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{ "a_id": [ "cudnzda" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "After checking the rules, I will address Japan as best I can. Full disclosure, I live in Korea and I think the Japanese government's position on this issue is horrible, but I love spending time in Japan.\n\n[This article from Foreign Affairs](_URL_2_) pretty much answers your question. The Japanese ignore their conquests of Korea, Manchuria, and China and the enslavement, human experimentation, rape, arson, and murder that it entailed. Instead, they tell a tale of American imperialists and atomic bombs where Japan is the victim.\n\nJapan has apologized many times, but the issue is more one of sincerity.\n\nIn Korea, one of the most important apologies was the [Kono Statement](_URL_0_). On the topic of forced prostituation, euphemistically called \"comfort women\", the Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono stated that:\n\n > Undeniably, this was an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, that severely injured the honor and dignity of many women. **The Government of Japan would like to take this opportunity once again to extend its sincere apologies and remorse** to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.\n\nThe problem now is that the current Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, likes to hint that he might \"revise\" or repeal the Kono statement, that the issue needs more study.\n\nJust last week on the 70th anniversary of the Japanese surrender, Abe gave a speech. [Here is a great analysis](_URL_1_) by a Korean lawyer on the \"dog whistle\" issue of the speech; the code words that Abe uses to sound sincere to non-Asians, to appease his base at home, yet still offend Korea and China.\n\nTLDR - Japan apologizes as infrequently as it can and it uses roundabout language in an attempt to evade taking responsibility for its actions in Asia between 1894-1945." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/women/fund/state9308.html", "http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2015/08/sorting-through-shinzo-abes-dog-whistles.html", "https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/japan/2009-05-01/perils-apology" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cbidc28", "cbik9ud" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "/u/merdre gave a detailed answer on 'the stigma of the stage' 3 months ago that I love so much I have it saved, so [here's a link](_URL_0_) to the older discussion. ", "Dunno about anything but England.\n\nDuring the early days of commercial theatre in England, from the 1570s to the 1640s, actors were looked upon as little better than vagabonds. Commercial acting troupes had to be sponsored by a nobleman, so that actors were technically part of their household, and when traveling they would wear the livery of the sponsoring earl (who did not actually support them except when they furnished entertainment for weddings and holidays). Women were forbidden to act on stage, so their parts were played by apprentice boy actors.\n\nIn London, however, where the first permanent public theatres were built, the businessmen and city fathers hated the theatre (for moral as well as practical reasons: the plague, and the fact that plays were performed in the afternoon when everyone was supposed to be at work, especially apprentices), and in 1575 outlawed them inside the city limits. This forced the theatres to move just outside the city, where brothels and bear-baiting arenas flourished (both also outlawed inside London). \n\nSince they were in the same vicinity, prostitutes would solicit business both inside and outside of the theatres (admission to the grounds was only a penny). Some theatrical impresarios such as [Phillip Henslowe](_URL_0_) and actors such as Ned Alleyn invested in the surrounding properties, becoming landlords (along with several churchmen) of brothels and animal arenas.\n\nAfter 1642 with the ascension of the Puritans and the [interregnum](_URL_1_), theatres were closed down and public acting outlawed. After the [Restoration](_URL_2_) the theatres were reopened. Since Charles II had been exiled in France where female actors were allowed, he legalized professional actresses. The reaction against Puritan rule resulted in very explicit sexual comedy, and the theatre became even more associated with sexual license. Actresses appeared in what were called \"breeches roles\", to play women who were disguised as men, dressed in tight-fitting and revealing men's clothes. They became extremely popular, and rich and aristocratic rakes would compete to meet them after hours for sexual assignations. Charles II's favorite mistress, the popular actress Nell Gwynn, had a mother who ran a whorehouse, and it was rumored that Nell had been a child prostitute.\n\nGurr, Andrew. *The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642*. CUP, 1992.\n\nHughes, Derek. *English Drama, 1660-1700*. Oxford UP, 1996." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1d7nf2/when_did_actors_go_from_having_the_same_social/" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Henslowe", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interregnum_%28British_Isles%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Restoration" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eazvxdz", "eb24uz7" ], "score": [ 14, 15 ], "text": [ "Follow-up: Today there is a taboo around having an unclean home. How would this issue be seen around that time? I'd assume the poor wouldn't have that standard, but would a wealthier individual \"lose face\" over this?", "PART 1\n\nInteresting question! The first thing to note is that housekeeping and cleaning practices varied widely across different parts of Europe and different social strata in Europe in the early modern age. The cleaning of peasant households was a much simpler matter because custom, sumptuary laws, and plain old economics severely limited the furniture and possessions that a peasant owned (wood needed to be conserved for fires, agricultural activities, and maintenance of lords' forest hunting grounds, and could rarely be spared for such vanities as furniture), so housekeeping for peasants was mainly a matter of sweeping, mopping, and wiping surfaces with hot water and maybe some soap made of animal fat. For royalty, nobility, wealthy farmers, and wealthy merchants, it was another matter. Many travel guides from that era remark that Holland and Italy (particularly the upper classes) had some of the tidiest domestic practices. One of the theories about this is that they are both relatively humid countries, where wood is more likely to mold and rot if it is not scrubbed and polished.[1] However, Switzerland and some parts of Germany were also relatively known for tidiness. The historian Bas van Bavel makes a strong case that cleanliness correlated with the dairy industry. The dairy industry required greatly sanitary conditions, because it was easy for bacteria to get into dairy and ruin the product.[2]\n\nThomas Brockbank called early modern housekeeping the \"many-headed monster.\"[3] Thus, van Bavel cites numerous early modern travel journals that recounted the almost frantic cleanliness of servants and housewives in dairying areas like Holland, where they would sweep paths often, lay down cloth at thresholds to prevent the tracking in of dirt, make the men wear house slippers when they came inside, scrub and polish surfaces and belongings, wash and scrub clothing and linens, use hot water and soap, and dry their wooden cleaning buckets not in the sun but over a fire because they felt that that got the bucket cleaner than air drying (unbeknownst to them, they were onto something--although bacteria wouldn't be discovered until 1670, drying things with fire was much more effective at killing bacteria and preventing mold). Of course, there was usually great concern about the conservation of fire wood in early modern Europe, so resourceful servants and housewives would rather clean buckets using the fires from burning straw or peapods than making a fire specifically for cleaning (thereby \"killing two birds with one stone\").[see footnote 2 again] Kitchen utensils also had to be cleaned, and most of these cleaning techniques were passed on orally from generation to generation (and never written down), since servants were by-and-large illiterate in the early modern era.[4]\n\nVan Bavel further points out that of all the dairy products, butter is the most susceptible to ruination by bacteria and impurities, and since Holland particularly specialized in butter production, this made them all the more cleanliness-conscious.[5] Dairy-making and butter-making were not sufficient conditions for cleanliness however. Adam Smith noted in *The Wealth of Nations*, in the case of Scotland: \"If [the market price for dairy products] is very low, indeed, [the Scottish dairy farmer] will be likely to manage his dairy in a very slovenly and dirty manner ... [and] will suffer the business to be carried on amidst the smoke, filth, and nastiness of his own kitchen; as was the case of almost all the farmers dairies in Scotland thirty or forty years ago.\"[6] Van Bavel argues that making butter and other dairy products for market (requiring products that could last for weeks), rather than for personal consumption (which only had to last for several days), created a special impetus for Dutch dairy farmers to practice extreme cleanliness and hygiene, because Holland was such a commercial society oriented around long distance trade.[7]\n\nAlthough both men and women were responsible for cleanliness and hygiene at some level, women were--of course--seen as the ones ultimately responsible for cleanliness. Uncleanness was typically seen as due to a lack of women, and this was most pronounced in military settings.[8] Erica Longfellow quotes from Gervase Markham's *English Huswife* (1615), where Markham says: \"the perfit Husbandman, who is the father and master of the family, and whose office and imployments are euer for the most part abroad, or remoued from the house, as in the field or yarde ... [as well as] our english Hous-wife, who is the mother and Mistris of the family, and hath her most generall imployments within the house.”[9] \"Economy\" was a synonym for female housework in the early modern era, which Sara Pennell argues revealed the place of \"female expertise ... as an essential underpinning of economic survival and success.\"[10] This concept is still noticeable today where schools still have classes called \"home economics.\"" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cxys6yo", "cxz2u82", "cxz5ok0", "cxz6c1h", "cxzgq4c", "cxzks73" ], "score": [ 27, 6, 4, 2, 5, 2 ], "text": [ "Speaking for the American air force, the aces flew the same aircraft as any other pilot did. When you add extra armor to a plane beyond its design specifications, it can reduce speed and maneuverability. In the case of Rudel's Stuka (which was already quite slow) doing this would impose a significant weight (and thus speed) penalty and could stress the airframe in a dive, making him more vulnerable to Soviet planes and even his own aircraft. The factor of speed is even more important when flying a fighter versus a dive bomber. \n\nIn many cases, pilots (not necessarily aces, but aces often did as well) modified their aircraft to make them more comfortable to use or to give an advantage over the enemy; the 56th Fighter Group diligently waxed all their P-47 Thunderbolts to make them slip more smoothly through the air. The P-47 Thunderbolt's factory-fitted rear view mirror was not the best design, and so some pilots replaced them with mirrors from Spitfires. \"Bud\" Mahurin did just that, and attached two more spare P-47 mirrors to his plane below the windscreen on each side of the cockpit to give him a better rearward view; other pilots in the 56th Fighter Group did this as well. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nHis P-47, like some others, also had the flat wheel hub covers removed at some point as presumably unnecessary. The 20th Fighter Group, after they converted from P-38s, took the mirrors off their old planes and put them on their new P-51 Mustangs.\n\nWhen a fighter group was first constituted, each pilot had his own assigned plane. As the war wore on and casualties mounted, there were often more planes than pilots needed to fly them. This problem became more acute when fighter groups were authorized to expand from 75 to 108 aircraft in the winter of 1943-1944.\n\nPilots selected to fly a mission flew whatever aircraft was available that day, which sometimes would not necessarily be \"their\" aircraft. It was an unspoken rule in the Army Air Forces during the war that \"new\" (replacement) pilots weren't assigned their own plane until they had flown *x* number of missions or accumulated so many flying hours. Until then, they flew whatever aircraft was available. \n\nSources:\n\n*Zemke's Wolfpack: A Photographic Odyssey of the 56th Fighter Group During the Second World War*, by Nigel Julian and Peter Randall", "I can answer a bit for the Navy, especially early war (1941-1942).\n\nBecause the situation was that there were never enough Wildcats on carriers to go around every pilot in the squadron from the CO on down would rotate, usually by flight or at least division if they had to. \n\nSo a squadron might have 30 pilots, but only 26 planes to start the cruise, then a month later only have 22. So you are going to have to rotate planes. Each plane in the squadron would be numbered and theoretically assigned a pilot base don position (F1 being the CO's plane F2 his wingman, F3 the other element leader in his flight, down the line). But when you have some planes under repair, others spotted quickly out of order on the flight deck, changes in plans or mission rosters, it all got very jumbled.\n\nThat isnt to say that they didnt have favorite or preferred aircraft, perhaps for whatever reason one Wildcat had a more efficient turbocharger, or one kept losing oil pressure every so often and wasnt liked, but in the end there werent enough planes at the time to be picky. \n\nAnd the F4F's flown early war (3, 3A, and 4) were all damn survivable aircraft that worked wonders to bring their pilots home to begin with. \n\nSource. The First Team: Carrier Fighter Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway by Lundstrum. ", "I can't remember his name, I think it was Alexander Pokryshkin, but there was a Soviet pilot who flew the lend lease planes and he made a modification to it. In the Bell P-39 Airacobra you could have 3 caliber weapons on the plane. Most common was a 37mm cannon in the propeller hub, 2x .50 caliber machine guns mounted in the nose cowling firing through the propeller, and 2x .30 caliber guns under the wing. There was a switch in the cockpit that could choose which gun to fire. This pilot ripped out the switch and wired it so that all his guns would fire at once. All that lead flying through the air you're bound to hit something, right?", "In reference to your question, if planes of aces were modified specifically for them? No. Going with your example, Hans Rudel flew the Ju-87 and later perfected becoming a tank killer, first with bombs then with the G model armed with the 37mm cannons. The Stuka was a slow, stable platform for dive bombing. Because of its slow speed it needed the added \"protection\" of a rear gunner who could at most hope to scare away any attacking fighters let alone shoot one down. Hans Rudel did fly an FW-190 and achieved numerous kills in that, he even shot down soviet bombers that happened across his path in the Stuka, there was nothing that man wouldn't bomb or shoot.