead of colonists, decimating the population, and rendering any colonial-period estimates of population size grossly inaccurate. Dobyns estimated over 112 million people lived in the New World at the time of contact. For reference, only 11 countries today boast a population larger than 112 million.\n\nToday the popular perception has inherited the legacy of the high counters, and their catastrophic, apocalyptic population decline due to infectious disease after contact. In academic circles we are stepping back from the assumption of epidemic disease decimation without concrete evidence of that disease mortality. For example, ten to twenty years ago we might look at a Mississippian site abandoned around 1525 and assume disease carried off all, or at least most, of the inhabitants. However, we now know for many people in North America geographic mobility was a regular means of dealing with resource scarcity, or territorial encroachment, or changes in the political structure. The interpretations of the evidence have changed, and with that change we must modify how we reconstruct the past. All that said, current best evidence suggest the Native North American population size at contact was between 2 and 7 million people. \n\nAs you can see, there are a host of issues and assumptions that go into calculating the Native North American population in 1492, and those issues are only magnified in the years following contact. Native American population size, and subsequent decline or rebound, varied based on geographic location and time. Centuries of warfare, population displacement, epidemic disease mortality, famine, territory restriction, and identity erasure wreaked havoc on Native North Americas. Calculating raw numbers is next to impossible. Native Americans were not included in the U.S. Census until 1860. An attempt at a total count of Native Americans throughout the U.S. was not realized until 1890. Compiling first hand estimates given by those traveling into Native American lands can only tell us so much from their limited perspective. Scholars generally agree the Native American populations hit their nadir (lowest point) by 1900 when the U.S. Census total for American Indian, Eskimo and Aleut was 237,196 (roughly 0.3% of the U.S. population). Since the population decline debate is so contentious, I’m just going to focus on when the “White” population of the United States passed the upper bound of the best estimates of Native American population size at contact. \n\nContinued below..." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.usdakotawar.org/", "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/f7/76/be/f776be148f2f41ab4ba6988b0b22550b.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clatsop", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._communities_with_Native_American_majority_populations", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Crow", "http://www.amazon.com/American-Indian-Holocaust-Survival-Civilization/dp/080612220X", "https://franceshunter.wordpress.com/2009/09/21/lewis-clark-and-smallpox/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e9i4agt" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "**Current:** Immigrants and Emigrants\n\n**On Deck:** Trauma\n\n**In the Hole:** The Balkans\n\nRemember to ask theme-related questions in [a new thread!](_URL_1_)! If your submission doesn't get automatically flaired, [send us a modmail](_URL_0_) with a link!" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FAskHistorians", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/submit?selftext=true" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dbdhld9", "dbdilgm", "dbds6ni" ], "score": [ 429, 36, 17 ], "text": [ "Japan has the oldest continuous, hereditary monarchy in the world -- and would, I believe, even qualify as oldest if we included non-hereditary or interrupted-hereditary successions. The Japanese royal family is still in the Yamato Dynasty, which took over the Japanese throne (according to legend) in about 660 BC under Emperor Jimmu. This means there has been a continuous line of descendants (traditionally, Japanese emperors must be male, but there have been several empresses in Japanese history -- though these generally succeeded in extraordinary circumstances) for nearly 2700 years. \n\nHowever, evidence for the first two dozen or so emperors in the Yamato Dynasty is scanty by modern, empirical history standards, and the first emperors are semi-legendary in status. Therefore, the Japanese royal line is often dated back to the time when we have solid evidence in line with modern standards of historicity -- which takes us back to about 500 AD with the birth of [Emperor Kinmei](_URL_0_). \n\nThat said, even discounting that first 900+ years of semi-dubious imperial lineage, the Japanese monarchy would still be about 1500 years old, the longest continuous dynasty in the world by a significant margin. To give a historical context, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Agustulus, was (probably) still alive about the time Emperor Kinmei was born, and Kinmei's dynasty is still on the throne today.\n\nSources: \n\n* Packard, Jerrold: *Sons of Heaven: A Portrait of the Japanese Monarchy (1987)*\n\n* Hoye, Timothy *Japanese Politics: Fixed and Floating Worlds* (1999)", "Now I don't know if it is the longest, but the Chola dynasty had a clear, tracable family tree and record of succession from Vijayala Chola circa 840 AD to Rajendra III circa 1250 AD, that is 410 years of unbroken succession.\n\nNow, the Chola dynasty itself is recorded in Sangam literature and mentioned in the edicts of Ashoka which itself dates back to 300 BCE, however we do not have any clear records of it is the same branch that went from 300 BCE to 1250 AD which would put it at a stellar 1,000 years.\n\nThe Pandyans, another major dynasty in South India trace their lineage back to the same Sangam era literature and have a recorded lineage / succession tree running from approx 300 BCE to ~ 350 AD (roughly 650 years). There is an interegnum and the second group of Pandyans run from ~ 500 AD to ~1250 AD and then the line switches briefly to a matrilineal one when the Pandyan empire was taken over by the son of Lilavati, a Sri Lankan Queen and then it runs continously till the Pandyan empire fell sometime in 1400 AD.\n\nIn essence, the Pandyan Dynasty per se was in recorded existence from ~ 500 BCE to 1,400 AD. They were contemporaries to Darius I and his Achmaemenid Empire and Rome when it was still a kingdom till the Pandyan dynasty / empire fell after the fall of Byzantium. The lineage though is broken up into 3 distinct lines, but their subjects and rivals as well as modern day historians consider the Pandyan dynasty as one entity. \n\nSource - Cholas by Nilakanta Sastri and An Illustrated history of South India by the same author.", "Follow-up: How about the current European monarchs? I know that Queen Elizabeth II goes back to the 10th century via Theodoric (since I'm related to her myself!), do any European monarchs go back further?\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Kinmei" ], [], [] ]