\n\nKeeping with this German theme Erich Hartman, the ace of aces with 352 kills, the only notable modification he added to his Bf-109 was the a black tulip on the nose. This eventually identified him to soviet pilots who avoided combat with him. He then would give his wing man the \"black tulip\" aircraft so they would not be interfered with while he went on racking up kills against the soviets.\n\nThe pilots just flew the planes they were given and depended on their skill as pilots to see them through, no special or \"superior\" weapons, or armor were given to them. Hans-Joachim Marseille the top scoring ace in North Africa, acquired the majority if not all of his 158 kills against the British, flew over 10 different Bf-109s and was killed jumping from his aircraft a Bf-109F-4 when the engine started smoking. A number of pilots did not care for the F model that came to the desert complaining of the problems the engines were having with the elements present in North Africa. \n\nWas the Bf-109 superior to other aircraft? At the start of the war yes, but by the end the only the K model could hold it's own against the newest fighters the allies had to offer. Why did the Bf-109 become the stable for the majority of the highest scoring aces? The majority of those high scoring aces achieved their kills on the Eastern Front against the hoards of aircraft the Soviets put up in the air piece meal. Of course there are exceptions notably the previous mentioned Marseille who scored all of his kills against western opponents. Just didn't want anybody thinking the Bf-109 was defacto the best fighter ever developed. ", "As the other commentators here have indicated, even ace pilots tended to fly a roster of different aircraft. The modifications to the planes tended to be done not in the factory, but at the local airfield. Such field modifications tended to be relatively minor and reflected what pilots perceived as necessary for combat. There were very few examples of \"special\" ace custom aircraft during the war, and such that existed were not so much for special pilots, but to test the potential for these modifications to be incorporated into future production lines. One example of this was Adolf Galland's three \"special\" Bf-109 F-2s. As commander of JG 26, Galland had three of its Friedrichs modified to carry a heavier armament. Two of the [aircraft](_URL_0_) had their cowl MG 17s replaced with two 13 mm MG 131, while the [third aircraft](_URL_1_) had a two 20 mm MG FFs in the wings. But Galland had his mechanics make these modifications not because he personally wanted an up-gunned fighter, but rather because he felt that the BF-109F was undergunned for the average pilot's skills. As Galland was making his ascent up the *Luftwaffe*'s hierarchy, these modifications were a proof of concept rather than a perk given to an elite. ", "Douglas Bader, the RAF ace who lost his legs in 1932, flew a slightly unusual Spitfire. The first mark of the Spitfire carried eight .303 machine guns (in what became known as 'A' type wings), but from 1941 the vast majority carried two 20mm cannon and four machine guns ('B' wings). Bader had always opposed the cannon armament, so when the rest of his wing were equipped with the Spitfire VB, he insisted on flying a Spitfire VA; this wasn't completely unique to Bader, but there were less than 100 Mk VAs built compared to more than 3500 Mk VBs, so it was somewhat atypical. For the most part, though, as others have said, aces flew standard aircraft." ] }

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[ [ "http://imgur.com/FIK3udr", "http://imgur.com/AkivyIh" ], [], [], [], [ "http://falkeeins.blogspot.com/2013/09/galland-bf-109-f-2-special.html", "http://falkeeins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/der-reichsmarschall-bei-oberst-galland.html" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dho2jla" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "According to our best available source - the historical account by Herodotos of Halikarnassos, written some 40 years after the event - this is indeed what happened. The army and fleet were sent to two adjacent bottlenecks and fought to prevent each other getting outflanked. Both battles continued over the span of the same 3 days. The naval battle ended in a stalemate, but when it became known that the land army had been defeated, the Greek ships withdrew." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dfvup2v" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Immediately after World War II in Europe ended, U.S. units there were classified into four categories;\n\nCategory|Explanation\n:--|:--\nI|Units to remain in Europe (the occupation forces)\nII|Units to be redeployed to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. Some soldiers were to go directly there (the 86th Infantry Division, having fought in Europe for only 34 days, was guarding POW pens in the Philippines on V-J Day!) while others were to train back in the USA for a while before deploying \nIII|Units to be reorganized and retrained before being classified as Category I or II\nIV|Units to be sent home and inactivated with personnel discharged\n\nI talk more about the \"points\" system used for sending long-serving men home [here](_URL_0_)\n\nOfficers also received an ASR score, but were not evaluated based solely on points earned for demobilization; combat effectiveness played an extremely significant role, and many officers who fought in Europe expected to be sent to Japan. The initial landing forces of Operation *Majestic* (the invasion of the Japanese home island of Kyushu, to be used as a staging ground for the invasion of Honshu island, where Tokyo is located) consisted of Army, Navy, Marine, and Coast Guard forces already in the Pacific. This landing was scheduled for X-Day, November 1, 1945;\n\n**U.S. Sixth Army:**\n\nLanding location|Corps|Forces\n:--|:--|:--\nNakakoshiki Ura and Koshiki Retto (X-4)|N/A|40th Infantry Division, 148th RCT\nKushikino|V MAC|2nd, 3rd, and 6th Marine Divisions\nAriake Bay|XI|1st Cavalry Division, 23rd and 43rd Infantry Divisions, 112th Cavalry RCT\nMiyazaki|I|25th, 33rd, and 41st Infantry Divisions\nN/A|Floating reserve to be used as a diversion on X-2|77th, 81st, and 98th Infantry Divisions\nN/A|Follow-up|11th Airborne Division\nUS Army Forces Pacific Reserve|N/A|6th, 7th, and 96th Infantry Divisions\n\nY-Day for Operation *Coronet* (the invasion of Honshu) was scheduled for March 1, 1946, and would have utilized forces still in the Pacific as well as some of the more veteran units redeployed from Europe, bolstered with fresh replacements to take the place of those men who had \"pointed\" out;\n\n**U.S. First Army:**\n\nCorps|Forces\n:--|:--\nIII MAC|1st, 4th, and 6th Marine Divisions (6th available from Y+5)\nXXIV|7th, 27th, and 96th Infantry Divisions (96th available from Y+5)\nFollow-on corps transferred from Europe|5th, 44th, and 86th Infantry Divisions\n\n**U.S. Eighth Army:**\n\nCorps|Forces\n:--|:--\nX|24th, 31st, and 37th Infantry Divisions (37th available from Y+5)\nX (Commonwealth)|3rd British, 6th Canadian, and 10th Australian Divisions, plus two unnamed British divisions to be available from Y+40\nXIII (lands on Y+10)|13th and 20th Infantry Divisions\nXIV|6th, 32nd, and 38th Infantry Divisions (38th available from Y+5)\nFollow-on corps transferred from Europe|4th, 8th, and 87th Infantry Divisions\nU.S. Army Forces Pacific Reserve|11th Airborne Division, 97th Infantry Division (11th available from Y+35)\nUnnamed reserve corps transferred from Europe|2nd, 28th, and 35th Infantry Divisions\nUnnamed reserve corps transferred from Europe|91st, 95th, and 104th Infantry Divisions\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43kptn/in_band_of_brothers_ww2_american_soldiers_are/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c54ywhs", "c551dcm", "c552vlv", "c55is75" ], "score": [ 12, 2, 10, 127 ], "text": [ "A few ideas, but I can't approach the subject entirely. \n\nBeer and Wine: There have always been hundreds of different styles of beer throughout history. Beer typically has always brewed in your town, or the town over. It didn't travel well until the advent of pasteurization, refrigeration and the reliable, durable bottles and cans. Every region (especially in Central Europe) had their own style of beer. Almost every region of the US settled by these central europeans (Czech, German, Belgian, Austrian mainly) had a brewery. Beer was also brewed at home throughout history, typically by the woman of the house. Therefore, depending on local ingredients (beer wasn't always made with hops or barley, depending on location) there were wildly different flavors. \n\nBefore prohibition, there were over 1,000 breweries in the United States. Many of these breweries had to shut down because of Prohibition and only a handful survived by making other products. Medicinal alcohol, malt beverages (unfermented wort, basically) and prepackaged malted grain (that could be fermented at home). These breweries that survived are the ones most people know today, Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, Pabst. These Breweries were all making lager beer. \n\nLager arrived in the United States with German immigrants, and Americans enjoyed it immensely. Previous, most beer in the US was English Style Ales, which were easier to produce than lager. Lager requires colder fermentation and longer fermentation time to produce a high quality beer. \n\nBud, Miller and Coors often get a bad rap for making \"cheap\" beer and training us to like it, but they really made it because Americans loved it. I'm sure the original founders of these breweries would have loved to make their traditional German bocks, dunkels and hefeweizens, but Americans loved lager. \n\nSo, they emerged from Prohibition unscathed because they were able to transport their product across the country using refrigeration technology and cans and bottles. Therefore, everyone could have a great taste of this lager. After prohibition, they jumped on the chance and were able to claim the beer market across the country. With control of the market, they were able to advertise themselves well and prevent any competitors. They introduced the idea that the only real beer is their product. \n\nNow, after the legalization of Homebrewing beer in the late 1970s, many people upset with the diversity of beer in the US began making their own. Some were incredibly good at it, passionate about it and had the resources to produce commercially. This gave rise to the first craft beer renaissance in the 1980s. The second wave came in the 1990s, and now we're into the third wave, which has a focus on drinking local, and using local ingredients. \n\nAs I remember, the United States now has just about the same number of breweries as it did pre-Prohibition. They're reintroducing styles and flavors that had been practically lost from the 20s to the 90s. The idea that drinking imported or flavorful beer is snobby and unAmerican is mostly gone, and we're returning to a diverse market with a focus on the local economy. Granted, craft beer and microbrews are still less than 10% of total beer sale.s \n\n\nOk, I typed way more than I thought I would about beer. Here's some other concise ideas. \n\nWine: It's a lot easier to legally open a vineyard in the states than a brewery. Making wine at home was legal long before homebrewing. Advent of international transport and industrial agriculture allows wineries the world over to grow similar styles of wines with the same grapes as the famous Regions of France and Italy. \n\nFood: Food pathways are extensively discussed in geography. I recommend finding some papers in the AAG journal. ", "In the 1990s food writers, college professors, and environmental activists educated the American public and food producers about the risks of monocultural agriculture. The most well-known spokesperson for multi-cultural food production is Michael Pollan, author of [The Botany of Desire](_URL_1_). \n\nMonocultural agriculture means the production of a single consumer-ready variety of any plant. Before the 1990s you could generally only buy Russett potatoes, for example, because that was by far the most abundantly grown variety. This single variety method was profitable and efficient in the short-term, but also very risky because farmers' entire investments were devoted to one crop. When only one crop is grown, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides have to be used to ensure a farmer gets a return on his investment. Growing 5 different kinds of potatoes can be done with less synthetics because the risk to the producer is divested.\n\nThis divested and low impact multicultural method, however, produces lesser quantities of food per acre. This means higher prices for consumers. Luckily, enough Americans paid the higher price to have less toxic, less environmentally deletrious, and better tasting food. The varied grocery store shelves you see today are the result of this. \n\nIn short, it took the actions of producers, consumers, and food academics to change food choices for Americans. This is obviously a very simple summary, but if you'd like to read more about this history of American food habits I would recommend any of Michael Pollan's books and especially Ted Steinberg's environmental history text, [Down to Earth](_URL_0_).\n\nEDIT: Clarification of historical potato availability in America in regards to mussscrott's comment.", "My research is deeply tied to this question, but it's far too late here for me to write up a response. As such, I'll edit this post in the morning. For now, I'll just say that I think there are really deep connections between this and issues of class, gender, and perhaps race. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what these connections are, because they often appear in contradictory ways. So, I'll sleep on this and then give you a thorough answer tomorrow. It'll give me a chance to digest some of the material that I've been working on anyway.", "Since you've asked for \"pretty much any perspective\" on this topic, I'm going to go quite a ways back, to the industrial revolution. I think this will give us some insight into the contemporary food scene, which we might say involves everything and anything from microbrews, organic food, and fusion cuisine. However, I'll say up front that I offer few conclusions. I have a good idea of British food history in the 19th and 20th centuries, which has a lot of applicability to the Dominions and the United States, but obviously there will be regional differences. I'm going to discuss these issues through the one lens that I know best, wheat and bread.\n\nSo, what are the contemporary food movements all about? One way to think of them is as a reaction to the last two hundred years of industrialization, a kind of critique of the world that the 19th century left to the 20th. However, this critique--like all social, cultural, and political movements--reflects a set of power relationships between groups of people. I'll say up front that I am myself a part of this movement. I eat organic food whenever possible, I do a portion of my weekly shopping at Whole Foods (though probably less than a quarter), I love food trucks (as an LA native), I garden, and I never, ever eat Wonder Bread; that said, I recognize that there are real problems with the contemporary food movement, though problems that are surprisingly familiar to the historian.\n\nSo, if we go back to the late 18th or early 19th century, we find a world in which most people--in Britain and America, in Europe and indeed around the world--grew their own food. Britain was the first nation to be majority urban, but that wasn't until 1851, and I don't believe the United States crossed that line until about 1920. And that's with a definition of \"urban\" as residing in a city of something like 10,000, a pretty small town by contemporary standards. In those days, food production and food processing was quite local. Everyone was a \"localvore,\" of necessity. As others have said on here, people brewed their own beer, grew many of their own vegetable, milked their own cows. Certainly there was long-distance trade in particular high-value food commodities like wine, spices, or sugar, but for the most part people took care of their own food needs from their immediate area. It was simply too expensive to transport food very far. \n\nThis all changed in the 19th century, and there were several interlocking changes that radically transformed the food systems of the Anglophone world (at least; much of this is probably true for most of Europe, but I just can't say with much confidence). To really boil things down, these changes were agricultural expansion, steam technology, and developments in agricultural techniques. \n\nSettler colonies expanded dramatically over the 19th century, in the United States most dramatically, but also in Canada and Australia. In those three cases, you had Europeans conquering and displacing indigenous populations who had been previously reduced through disease. At the same time, there was an expansion of irrigation systems in British India, particularly in the Punjab. The net result of these changes was there was a lot more land under cultivation. I don't have access to my library at the moment, but I believe the land under cultivation more than doubled from about 1850 to 1914, on top of pretty substantial expansion in the previous century.\n\nAt the same time, the construction of railway networks pretty much everywhere dramatically reduced shipment costs. These really start to have an effect in the US about 1870--as far as food transport goes--and then everywhere else follows. Steamships come along slightly later, though sailing ships remain important until the 20th century. In any case, it becomes much easier for farmers around the world to transport their goods to markets, and remember that much more land is under cultivation. Railways bring all that new American, Canadian, Australian, and Indian land into an emerging global grain market. Railways also made it much more profitable to export grain from places like eastern Europe and Russia.\n\nFinally, farming gets more capital-intensive and more productive (per acre in some places, per laborer in others), thanks to developments like Justus von Liebig's publication of the NPK factors in plant growth (the idea that Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and [K]Potassium are the limiting factors in plant growth). Recognizing that the level of nitrogen in the soil could have profound effects on plant growth encouraged farmers with sufficient capital to begin mining nitrogen-rich bird waste from islands and putting it on their fields. By World War I, Fritz Haber had developed a way to synthesize amonium nitrate from natural gas, meaning that you could turn fossil fuels into fertilizers. There were also important developments in agricultural machinery; the McCormick reaper was patented in (I believe) 1843. \n\nSo, the bottom line is that world was capable of producing much more food in 1900 than in 1800--and I mean MUCH more; I've never seen anyone actually compile global agricultural statistics (maybe Giovanni Federico?), but it wouldn't surprise me if it was an order of magnitude. All this food can also be transported much more efficiently than ever before. AND, this all happens in the Western world where farmers were already pretty productive; Britain was the most urbanized nation from the 18th century, and this was a precondition for industrialization in the first place. So, a local surplus that allowed 18th-century Britain to begin industrializing became a global surplus that made possible the creation of an urban, industrial “core” for the world: the North Atlantic, basically the northern and eastern US and Canada, and northern and western Europe. All the food produced elsewhere in the world was funneled to these places, and in particular to Britain, whose cities grew the fastest and whose agriculture declined the most. Again, I don't have my library handy, but Britain imported something like half of all the grain traded internationally in the last half of the 19th century. I'm sure the situation was quite similar for the eastern industrial cities of the US, it's just that the grain didn't cross international borders.\n\nSo, we know that the world's food supply basically globalized in the 19th century; most of the action went down from about 1850 to 1914. Let's stop a moment and consider food from a cultural perspecitve. What does bread MEAN? Well, food has often played a role in marking identity, so that people of different groups eat different things. It's not so much that you are what you eat, but what you eat displays who you are.\n\nIn the case of bread, if you were wealthy, you ate white bread. White flour was harder to manufacture and you didn't get as much, so it was more expensive; whether humans have a natural proclivity to white flour over brown is impossible to say, in my view. In any case, the wealthy ate white bread, and the poor ate brown bread. And, when the poor did eat white bread, they were often criticized for being uneconomical. They were essentially being told, “well, no wonder you're poor, you're eating fancy bread, bread that's above your station.” The examples of this discourse I'm most familiar with are in the 19th century, with people like William Cobbett and Eliza Acton. \n\nHowever, industrialization does a funny thing to bread. Right at the same time that the world was creating a global market in grain, flour millers industrialized their business. They switched from millstones to steel rollers (I know I've posted the story of this particular change on here before, which has a lot to do with particular environmental conditions of American and Canadian and Russian wheat, but I can't be bothered to dig it up now). Rollers made is much easier to produce a lot more white flour, and so it became possible for everyone to have white bread. So, with white bread available for everyone, what do you know, brown bread becomes a mark not of poverty, but of sophistication, or informed choices. The old reddit switcheroo happened with bread in the late 19th century. This, in my view, is at least one of the roots of the current food culture. \n\nPart II will have to come tomorrow, I've just had a day that was much too long to keep this up. " ] }

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[ "http://www.delseoul.com/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Doug%27s" ]

[ [], [ "http://www.amazon.com/Down-Earth-Natures-American-History/dp/0195331826", "http://www.amazon.com/The-Botany-Desire-Plants-Eye-World/dp/0375760393" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cs0c57r" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The everyday Joe? No. \n\nThe Catholic Church before the Reformation was great at keeping its corruption a secret on the higher levels, but the corruption within the lower levels was less well kept.\n\n-In local communities, if you were wealthy enough you could buy indulgences, or you could buy yourself a \"clean slate.\" You would pay the priest, donate to the church, or the local church authority, and you could be cleared of any past wrongdoings. The logic was that you did not tell anyone you paid for being cleared, and that paying to the church was a sign of asking for forgiveness by giving money to the cause of the church. However, people did begin to figure out that local churches/officials were corrupt and selling these slates to people.\n\nBut that is not the end of the corruption. \n\nThe full grasp of corruption-\n\nMany peasants and commoners did not know how to read in their native language, let alone in Latin- which every Bible was written in. This was more exposed by the printing press when bibles were first begun to be printed in other languages, allowing for people to be able to actually read from them. The reason this is such a large deal is that before, only the educated rich and nobility, and members of the clergy could read Latin, and could basically claim many things were in the Bible, and then conveniently allow other things to go unmentioned. This actually was covered up for a while due to the lack of education and lack of bibles until the printing press beginning to mass manufacture them, as well as literacy rates rising because of the printing press. Although I'm not sure of the exact wording of claims, many dealt with money, with the idea that the current ruler had divine power from God to rule over their country, that conditions were actually ideal and commoners should not attempt to improve them, etc.\n\nAnd of course political corruptness- which even many members of the nobility and low ranking clergy did not know about. The Catholic Church was a huge power in Europe during its height, and even after- directly influencing, and could be argued to be controlling the Austrian, Spanish, and Holy Roman Empires, as well as many Italian city-states, German provinces, and before the reformation, English lands. An example of said influence over the Spanish empire was that in the Southern American colonies, natives could first be enslaved BUT the policy changed after the church declared that no converted native could be enslaved- initially against the Spanish's wishes, who eventually accepted, which combined with natives not being \"suitable for physical labor\" led to the growth of importing African slaves- who were deemed by the church to not be human, and not be capable of conversion.\n\nAnyway, this political corruption lasts from directly influencing governments in Italian city-states, having links with both monarchies in established empires, as well as the governments of individual provinces and cities. the Italian city-state Florence for example had its government incredibly linked with the Catholic Church, many officials being members, or associated with members of the church- the crimes of individuals linked with the church often went unpunished or unheard of until a large amount of time had already passed.\n\nIn short- the people doing it, and very high ranking nobility were aware, as they directly benefited from the corruption. the average Joe only could know of the corruption at the local level (which was actually classed as corruption in the Catholic Church, despite it being a large source of income for many small/local churches) The corruption came in political, economic, and social \"waves\" and was expressed differently, and of course when the corruption began to be learned about more, we see an alternative- Protestantism begin to become popular in areas where corruption was exposed more. Even after the reformation, the Church still retained massive amounts of power, but now with a rival, and a large amount of land lost due to Protestants taking over England, ruling over Ireland, and German nobility being allowed to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism to be followed within their lands, power was lost.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ch6f3yq" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "I'm a history student and this was one of the questions we got asked this year in our 'History of Violence' module. \nThis probably isn't the answer you wanted to receive but to be honest it's difficult to say, because it depends how you look at it.\nFor example, there was a lot more a risk of being murdered as you went about your daily life then, just because we didn't have as many safety measures then as we do now (street lamps, cameras etc.), and it goes without saying that punishment was a lot more violent in the Middle Ages and you were punished severely for minor things.\nBut if you look at the last century alone for example, we've had two world wars, genocide and have had the threat of nuclear war. In my opinion at least, while people in the Middle Ages faced a lot of violent behaviour, it wasn't able to be carried out on the same scale as it is today. If you take an average bomb from an aircraft as an example, it's capable of doing a lot more destruction from quite a large distance away than say close quarters combat with swords. It's also capable of killing more people in a shorter amount of time.\n\nWhile it is quite controversial and I don't necessarily agree with his theories, Steven Pinker wrote a book called 'The Better Angels of our Nature'. _URL_0_\nBasically, he argues that over time we have gotten less violent. But looking at the Middle Ages specifically, he says they WERE violent because of religious intolerance, the government was divided between barons, knights etc. so there was a lot of fighting to regain power, and he also mentions how a lot of entertainment in the Middle Ages had an element of torture - such as jousting or animal baiting. But he describes the Middle Ages as fairly civilised and thinks they were less violent than humans prior to the Middle Ages.\n\nFinally, it sort of depends on what you consider 'violence'. Do you consider it physical violence such as murder alone? Or is persecution and prejudice violent behaviour too? Does violent behaviour include slaughter of animals, or just against humans?\n\nI hope I managed to at least attempt to answer your question. Like most things in history there's different ways of looking at a topic and no definite answer!" ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "cbmt0kb", "cbmt135", "cbmupxk" ], "score": [ 6, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Well, you are in luck, because the quality and number of English language books on daoism in China has increased significantly in recent years. My own journey with daoism (which began about twenty years ago) was much more circuitous than it could have been just ten or fifteen years later. \n\nMore in a moment. Just have to dig up the available sources, most of which are packed for moving next week. \n \nOk, back. \nHere is the newest and best source for a non-specialist - [Livia Kohn's *Introducing Daoism*](_URL_0_). It is readable, comprehensive, and best of all, relatively cheap. It is not a reference text, so that keeps the price down. \n\nAs u/grass_skirt mentioned, Robinet's work is also excellent, but more in depth and academic than the Kohn introduction. \nIf you get really excited and into it - Kohn edited a fantastic two volume grad-level text - [Daoism Handbook](_URL_1_) - but it is better read at the library, unless you want to spend $200+. \n\nWhat you were told by the Daoist is not entirely wrong, but it is such a distillation and simplification that it bears only passing resemblance to *some* of the story of Daoism in China. \nKohn's book lays out all the major strands quite beautifully. Enjoy!", "These might be of interest:\n\nIsabelle Robinet: *Taoism: Growth of a Religion* (trans. Phyllis Brooks); Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1997. \n-----*Taoist meditation: the Mao-shan tradition of great purity* (trans. by Julian F. Pas and Norman J. Girardot); Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, 1993.\n\nThere are references in the *Zhuangzi*, one of the early (supposedly pre-religious) Taoist texts, which seem to be about meditation, known as *zuowang* 'to sit and forget'.\n\nMy understanding is that the modern terms \"philosophical Taoism\" (*daojia*) and \"religious Taoism\" (*daojiao*) are problematic when we try to trace their use historically. Sometimes we are dealing with a bibliographic category, sometimes with a social movement, sometimes with things whose definition as either *daojia* or *daojiao* do not at all match the way we use the terms today. \n\nNathan Sivin's 1978 essay ['On the Word \"Taoist\" as a Source of Perplexity'](_URL_0_) is a classic exposition of the problem. I'm not clear on how the state of the field has progressed since he wrote that essay, however. \n\n/u/lukeweiss will be more helpful in this regard! \n\nEdit: Regarding folk religion: I think the penchant for mixing philosophy with 'folk' mythology is clearly present in the *Zhuangzi* also.\n", "If you're interested in learning more about the history of the religion, I think that the books Lukeweiss has recommended will serve you well. If you're interested in studying some of the primary sources in greater detail, to understand the key early texts of Daoism (namely, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi), then here are a few recommendations for you. Of course, you might choose to read these two books before studying them in greater detail, in which case, look [here](_URL_3_) or [here](_URL_5_) for the Daodejing, and [here](_URL_0_) or [here](_URL_8_) for the Zhuangzi. Now then:\n\n[Allan, Sarah. The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue.](_URL_4_)\n\n[Coutinho, Steve. Zhuangzi and Early Chinese Philosophy: Vagueness, Transformation and Paradox.](_URL_2_)\n\n[Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi. Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip Ivanhoe.](_URL_9_)\n\n[Schwartz, Benjamin. The World of Thought in Ancient China.](_URL_1_.)\n\n[Slingerland, Edward. Effortless Action.](_URL_6_)\n\nThose are the first few books that are coming to mind - they'll certainly help you get started on understanding these important Daoist texts. I think that the Slingerland book and Benjamin Schwartz's book might serve you better as a general introduction to important ideas in Daoist texts, and then the other books can help you delve even deeper. Although, if you are more interested in learning about the history of Daoism than the careful study of early Daoist philosophy, I definitely have to second Lukeweiss' suggestion of [Introducing Daoism](_URL_7_)." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Daoism-World-Religions-Livia/dp/0415439981", "http://www.amazon.com/Daoism-Handbook-set-L-Kohn/dp/0391042378" ], [ "https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:h3hMO2K2l_0J:ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~nsivin/perp.pdf+&hl=en&gl=au&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg-tF9qOu7HRXmBV9T4rSCoOeYD9fXvSWKdscf8ZmwhEAsclruX4pD6Q4sOdRdt9RK8RdIH2P4wmhf8V6vYgZn3UKv56a7yHTPwxtqvQti9SVr2uwjJjnC8LBEtPVeOqLP_fBMZ&sig=AHIEtbSzd5VMTpKr19tiR_a44bOrCPCvpA" ], [ "http://ctext.org/zhuangzi", "http://www.amazon.com/World-Thought-Ancient-China/dp/0674961919/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376405414&sr=1-1&keywords=Schwartz%2C+Benjamin.+The+World+of+Thought+in+Ancient+China", "http://www.amazon.com/Zhuangzi-Early-Chinese-Philosophy-Transformation/dp/0754637301/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376405361&sr=1-1&keywords=coutinho+zhuangzi", "http://www.daoisopen.com/DDJTranslations.html", "http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0791433862", "http://ctext.org/dao-de-jing", "http://www.amazon.com/Effortless-Action-Conceptual-Metaphor-Spiritual/dp/0195314875/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376405433&sr=1-1&keywords=effortless+action+slingerland", "http://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Daoism-World-Religions-Livia/dp/0415439981", "http://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html", "http://www.amazon.com/Religious-Philosohical-Aspects-Chinese-Philosophy/dp/0791441121/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376405387&sr=1-1&keywords=Religious+and+Philosophical+Aspects+of+the+Laozi.+Mark+Csikszentmihalyi" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ccuju67", "cculqy4", "cculr5p", "ccv2tpf" ], "score": [ 7, 9, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "[Richard III's body](_URL_1_) found under a parking lot.\n\n[Roman coins](_URL_0_) found in Hertfordshire.\n\nMore broadly, I anticipate a huge amount of stuff to be coming out in the next few years on Magna Carta and the surrounding period, too, since its 800th anniversary is coming in 2015. In addition, libraries are digitizing medieval manuscripts more and more rapidly every year, which is wonderful for those of us studying medieval Europe who don't live in Europe.\n\n", "Rather dully, I'm most excited about a database. \n\n_URL_0_ - the National Archives recently made the (searchable) writings and correspondence of the U.S. \"Founding Fathers\" available for free online. I don't study the Founding Fathers, but it's already proving to be a tremendous resource. The annotations and biographical sketches attached to correspondence are particularly helpful for quick information on certain figures in early U.S. history.", "The [treasure](_URL_0_) found in the unopened rooms of an old temple in Southern India (Kerala).", "The recent dig at Jellinge in Denmark, it haven't really been made public yet, but some interesting discoveries have already been made. It makes me literally shiver with joy." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-22794839", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882" ], [ "http://founders.archives.gov" ], [ "http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/30/120430fa_fact_halpern" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cvoxd6m" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "The first serious emigration from what you describe as the colonies to the UK took place post American War of Independence with American loyalists arriving in the UK. Subsequent to that immigration to the UK from the colonies was mostly that of seamen, mostly from the sub continent, \"paying off\" ships in the UK and, sometimes, settling in whichever port they were in. The main centres of this pattern of immigration were Cardiff, Liverpool, London and the Tyne, especially South Shields. This book has some details Coolies, Capital and Colonialism: Studies in Indian Labour History. Rana P. Behal, Marcel van der Linden, published at Cambridge. It is a bit polemical at times, but the essential story is correct. More here _URL_0_ also here The Invisible Empire: White Discourse, Tolerance and Belonging Again, this is a bit polemical with condemnation of the living conditions of lascars, whilst seemingly unconcerned, or unaware, that living conditions for British or other European seamen were pretty much the same." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.southampton.ac.uk/archaeology/research/projects/lascar_lives_and_the_east_india_company.page" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c78q51e", "c78qigg", "c78xui4", "c78y1d6" ], "score": [ 5, 3, 5, 6 ], "text": [ "I don't usually like to do this, but...\n\n[Charles Darwin](_URL_0_) and [Alfred Wallace](_URL_2_) are widely accepted as the two men who independently established [the theory of evolution by natural selection](_URL_1_). There had been theories before about how species might have changed and developed over time, but these men were the ones who theorised that this development might occur through natural selection.\n\nI've linked a few Wikipedia articles to get you started on the basics of this topic (if you don't even know that Darwin is the \"father\" of evolutionary theory, then you definitely need to start with the basics).\n\nI hope this helps.\n", "There have been \"theories of evolution\" going back to [the pre-Socratic philosophers](_URL_0_).\n\nHowever, the idea of biological evolution didn't become \"established\" and \"accepted\" until Darwin proposed a workable mechanism. ", "Al-Jahiz, in the 9th century, outlined some basic tenants of evolution:\n\n\"Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring.\"\n\nThis probably sounds more similar to what Lamarck was saying than what Darwin eventually envisioned, though.", "Ooooh, I got this!! The roots of what we consider evolutionary theory really begin with the theory of \"unity of composition\" proposed by Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (zoology professor at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France) in the 1830's. He basically said that all animal body plans could be reduced to common organ components—which indicated a common ancestry and supported the idea of \"transmutation\" (evolution). What came to be called \"Geoffreyism\" was influential in Europe outside of establishment circles in Britain, but its connections with revolutionary ideals prevented it from being accepted at Oxford and Cambridge...which is why it's not widely known about today. In 1844, a Scottish writer/publisher named Robert Chambers anonymously published a book called *Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation* which explained transmutation in terms that the average middle-class reader could understand. He wasn't a scientist, and obviously his writings still had a religious slant, but he brought together a whole bunch of scientific disciplines to flesh out the notion of transmutation. It was still highly controversial, but *Vestiges* sold hundreds of thousands of copies in several consecutive editions (more than Darwin's *Origins* ever did) and more than certainly paved the way for Darwin.\n\nRecommended reading: *The Politics of Evolution* by Adrian Desmond, and *Victorian Sensation* by James Secord (about the impact Chambers' *Vestiges*)\n\nEdit: What set Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace apart from their scientific predecessors was that:\n\nA.) Darwin provided a lot of good, hard, empirical evidence for evolution.\n\nB.) They provided a *mechanism* for evolution/transmutation: natural selection\n\nC.) Darwin's solidly \"establishment\" status (in contrast with the political outsider mentality of Geoffrey's supporters) made evolution respectable." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought#1859.E2.80.931930s:_Darwin_and_his_legacy", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#History_of_evolutionary_thought" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cic0c5k" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Catholics in Ireland certainly were oppressed. Big time. There is a famous phrase that stems from the famine days called \"taking the soup\" This was basically you had two choices: starve or convert to Church of England. This is called souperism. Basically if you decided not to starve it was called taking the soup. \n\nCite:Thomas Edward Jordan (1998). Ireland's Children: Quality of Life, Stress, and Child Development in the Famine Era\n\nThen of course there's Oliver Cromwell. A man still cursed here in Ireland to this day. Cromwell started a bloody campaign against the Irish catholics and English royalists in 1649 and ended in 1653. Over 200,000 Irish are believed to have died during this time. All catholic land was confiscated during this time too in the \"Act for the Settlement of Ireland of 1652\"\n\nCite: \"Rather the region was chosen out of exaggerated respect for the impermeability of the Shannon line\".\n\nDuring this time there was a famous phrase \"Hell or Connaught\" Which meant you can either die or be exiled to Connaught. Connaught is a province in the west of Ireland. It has awful farming conditions. So really you were going to die regardless. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5bg8eb" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "This is the question that destroys the image of Empires as being inherently evil states; why did so many people not only accept being part of an Empire but actively take part in them? Was it because the majority of humanity is/was evil or complacent? Or is it because Imperial states can offer something to people that is actually helpful?\n\nBefore I sink my teeth into this, a major disclaimer; I am not an imperialist. I don't think Empires are inherently evil, but I don't think that they're *nice* either. They are morally ambiguous, capable of both great acts of service and great acts of cruelty because they operate on such a large scale; anything they do is magnified in impact. It is certainly never, ever nice to be caught in an Empire's way.\n\nSo, let's turn to your first subquestion- why don't the conquered provinces rebel? In many Empires, the conquered provinces did attempt to rebel initially or even multiple times over the course of the Empire's lengthtime. For example, Egypt managed to gain independence from Achaemenid Persia not once but twice. In fact the examples are so numerous that I can't begin to list all of history's rebellions here.\n\nSo what do Empires do to solve this problem, as clearly many did not face constant revolts everywhere at once? Well, firstly most ancient Empires weren't able to centralise their administration as we would recognise; the King would only ever be able to really rule everything in a 50 mile radius around where he was at a given moment. This is a weakness in the state, but it was very often turned into a strength of Empires; lightness of touch. In many Empires, provinces, subkingdoms and whatever were relatively free to do as they wished as long as they didn't threaten the Empire and kept to their treaty obligations. In many cases, no direct governor was appointed- instead, a 'client-king' was installed; he was normally a local who had proven loyalty to the Empire in question, or who had been shown favour. Whilst these states obviously lost their ability to make foreign policy decisions, on a day to day level they could essentially continue as before.\n\nSpeaking of courting locals, many states went straight for the jugular and outright attempted to buy the loyalty of local elites. When I say local elites, I mean the people in a society who have control over social organisation, economics, everything like that. Imagine Medieval aristocrats for a relatively clear example of 'an elite'. Many Empires would court these elite groups on a case-by-case basis; an Empire controlling Babylon example might have the 'Emperor' act as King of Babylon, and repair the major temples of the city, whereas an Empire controlling a Greek city might guarantee to keep a certain ruling family in charge. By keeping the local elite onside, it meant that even if there was resistance in a given area Empires would face no *organised* resistance, which often meant it collapsed easily and quickly. Indeed, these local communities often began policing themselves whenever rebellion seemed to be on the cards.\n\nIn addition, starting from the very first Empire (Assyria) measures were adopted to attempt to counter the limited capacity of the Emperor to directly observe a situation. Efficient communication systems were created to drastically improve the ability of the King to communicate with his governors, generals and other important subjects; pony expresses were the method of choice from Assyria onwards, and did their job extremely well. Not only that, the creation of a vast bureaucracy enabled the Imperial state to actually begin to manage the *vast* amounts of data that would pour in every day. Also importantly, infrastructure was built; roads, forts, garrisons, capital cities, navies, all of these are ways of protecting interests, or speeding up movement.\n\nSpeaking of infrastructure, let's turn to the actual palpable benefits to ordinary people in conquered societies. This is the paragraph in which I basically list all of the nice things that Empires *can* do in the right situation. First and foremost, the world has been a very dangerous place. Not only can settled states declare war on you, but quite often people who were not in 'official states' might just turn up one day and decide to burn your crops, sack your city, plunder its treasures and leave everyone for dead. Empires can legitimately protect the states within its borders in a way that the state wouldn't be able to do on its own. This is one of the reasons to contribute troops to an Empire's forces, or to join them; you are not just protecting the Empire, you are by extension protecting your home as well. Speaking of which, the other major function of many Empires was to protect trade routes- this may not very exciting, but piracy has been a problem for a very long time, as have scams to cheat people out of money or to sink ships for profit. Empires can safeguard trade routes, and even increase the volume of trade by including the traders in an enormous network of exchange; there is a reason why so many cities became prosperous under Empires even without direct intervention. Empires also act as arbitrators in disputes between states- for all that the Empire is usually working for their advantage, that does not also mean they can't legitimately solve disputes. This is in itself a way of keeping peace- preventing disputes escalating into war. Indeed, if ordinary people were wronged they actually now had a level far beyond that of their direct king or governor to appeal to- appeals to Emperors for help have been around for a very long time. And this was actually sometimes effective- from a pragmatic point of view, if a governor was so hated that ordinary people were constantly sending representatives to complain about how harsh he was, it was entirely in the Emperor's interest to intervene and replace the man with a new governor. In most Empires, you actually had to consider what ordinary people wanted because you *needed* some element of co-operation in order to continue to exist.\n\nAnd last but not least in terms of tangible benefits, as I mentioned *everything* is on a larger scale. Glory you win on behalf of an Emperor is glory resounding throughout dozens of nations and cities, achievements are on an Imperial scale. An Empire might often invest immense amounts of money into making an area prosperous, in several cases they even spent time and money on making sure the local farming was up to scratch and invested in upgrades where possible (I'm mostly thinking of the Seleucid Empire here). If you're a trader, you have access to a vast regulated network where you are guaranteed safe passage and where a single currency is likely to be serviceable the entire time. If you're an intellectual, instead of being the biggest fish in a tiny pond you can suddenly find yourself in a whole lake; Empires are often breeding grounds for intellectual study as previous separate trains of thought encounter one another and begin to react to one another. If you count religion as part of intellectual thought, which in the ancient world I would, then just look at the Roman Empire between about 100 BC- 400 AD; the number of new religions formed from interactions of older ones is dizzying.\n\nEmpires are not nice, but they are not necessarily parasitic; there can often be tangible benefits to being part of an Empire, and even reasons to actively prefer to remain part of the Empire rather than attempt to leave.\n\nHowever, let's turn to the stick; the ways that Empires controlled their subjects. You are right in saying military dominance was not enough, but in the case of some Empires they were already militarily dominant before becoming an Empire; in the case of Assyria it was already the largest state in the Near East, with a standing army of 60,000 men by 800 BC. This is not an insignificant thing. Additionally, there are other ways of using that military force to control populations than as an army; many Empires garrison forces in cities and other areas using forts. When 600 armed soldiers loyal to the Emperor are in your city, you think twice before trying to get rid of them. Some Empires went further, and made locals responsible for billeting and feeding the soldiers. It's a canny if really nasty move. Also, taxes serve a twofold purpose; they enrich the Empire's core whilst also reducing the power of the local people being taxed. If you're being taxed and have troops in your house that *you* have to pay for in terms of living expenses, how do you even begin to consider resistance?\n\nAdditionally, the method of getting local elites on board is also a method of control. As is propaganda, like erecting massive *stele* in a city talking about your conquests- even if almost no-one there can read it, they are impressive to look at. And you divide and conquer; you move populations around to weaken them. However, a major caveat here- relocating populations was never used by early Empires as a punishment, the intention was usually that they had a new city and needed a population whilst also weakening the strength of the original people. Indeed, usually you ended up taking much of the local elite out of the original territory- the intellectuals often ended up in the Empire's capitals, the soldiers in the Empire's armies, the scribes in the Empire's administration.\n\nNow, this was a bit sprawling, and there's a few things wrong with this post; I've not used specific examples very much, it didn't dwell on any of the topics long enough, and sourcing it is going to be difficult because I'm piecing together my knowledge of multiple Empires rather than using specific texts that talk about all of them. So if either the OP or anyone else wants me to elaborate about any of this, feel free." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dsfd2j1" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "No, there are no reactions recorded.\n\nIn general there isn't a whole lot of written material about Christianity from Jewish sources in this period. Rabbinic sources do have occasional reference to Jesus, but they don't generally contain meaningful details. It's also an issue that the narratives put Jesus in the wrong time period. It is likely that they are literary ways to talk about Christianity in general, but because of distance from the context of authorship (and the massive amount of censorship that's happened of these passages) the exact meaning is not entirely clear.\n\nNone of these have any reference to a resurrection at all, much less any refutation of it. Really, the period was a very tumultuous time for Judaism in general, and most Rabbinic texts are intended for internal consumption. So it is somewhat unlikely that opinions on Christianity would be discussed very much.\n\nThe big exception to all this is Josephus, who was Jewish and wrote history texts. He did not refute Jesus's supposed resurrection, he actually records it as a historical event. But that passage is likely to have been either tampered with or entirely added by Christian scribes, since it would be somewhat incongruous for a Jewish author to write that, even at such an early time before Christianity and Judaism had become completely distinct religions." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cdx2rmp" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "Territory that we now call France was part of Roman republic (and later Roman empire) for centuries. Its previous Celtic-speaking population adopted Latin language which later developed into dialects of Vulgar Latins, called Romance languages, which included the ancestor of Old French and finally French. \n\nWhereas most of Germany were left unconquered by the Romans. This area was later inhabited by various Germanic (and to lesser extent Slavic) tribes. This is why the French speak languages descending from Vulgar Latin, where as the Germans speak languages from Germanic languages (and to lesser extent we have Sorbians in eastern Germany which speak a Slavic language).\n\nThere were indeed various migrations from area of modern-day Germany to France after the fall of Roman empire, most importantly the Visigoths, the Burgundians, and the Franks, from whom France took its name, but these \"barbarians\" migrants were absorbed into the existing, settled Gallo-Roman population and mostly adopted Romance languages. \n\nBy the time of Charlemagne, whose ancestors were Germanic Franks from modern-day Low Countries and western Germany, the Franks already started using Old French in addition of their Frankish languages. This shift further accelerated under his successors as Charlemagne's western Frankish realm (which consisted of most of Romance area) was separated from Charlemagne's eastern Frankish realm (which consisted of Germanic and Slavic areas).\n\nHaving said that we also have to consider the modern phenomenon of ethnic nationalism which equated citizenship with ethnolinguistic identity. There was indeed area in France whose population until recently spoke Germanic dialects, the Alsace-Lorraine, or in German Elsass-Lothringen in the east and Dutch-speaking area in South Flanders near English Channel. The Germanic languages in these area declined significantly following the rise of Nationalism in French revolution, where education in French and speaking in French were enforced, often very severely. This strict enforcement affected not only Germanic languages in France, but also non-French Romance languages such as Occitan and Provencal. The practice is known as *Vergonha* in Occitan.\n\nAlsace-Lorraine was conquered by the Germans from France in 1870 following Franco-Prussian war. After regaining the area after World War I, the French intensified their Francification in the area, and today Alsace-Lorraine is a French-speaking area. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d4nbur4" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Very early.\n\nThe cities Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley Civilization (which existed fro 3000 BC-1700 BC) which can now be found in modern-day Pakistan and northwest India were excavated to have several multi-storey buildings. \n\nAnd an interesting feature of the very early city of Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey which existed from 7500 BC to 5700 BC was that ladders from the ceiling were used to enter the houses instead of doorways. \n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c40cdta", "c40damu" ], "score": [ 2, 6 ], "text": [ "I would say that it was probably more to do with the fact that towards the end of WWII, the UK and the USA supported the Greek royal family and government against comunist and leftist military groups in the Greek civil war, and the western-backed government eventually established control. They then joined NATO and got money as part of the Marshall plan, so were closely related to other European nations that later made the EEC, later EU", "*As a note, I'm going to use the term EU throughout, though technically EEC is accurate for much of the period discussed*.\n\nThe answer is no, though Greece did receive special political consideration:\n\n\nTo give you an historical sketch, Greece ascended to the EU in 1981, several decades before other eastern european states with similar economies did. \n\nThe process to join the EU is complicated, and a consists of a mix of legal and political barriers. For purposes of discussion, they involve:\n\n* Mandatory 'red line' issues, mainly relating to human rights complaince and legislative procedure. Essentially the ascending state needs to be compliant, or able to rapidly comply with all the conditions of EU membership (the [Four Freedoms](_URL_1_), human rights, resolution of political issues with other EU states, etc. \n* Legal and economic 'amber line' issues. The EU's commission, it's exceptionally assembled civil service, audits a prospective nation's economy and legal infrastructure for issues which may not be show-stoppers as red-line issues are, but which make membership complicated. \n* Political tussling. The political as opposed to administrative leaders of each EU state then examine the Commission's above work, and decide on whether to proceed. They can overrule the 'amber' issues, but not the red ones. \n* Implementation. The EU will organize a framework and timetable with both its existing member states, and the new applicant. Existing states can attach conditions to ascension, an example being the UK's arguing for a bar on polish migration for a number of years after Poland joined (normally Polish-EU citizens would automatically gain a right to immigrate to other EU states on ascension, but concerns over an influx led to a negotiated time-delay on this one particular right). \n\nGreece passed the red-line test, but failed the amber one. Commission officials officially recommended against ascension due to Greece's distance and political and economic underdevelopment compared to the rest of the EU.\n\nThe member states however disagreed, and overruled the commission. There was a **huge** amount of political wrangling over this, [for example here](_URL_2_), and there were widespread concerns over Greece's ability to integrate successfully with the EU.\n\nSo, greece got special treatment, but was it because of it's pedigry?\n\nI don't think so.\n\n* Greece had just emerged from a political dictatorship. A dictatorship is obviously utterly unacceptable to EU membership, and as with Portugal and Spain, NATO / EU interests were decidedly in favour of integrating them into a political structure that had proved astoundingly effective at preserving democracy and stability (the origins of the EU lie in the attempt to make ['war unthinkable'](_URL_0_) amongst its member states by shackling them together economically.) \n\n* It's application came a year after Turkey invaded Cyprus and led to Greece withdrawing from NATO as a result of inaction. Given that the cold war was raging, keeping Greece firmly in the Western / Capitalist sphere was undoubtedly a motivation amongst the EU states.\n\n* Having mentioned the Cold War, it might be a good idea to bring up the general aim of EU enlargement. Without getting into the politics of it (as a rule, EU members opposed to perceived centralisation favour enlargement, whilst integrationists oppose it) the EU's final size is all of geographic Europe minus Russia. Of course, because of the cold war the Eastern European states were out, and Turkey is a cultural issue that the EU has still not resolved. Switzerland and Norway also just don't want in (yet), so Greece was, at the time, a pretty logical move for expansion.\n\n\nSo those factors should hopefully make it clear that there were powerful EU, Cold War and NATO reasons for allowing Greece an exception.\n\nWhat about culture?\n\nGreece is Christian, capitalist and definitively European. Though it was under Ottoman control, it retained (and more interestingly, redeveloped) a powerful identity of its own. If you had to chalk modern Greece into a cultural class, European would come before any other word.\n\nIt's important to understand that this Greek identity is, romanticism aside, stridingly different from the classical greek one. From their tussles over reform of their language to their decidedly un-athenian government structures for much of the post-war era, Greece is not ancient greece. \n\nCultural issues don't usually play a favourable role in the EU. They serve as a political excluder as Turkey demonstrates, but given the uniqueness of each EU state's own culture, Greece's (and I would dispute this somewhat) role as father of Western thought would have little bearing on the Greece of now, other than to make clear to the EU that it is within the ambit of expansion (as Turkey is).\n\nSo I doubt it had anything to do with ascension. **Certainly** the Greek press and sympathetic journalists would probably have had a field day in the propaganda wars that were going on in between the Commission's rejection and the political organs overruling. But that doesn't at all mean they formed a substantive part of the decision making.\n\nOne last point: Greece's economic woes are more of an issue of the Euro, which was separate to membership. The Euro wasn't a serious proposal until several decades after Greece joined and by that point all EU economies were deemed competent enough for the monetary union (we can debate back and forth over the naysayers at the time, and whether they were prescient or just sceptical). \n\nA telling point is that if Greece was being pulled into the EU despite its economic inability, member states would have attached strings to its ascension in the same way that ascending Eastern European states did (remember Poland?) in the 2000s." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuman_Declaration", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market", "http://www.cvce.eu/obj/success_konstantinos_karamanlis_le_figaro_11_february_1976-en-19074d97-efda-45e1-b956-931833bb89c7" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f1nwvc7" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The first problem there is that ,due to the popularity of \"Celtic\" romanticism and Celtic Revival, a lot of features are popularly attributed to all of Celtic peoples without necessarily being attested or verified in sources, either historical or archaeological Druidism isn't an exception to this rule.\n\nEven if, thanks to exploiting ancient and medieval sources as well archaeological data, we might have a relatively clearer perception of Druids, it still a fragmented image where various interpretation create important academic debates.\n\nIn Antiquity, Druidism is only mentioned by Greek or Roman authors as a Gaulish and British feature : never the word or an equivalent position is described for Celtiberians, Danubian Celts or Irish; it doesn't negate the possibility of their presence in these peoples, but the argument tends to revolve about the axiom of Druidism being pan-Celtic, which is largely unproven.These sources first identify druids in the late IIIrd century BCE but it's possible that they were known by Greek scholars as far as the Vth century, after centuries of contact with Mediterranean Celts in comparison with Pythagoricians. Did druids only appeared with the LaTenian period, however? This is the other bone of contention between historians arguing in favour of an earlier, proto-Celtic institution, and those arguing in favour of a Gaulish institution born out of the contact with Mediterranean peoples (trough trade or mercenariate) and the transformation of local polities in the VIth to Vth centuries BCE^(1).For the sake of transparency, I must say I rather agree with the latter and follows essentially this perspective in this post : even there, the existence of \"pre-Druids\" existing from the late Bronze Age, is still considered possible.\n\nThese Gaulish and British druids had an important set of responsibilities, ranging from organising religion to being philosopher, as well as scholars and judges.However we can still see a functional slip of Druids, still considered as seers in the Vth century, when *Uates* took over this role in the IInd; which possibly hints at the role of the aforementioned \"pre-Druids\", or even as sorcerers of sorts which would be essentially cast away later in Gaulish Druidism in favour of a more rationalist figure closer to a Greek philosopher or a theologian than a priest (bards and uates being unfortunately ignored by Caesar, hence a later mix up of Druids as seers, sacrificer and priests).In this perspective, contacts with Greeks since the VIth century, the Rhone trade road entering deep in Gaulish and Celtic heartlands, might have well played a role there, especially given the trope of Gaulish philhellenism (hellenic influence being obvious in regions closer to Massalia, as it appears in the oppidae of Ensérune or Entremont; but also further as demonstrated by the Vix Krater) new ideas colliding with old ones in the early Celtic states of the region, filling a social vacuum with the decline of Halstattian aristocracies in the VIth - Vth centuries; partly explaining the cultural rupture between Halstattian and Latenian cultures.Ancient Greek made comparisons with Druids and Pythagoricians, and the fortune of the latter in Greek Italy might provide something to the idea early Druidism could have been partly and indirectly inspired by Pythagore's disciples but as well by Orphic tendencies among Greeks, especially with the stress on metempsychosis. (Peoples closer to Mediterranean Sea are also the same that seem the less marked, if at all, by a Druidic influence; which would stress the indirect transmission and an original emergence of Druidism among Gauls).\n\nGaulish sanctuaries might be an interesting feature too on this regard : the appear, almost out of the left field, in the IVth and IIIrd centuries without known predecessors. While superficially Greek-like on the exterior, the interior is open-aired and both the sacred wood (*nemeton*) and the altar are close to each _URL_0_ would be tempting (and it is done, truth to be told) to associate this brand new religious materiality to Druidism : chronological correspondence isn't really perfect tough, and it would require new archaeological discoveries to be more decisive when it come to Britain (Britto-Roman temples, as Roman temples in Gaul, being quite distinct from the aforementioned sanctuaries)On the other hand, it was previously thought to be rather a northern Gaulish thing but equivalent had been found in southern Gaul too, namely in Le _URL_1_'s hard not to hypothesize a Druidic presence in Germania, where people share essentially the same culture than Gauls until the Ist century BCE, but there's a lack of historical and archaeological sources to propose something strong enough; although speculating about their presence there isn't really implausible; that the known Druidic annual council took place in Gaul (in the territory of Carnutes, believed to live in the center of Gaul) and the comparison with \"lay\" Gaulish council might indicate that neither British druids or their hypothesized Germanic colleagues took part in these.\n\nDruidic presence in Britain is nevertheless attested for the Antiquity trough Roman sources, which giving the important ties between Gaulish and British peoples is quite logical, as well as an increased presence pointed by Caesar since the IInd century (probably because Roman influence was detrimental to Druidic teaching even before the conquest). Welsh sources are too scarce to be really definitive, but could hint at a pre-Roman reality.Presence of druids in ancient Ireland, however, is a challenge : there's simply no mention of them for the period and only medieval texts which depict them as different figures than British or Gaulish counterparts : wizards, enchanters, brewers, sorcerers, or even quacks. Giving the relative isolation of Ireland, it might be possible that an equivalent of \"pre-Druids\" remained there as an archaic feature, possibly called druids by later chroniclers linking them to what they knew of Gaulish or British pagan religious figures.\n\nEventually, what we call Druidism from ancient sources about Gauls and Britons might have been only one of the religious (understood as an institutions) traditions of the various Celtic cultures, which could be compared only to what might have existed in Ireland as an isolated archaic survival; but not efficiently to Celtiberians or Danubian peoples due to the utter lack of historical and archaeological evidence.\n\nRegarding your second question : aforementioned contacts between Celts and Greeks don't seem to have taken place in Balkans, mostly because migrations to Middle Danube and Balkans took place only in the IIIrd century BCE; but also because contacts there took a more confrontational look with raiding expeditions. While druidic presence is possibly hinted at trough the *Drunemeton* of the Galatians, it might be due to a Gaulish influence rather than a local \"re-creation\" of Druidism (although Druids themselves aren't accounted for in Galatia, maybe due to an early and intense Hellenistic influence).It is only at this point that Celtic influence (either due to migration of Celtic or Celticized peoples; or Celticization trough trade or relations of local peoples) can really be pointed at in Transylvania, when Druidism is already attested in Gaul.\n\nThe (broken) source in the Wikipedia article seems to comes from Carl Wadman and Catherine Mason's *Encyclopedia of the European People;* where a lot of assumptions made about Druids (as being pre-Celtic, unmistakably seers, not taking part in fights, direct continuity between ancient and medieval Druids etc.) could benefit from actual sources, and some other are blatantly wrong (Caesar never mentioned Anglesey as a Druidic centre, neither Bibracte by the way). Both of the authors seems to be freelance writers of pop-history and, while I don't want to seem lacking respect to them as persons, you'd be better off with actual historians of Celtic peoples (*Druids : a very short introduction*, by Barry Cunliffe for instance even if you'll find he describes a much different perspective that the one in this post)\n\nWhoever put this source in the Wikipedia article, furthermore, *doesn't seem to have even actually read it,* as the author states that \"The Dacian priestly class may have emulated the Druids of the Celts\" (it's technically possible, but a direct Pythagorician or Orphic influence from Greeks is as if not more plausible) which you could recognize as the exact contrary of t*he Dacian priestly class may have influenced the* *druids* *of the Celts*\n\n\\- *The Celtic Gauls: Gods, Rites and Sanctuaries*; Jean-Louis Brunaux; 1988\n\n\\- *Les Druides - Des philosophes chez les Barbares*; Jean-Louis Brunaux; 2006\n\n\\- *The Druids*; Stuart Piggot; 1968\n\n(on a more Indo-Europeanist and Pan-Celticist take)\n\n\\- *Les Druides*; François Leroux, Christian Guyonvarc'h; 1985" ] }

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[ [ "other.It", "Caylar.It" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fkdvg1x", "fkb7wn0", "fkbcity" ], "score": [ 8, 10, 34 ], "text": [ "I can perhaps add a few notes on the character, raise some complications, and offer some ideological background given to these distinctions in the Archaic period. \n\nPenelope is presented as a crafty, prudent, wise, loyal, yet also empathic wife (e.g. Hom. Od. 24.191-203) and this is her reputation also later, for instance in Apollodorus and Pausanias. Yet she is strangely remote from her family of origin (even her father plays no part in the Odyssey) and is explicitly contrasted with the sorceresses (Circe, Calypso) and other superhuman women, including Helen (Hom. Od. 4.219-235), and with the husband killer Klytaimnestra, all of whom exemplify normatively deviant forms of wife/womanhood. \n\nUnlike these women, Penelope is therefore a character designed to be an ideal in loyalty and decorum, in her weaving, her devotion to her husband's family, her production of a good son, and her crafty preservation of the household in her husband's absence. Her character therefore tells us about the idealising elite expectations for married women in the Archaic period, but little about their actual, average behaviour, which surely involved closer ties to their family of origin, especially in an extreme situation like the one the Odyssey explores. Looking beyond the idealisation, she is also, however, linked to Odysseus throughout the Odyssey by inverse similes, designed to undercut and enrich the portrayal of the ideal gender roles by pointing out their potential inverses.\n\nAs others have pointed out, the sexual politics of the Odyssey and its differentiation by gender does agree broadly with other normative texts (Xenophon's Oeconomicus, Plato's Laws, Demosthenes and Lysias Speeches involving family matters, some archaic poetry etc.), though they are largely from particularly restrictive Athens and later in date. In the Odyssey itself, having multiple lovers is a trait of bad or superhuman women and therefore certainly conceivable, but not normatively acceptable. What Odysseus does, sleeping with divine women, is however not a simple matter either: The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite offers a different perspective on such relations, in that Anchises is weakened by his sexual encounter with a goddess, something Odysseus escapes, perhaps because these relations are not being presented as legitimate relations, but as exceptional relations meant to characterise the deviant women and the difference between divine and human experience rather than Odysseus.\n\nWhat is at work here more generally is a deep-rooted concern with Eros (“desire”), a primal force (Hes. Theog. 116-122) that has to be controlled by culture, but causes failures of such control in many a form. This force is imagined in the Archaic period to have taken form for mankind via Pandora, who turns mankind into a race with two sexes, ending the golden age (Hes. Op. 57-92; Theog. 590-613) and making man dependent on women for offspring. This ideologically „explains“ and „justifies“ the difference in social space accorded women in sexual matters, as they hence have to be controlled (by rites of passage like marriage) as sources of evil. Lack of such control causes most of the messes Greek tragedy explores.\n\n**Some reading:**\n\nSkinner, Marilyn B., *Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture*, London 2013.\n\nWohl, Victoria J., “Standing by the Stathmos: The Creation of sexual Ideology in the ‘Odyssey’”, in: *Arethusa* 26:1 (1993), 19-50.\n\nFoley, Helene P., “’Reverse similes’ and sex roles in the Odyssey”, in: *Arethusa* 11 (1978), 7-26.", "It is not quite an identical question (and if you have followup questions, let me know), but you may be interested in the answers to [this similar question](_URL_0_) by u/sunagainstgold (especially considering the ways in which a mortal/divine pairing could fall outside the normal rules of marriage), u/AristaAchaion, and me.", "The short answer is that it was a big, BIG double standard.\n\nAncient Greeks were extremely misogynistic by modern standards, and even by ancient standards. Women weren’t allowed out of the home alone, and they were expected to get married young, spin a lot of wool, and die in childbirth in their early twenties.\n\nA good source for this is “On the Murder of Eratosthenes,” a speech by Lysias. You can get a good sense of what was allowed and not allowed for women in Athens.\n\nFor the Greeks, to penetrate was to be a man. Womanhood was defined by chastity to better facilitate transfer of property via inheritance and manhood was expressed by having sex with women, having sex with men, having sex with boys, and stabbing people. All forms of penetration.\n\nRe: Agamemnon, Aeschylus inserts a metaphor early on in the work which implies that Agamemnon’s real crime wasn’t taking Cassandra as a slave, but rather damaging the household. When he first returns, Clytemnestra has him tread over some tapestries from the palace to symbolically re-create his sacrifice of Iphigenia to Artemis. Bringing Cassandra back was an insult to Clytemnestra, but not beyond the realm of normal. Killing Iphigenia wasn’t a crime because he killed his daughter, but because he diminished the worth of the household. Clytemnestra taking Aegisthus as a lover, however, was a good enough reason for Orestes to murder her. In short, Agamemnon was not killed only for his adultery.\n\nRe: Penelope and Odysseus, Odysseus cheating on Penelope is not culturally as bad as Penelope cheating on Odysseus simply because Penelope was considered a part of Odysseus’ household like Iphigenia was hers. The suitors had to die because they were trying to deprive Odysseus of his household. The women of the house who slept with the suitors had to die for betraying the house, but it was extra bad because due to the above mentioned double standard, their act was also considered sexually immoral.\n\ntl;dr: the rules of sexual morality were really different for men and women in Ancient Greece." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8ljrx2/odysseus_has_sex_with_several_women_hecuba_circe/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cz7v3ab" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Modified from an [earlier answer](_URL_0_) \n\nMilitary service in the Petrine army and its successors was very much a mixed bag. One of Peter I's innovations, and one that made Russia's military unique up through the Napoleonic Wars was that he sought to establish a large, permanent force structure that made the Army a major institution within the Russian state. This meant that recruiting for the military embraced both volunteerism and increasingly a type of conscription or blood tax imposed upon peasant communities, the largest source of manpower reserve the Russia state possessed. The choice of recruits for this military poll-tax often fell upon the elders of the serf community, so these elders would often designate certain individuals, often those outside his immediate family, as the ones destined for military service. The Russian Army was also atypical in terms of the length of service, initially life, but limited to 25 years in 1793 and were garrisoned away from their native villages to discourage desertion. \n\nThe typical serf-recruit drafted would have a funeral service in his community before he mustered to his regiment. This funeral service was quite deceptive from the position of the twenty-first century and it is dangerous to take the idea of a funeral for the living at face value. Firstly, given the size of the empire, the limited transportation infrastructure, and the tactic of stationing the formations away from where they were recruited, it was highly unlikely a soldier could ever return home to his native village. Occasionally a soldier would be able to get a request granted for extended leave to return home, but regimental commanders usually granted such requests after receiving a bribe or other sort of inducement. Secondly, entering into the army meant leaving one's native estate (*soslovie*) and entering into a new *soslovie* class. The *soslovie* table of ranks in the eighteenth century was not as hardened and defined as it would become in the nineteenth, but military men, even lowly infantry men, were in a separate social estate set up for military service. This estate status was inheritable and was in evidence in many of the garrison towns that serviced the Russian state. It's important to remember that garrison duty was much more the typical life of a soldier than one of constant battles and garrison life became one of the focal points of a soldier's new life. Although there were restrictions upon soldiers' ability to marry, garrison life could make the regiments' authorities more amenable to granting permission. The children of soldier's wives could enter into garrison schools, first founded in 1721, that fast tracked young boys for military service. Similarly, off duty soldiers were legally allowed to practice a trade and if they were allowed to muster out, such individuals often became tradesmen. Those soldiers though who did not learn a trade or were otherwise incapacitated by injuries acquired during service, were often less fortunate. Some of these individuals returned to their birth communities as free peasants, but there was little role for them in their home towns. The state itself tried to correct this problem in the late eighteenth century by establishing military colonies in the southern portions of the empire, but as with many attempts to ameliorate the lives of older veterans, such efforts were often quite anemic. But it is also worth keeping in mind that the first priority for tsarist military organization was to create an effective and large fighting force, the needs of veterans was often subordinate to this need. The estate system imparted to the Russian army a much greater and cohesive institutional character than many of its contemporaries and the long-term service helped add to the Russian military estate as a somewhat distinct class in Russian society. \n\nHowever, just because the Russian armed forces were a special military estate does not mean that the tsarist state looked fondly upon them. Pay was very much in arrears and quite meager as many general and officers felt that the troops in garrison would spend it on drink and other surly pursuits. Discipline was very rough and corporal punishment was the norm. Cooking the rations of food provided was usually left up to the soldiers themselves, who broke up into small groups called *artel* usually run by a corporal elected by the ranks. The *artel* would organize supplements of vegetables and meat to the rations of bread, rye, or barley the commissaries provided. The organization of these supplemental foodstuffs led to collective sharing of excess pay, gambling windfalls, plunder, or other forms of currency and the *artels* acted as form of a bank for the regiment. This system created a degree of self-sufficiency within the Russian army and was something many foreign commentators observed that the Russian rank and file had an amazing recuperative ability and ability to march great distances in good order. \n\nThat said, there are also a lot of overlap between the life of the average Russian soldier and a number of his European contemporaries. Corporal punishment was quite the norm in most European armies at this time and low pay, or any pay, was a common complaint of soldiers regardless of which state they served. One of the common tropes of European veterans' accounts was that outside of those few who learned a trade, the civilian world had little use for the skills necessary for a soldier. The relative inaccessibility of sources on the Russian army, both because of the language barrier and the administrative poverty of the imperial Russian bureaucracy left a relatively small archival base, ensured that demi-Orientalist depictions of the Russian army by those who fought it have remained relatively unchallenged in a lot of popular literature such as John Elting's *Swords Around a Throne*, whose section on the Russian army is especially poor. The Russian army was in many respects the equal of its contemporaries and in some ways, their superior. The Russian artillery arm started strong under Shuvalov's reforms of the 1740s and remained typically much stronger than its European counterparts. The institution was able to promote individuals like Suvorov whom was just as capable a general as any in Western Europe. The hypothetical serf recruit entered into an institution that reflected the unique conditions of the Russian empire, but shared a lot of experiences in common (low pay, corporal punishment, boredom of garrison life, etc.) with his contemporaries. \n\n*Sources*\n\nDuffy, Christopher. *Russia's Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power, 1700-1800*. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. \n\nKeep, John L. H. *Soldiers of the Tsar: Army and Society in Russia, 1462-1874*. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. \n\nWirtschafter, Elise Kimerling.*From Serf to Russian Soldier*. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. " ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/352yj8/im_a_young_serf_from_near_moscow_at_the_end_of/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d3pi6rw" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The title of Marquess/Marquis in the English/British peerage has only symbolic connection to the title's antecedents of border / \"marcher\" lords on the Continent or in England and Wales. \n\nThe actual use of Marquess in the peerage was to be a title conspicuously higher and more rare than that of Earl, but not dilute the rank of Duke which was (in general) reserved to royalty and public servants of extremely great and unusual distinction. In general, someone who had particularly distinguished himself while already an earl might hope for elevation to the marquessate. \n\nAs with all other peerage titles, it was never associated with any particular (or indeed, any at all) grants of land for private ownership, to say the of bestowal of feudal or governance rights over a territory. Remember that England and then Britain were from the reign of William the Conqueror onward, subject to minor exceptions unitary states, governed by the King's ministers and sheriffs with greater or lesser cooperation of Parliament. The power of a landed peer over his lands wasn't as a ruler but as a private owner. Those powers could be quite considerable of course, but they were artifacts of ownership and not noble title. \n\nIn addition to higher formal social rank, Marquesses differed (and differ) from Earls insofar as they are entitled to the prefix \"Most Honourable\" *vs. \"Right Honourable\"), if they happen simultaneusly to hold an Earldom with a different title their oldest son can be known as \"Earl X\" (as opposed to an Earl's oldest son being able to be known as no more than \"Viscount X\") and their younger sons are entitled to the title of \"Lord\" (vs. \"Honourable\"). But these were not and are not really of much consequence in the second and subsequent generation. Someone who inherited a marquessate had in reality the status among peers afforded to him by his wealth and talent. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dwo7f88" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The short answer is no, no pockets.\n\nThe long answer is that you wouldn't generally speaking have pockets built into your clothing like we do, but you might have a pouch, purse or scrip which fastened to your belt or girdle. A drawstring design like [this](_URL_0_) done on linen would be a good guide for a woman's alms-purse - it dates to the mid-1300s in France - though this is of course an unusually ornate and costly example, given just how much gold and silver thread is involved! Samite might also be an option, but only for the VERY wealthy.\n\nYou see how it has the drawstring across the mouth of the bag (disregard the tassels, they're decorative), and then the two loops of thread? The bag would be tied or hooked on at about hip height, next to a ring of keys, her personal knife for mealtimes or any other personal items the owner wished to keep convenient.\n\nBags for men might be of a similar drawstring type (this was common for both men and women) or might be a more sturdy leather scrip. " ] }

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[ [ "http://cottesimple.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/1340_rectangular_Paris_large.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c89dhks" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I don't know that actual battles would spring up out of a couple thousand armored guys not having anything else to do, but I can tell you with certainty that the First Crusade was organized as a result of boredom among the nobility.\n\nBecause there weren't any major wars going on, the knights were basically just raping and murdering throughout the countryside out of sheer ennui; when Urban called them to Crusade, he was attempting to direct their martial energies into more productive channels." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cix8h9o" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "This really is more of an archaeological and anthropological question so I suggest cross-posting it to /r/AskAnthropology. \n\nBesides that, can you be more specific about which hypotheses you are referring to? There have been tons of hypotheses suggested, and a few are better-accepted, but it's difficult to just blanket critique everything. \n\nAlso, agriculture was developed independently in at least 7-8 different places. Although there are some similarities between them, so we can generalize a little, each place had its own unique geography and the reasons and way that agriculture developed in each place are somewhat different. So it's hard to say that there is any single reason, though many archaeologists have tried to do that. But I don't focus specifically on early agriculture and I'm not up to speed on current ideas about it, so I would rather leave the real answers to other people." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "caq6fq3" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "While there definitely was not a 'united kingdom', the early Saxon migrations might have been coordinated by one or a few enterprising individuals (Bede's Hengest and Horsa, for example). Germanic social structure in this time was not strictly organised under territorial kings, but did allow for the election/appointment/ascendancy of what the Romans and the Franks call 'kings'; basically charismatic war-leaders who dealt with affairs such as foreigners, flotsam, tolls and trade, sacrifices and the supernatural, and large-scale war. Later authors identify for the Saxons a system of 'satrapes', where each region has its own aristocratic 'head' or representative who in a council could organise larger-scale affairs (such as how to respond to the Frankish wars of the 780s). I do not believe that such a system was as straightforward as the later sources suggest, and neither was it already in place in Saxony 400 years earlier. Think rather of a figure like Attila or Alaric, who unite people from different tribes together in undertaking large scale operations.\n\nThat said, much of the Anglo-Saxon migrations are likely to have taken place as individuals or in small groups, rather than massive organised invasions." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dhxrqba" ], "score": [ 42 ], "text": [ "I'm in mobile and don't have access to my notes or books, so I apologize for the less-than rigorous response. \n\nWhat you're asking about can essentially be restated as \"Why does communist in practice not adhere to Marx's presentation of dialectical materialism.\" As I imagine you know, Marx says society moves from antiquity to feudalism to capitalism to socialism/communism. As you also seem to understand, capitalism will inevitably begin to manifest itself as industrialization, for reasons he makes clear in *Kapital*. Inevitably, Marx reasons, as capitalism continues to deprive the laboring class of both its species-being and true value of the cost of their labor, the laboring class will rise up and seize the means of production. They will institute a dictatorship of the proletariat, then communism will appear somewhere on the distant horizon. \n\nOf course we know this prediction to not have unfolded like that at all. As Western Europe and America continued to industrialize, you see the increase in colonization and the sort of imperialism whose scale Marx hadn't fathomed, nor even truly considered until his last years. This in turn meant that while the colonizing powers enjoyed more growth and more wealth, the colonized became even more impoverished and left behind. Marx didn't account for the fact that capitalism could also be regulated by the state to agree that allowed for an increase in living standards for most of the laboring class, which had the effect of appeasement; the proletariat was fed, clothed, and bedded, and therefore had no need to revolutionize. \n\nThe promises of socialist utopia was much more popular east of Germany, where many nations, notably Russia, were still feudal. There were millions of peasants that frequently starved. They were, in short, more captivated by the promise of liberation through revolution. This is why Lenin (and Trotsky and later Stalin) were successful in initiating the Bolshevist revolution of 1917: Russia was hemorrhaging support among the people for the War, the nobility was hated, and people were starving. Lenin took it upon himself to be the \"subjective element\" (I forget how it was exactly translated in his *What is to be Done*) in the unfolding of Marx's theory of historical materialism, and so triggered the revolution. \n\nWhat does this say about Marx's theories? It's hard to say, because, indeed, Lenin (and Stalin) seemed to think one could jump from feudalism to socialism by taking control of the state and then coordinating its industrialization. History has shown the terrors of this endeavor, it being not limited to Russia but to China as well. \n\nThe short of it is that, like all things, the implementation of such a systemic theory of society will inevitably produce results that differ from one's hopes. As for why *that* is, is a question best left for r/AskPhilosophy. " ] }

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[ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5oyy9c/why_were_communist_revolutions_predominantly/" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cvyaxdz" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "Politically, in terms of who is ruling each region, it's probably pretty close to the truth. *Crusader Kings* can be good about that stuff. That said, the way the nobility in any given region interacted is going to vary, and thus CK2's system is probably to broad to be an indication of what happened. Generally speaking, the the aristocracy of Northern Italy came from a number of populations that gradually became enmeshed with each other. There was the old senatorial elite that held on to some of their power, there were Lombards, and eventually there were Carolingians. The relationship between the Empire and the nobility of northern Italy was in a constant state of flux and the degree that any centralized authority could exert of the region was temporary. No game is going to do that kind of complexity justice.\n\nIf you want more information, *The New Cambridge Medieval History* is pretty good for a general narrative. Chris Wickham has a pretty good book on some of the relationships you're talking about, _URL_1_. It's quite old, but it's not too bad. The best source for your purposes, however, would be the early Middle Ages volume in the *Oxford Short History of Italy* series, _URL_0_. It's more recent and has some good scholars." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.worldcat.org/title/italy-in-the-early-middle-ages-476-1000/oclc/48532606&referer=brief_results", "http://www.worldcat.org/title/early-medieval-italy-central-power-and-local-society-400-1000/oclc/7576748" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d6mjnlb" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "To clarify, as you asking in the broader sense of historical study, or specifically in the context of the \"No Personal Anecdotes\" rule on this subreddit?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cf9ozva" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "Well, you can doubt the existence of virtually every historical figure, especially when it is as remote in history. There is a French scholar who wrote a book in the 1820s to prove (jokingly, of course) that Napoleon was an allegorical figure who never existed. However, names rarely appear out of thin air, except when they have an obvious purpose. It is hard to see why the inventor of Zoroaster should have called him Zarathuštra, *i.e.* “he whose camels are old.” Not that this name is especially shocking in itself; giving deprecatory names is actually a common practice in various cultures, the underlying idea being to “turn away” bad luck (you can call that apotropaic practices, if you want to show off). But it is probably that if you invented a prophet, you would choose a more proper name (like, I don't know, “envoy/priest of Ahura”). Camels may have been an important economic reality, but it did not really translate in terms of symbolic reality into the Gathas (the oldest part of the Avestic corpus). Then, of course, the real importance of Zarathuštra, and the accuracy of the few and obscure written traditions about him can (and should!) be questioned." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "f2rqoeq" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "I cannot answer this in full for all US elections because that is not my field of knowledge.\n\nFrom my own field however, I can say that in the 1968 US presidential elections, the Soviet Union tried to interfere in it. Initially the Soviet ambassador was instructed by the Soviet Foreign Ministry to offer Democratic candidate and Vice President Hubert Humphrey any kind of help he asked for, including money. The offer was made at an informal dinner between Humphrey's family and that of the Soviet ambassador. The ambassador was however careful in his formulations so as not to cause a potential diplomatic scandal.\n\nThe Soviets feared Nixon as an anti-Communist Hawk, while the Kremlin had set as its goal to reach agreements with the US. The domestic prestige of the new Soviet leader Brezhnev was thus at stake to get an agreeable president elected.\n\nThe KGB in the meantime had established contact with the Nixon campaign through Henry Kissinger. Working as academic and foreign policy advisor to Nixon, Kissinger was approached by a Russian reporter for the Novosti Press Agency, Boris Sedov. Russian news reporters were more often than not a cover for KGB officers. Sedov knew Kissinger from before he entered politics, but now made use of this contact to obtain information on Nixon's intentions towards the USSR.\n\nWhen Kissinger hinted that Nixon was pragmatic and that his anti-Communist rhetoric was just rhetoric. Kissinger was probably aware that the reporter was linked to the KGB, and Nixon probably instructed Kissinger to pass on his willingness to improve relations. Several unofficial letters expressing mutual willingness to cooperate in the future were sent between Nixon and Brezhnev through Sedov and Kissinger. These contacts lasted for several months.\n\nRecommended literature & sources:\n\nAnatoly Dobrynin, \"In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents\"\n\nOleg Kalugin, \"Spymaster: My Thirty-two Years in Intelligence and Espionage against the West\"\n\nChristopher Andrew & Vasili Mitrokhin, \"The Sword and the Shield: the Mitrokhin archive and the secret history of the KGB\"" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d3e4la9" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Adding on, were there any methods of verification that a signature was from who it said it was?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "di0zgs2" ], "score": [ 15 ], "text": [ "From [an earlier answer of mine](_URL_0_)\n\nThe size and scale of the Great Purges sometimes obscures some of the subtleties of the Soviet system and the nature of political power under Stalin. While the Purges appeared to outsiders- both at the time and since- to be a case of the Revolution eating its own, the senior Bolsheviks purged tended to come from internal factions within the Soviet system. A number of the \"Old Bolsheviks,\" ie veterans of the pre-1917 political world, survived the Purges. Anastas Mikoyan and Lazar Kaganovich were certainly rather senior members of the Politburo and both survived. Stalin himself played a dynamic role in the course and micromanagement of the purging of senior CPSU members. These dynamic of the Soviet state gave some individuals in Stalin's personal entourage a modicum of security all while fueling the the Purges excesses. \n\nOne of the facets of Stalin's dictatorship was that by the early 1930s he had accrued a constellation of hard-nosed administrators and servitors. Stephen Wheatcroft memorably coined the phrase \"Team Stalin,\" to describe these individuals. Some of them had been junior members of the RSDLP and had come to prominence during the Revolution and Civil War, which in turn led them to a position within the nascent Soviet bureaucracy. Both Khrushchev and Molotov fit this mold; both men were what would be termed in the West as \"upwardly-mobile\" within the Soviet state. They were were relative late-comers to the RSDLP but rose up through the ranks during the Civil War and Lenin years. This naturally meant these men were drawn into Stalin's orbit. Stalin's political maneuvering after Lenin's death capitalized on his control over the bureaucracy to sideline his other rivals among the senior leadership. Still other members of the Team were Stalin's early political allies like Kaganovich or Kliment Voroshilov. These men not only capitalized on a close personal relationship with Stalin, but were also important allies for Stalin's emerging dictatorship. The aged Mikhail Kalinin, for instance, struck the correct image of a senior peasant elder within the Politburo. Although he was relatively toothless in terms of actual power, only Stalin received more personal petitions from Soviet citizens than Kalinin. The Team had proved essential in implementing both collectivization and the Five Year Plans, as well as attempting to restore something of a Soviet diplomatic presence within Europe. Stalin may have a strong tendency to micromanage, and this was one of the sins Lenin faulted Stalin in his Testament, but a micromanager needs someone to carry out orders. \n\nThe problem with this semi-open clique leadership is that it puts those outside the group into an anomalous position. They have less real authority, but still exist within the system. Trotsky's purging and exile often obscures the fact that many of Stalin's political opponents of the 1920s remained within the USSR, often in some form of official capacity after a suitable supplication to Stalin. Both Zinoviev and Kamenev were in neutered political positions until their formal expulsion from the Party in 1932. Stalin himself saw these super-attenuated members of the Party as dead wood and they were ready scapegoats for the failures of the 5YPs and other problems with Stalinist state-building. Both in private and in public, Stalin would rail against the old-style thinking and lack of energy devoted to the Soviet project and characterized these sidelined individuals as exemplars of this problem.\n\nThe emergence of the Team as well as a whole generation of young managers from collectivization and the 5YPs created a dangerous nexus that made the Great Purges so destructive. Not only did Stalin fear that his rivals could unite and dethrone him, he also had at his disposal a collection of servitors willing to advance their careers at others' expenses. For the Team, this meant ferreting out real or expected enemies. More often than not, they often targeted outsiders. Of the Politburo members purged in 1937, they were relative outliers within the larger Soviet system. Most were late-comers to the Politburo and a number of them had been abroad for reasons of health, providing a neat pretext for charges of foreign collusion or connections to Trotsky. Other out-groups were especially vulnerable to the purging process. There was a strong distrust within the early Soviet system of military professionals. As good Marxists, a number of the inner circle appreciated the lesson of the French Revolution where Bonaparte used the army to put an end to the revolutionary process. Adding to the fears of Bonapartism, many officers of the first decade of Soviet rule had ascended the ranks semi-independently of the Party, and, by extension, Stalin. These suspicions bore fruit during the Great Purges as military officers found their personal networks within the military provided very little cover against charges of treason and wrecking. \n\nBut being on the Team always carried with it an element of risk. Displeasing Stalin or creating some sort of pretext for removal was an ever-present threat during the Purges. Genrikh Yagoda's fall exemplified that no one was immune from the process. Yagoda, as head of the NKVD, was notoriously corrupt and inefficient and enemies within the Team and the NKVD used this against him. His successor, the much younger Nikolai Yezhov, conducted his duties with far greater probity and thoroughness than the venal Yagoda. But although Yezhov was a more efficient executor, that very status painted a target on Yezhov's back. Like many intelligence chiefs, Yezhov actively sought out intelligence on his political rivals. Such files were dangerous in the collective paranoia of the Great Purges as trivial biographical details and missteps could become treason. Stalin's habit of simultaneously delegating and then micromanaging the Team gave Yezhov plenty of evidence on the Teams' activities that could be spun into a charge. Not surprisingly, Yezhov was the most powerful member of the inner circle to be purged. Even here, the purging process was quite different and staged with a gradual stripping of his power before his arrest, show-trial, and execution. A similar fate befell Yezhov's successor Beria after Stalin's death, illustrating the occupational hazards of being Stalin's chief of secret police. \n\nAlthough underlying causes of the Great Purges are still highly contentious within the historiography, the process of the Purges was relatively straightforward. Much of the initial targets were outliers and men who had lost earlier political battles with Stalin and were thus automatically suspect. But as the Purges escalated, blame-shifting and circular firing squads began to take over, leading to a wider expansion of arrests and show trials. Stalin proved an important bellwether for the Purge process that encouraged to evolve in certain directions or occasionally putting a stop to it in some areas. The Team had been used to tailoring data to suit Stalin's expectations for the better part of a decade before 1937 and the Great Purges were not an exception to this phenomenon. Yezhov in particular knew how to play to Stalin's instincts and suspicions and it was this that made him especially dangerous to other members of the Team. While some members of the leadership participated in the Purges as a matter of self-preservation, others like Yezhov or Khrushchev used them as an opportunity for career advancement or to settle scores with their rivals. While the Terror certainly disrupted the Soviet leadership, it also created opportunities for advancement and bound certain members of the Team together with their master. By fusing self-preservation and careerism, the Stalinist system of government created a self-perpetuating dynamic that only Stalin could put the breaks upon. \n\n*Sources*\n\nFitzpatrick, Sheila. *On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics*. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. \n\nGetty, John Arch, Nadežda Vladimirovna Murav'eva, and Oleg Vladimirovič Naumov. *Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's \"Iron Fist\"*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. \n\nKhlevniuk, Oleg. *Master of the House Stalin and the Inner Circle*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. \n\nWheatcroft, Stephen G. \"From Team-Stalin to degenerate tyranny.\" In *The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship*, pp. 79-107. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2004." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/63kgv1/why_were_nikita_khrushchev_and_vyacheslav_molotov/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cxu2gdm" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "I've been thinking about this a lot for the last couple days since I heard about some of the things Trump said. I've wanted to respond since seeing your question but I've refrained because I think it will be hard for me to answer without getting pretty close to violating the 20 year rule.\n\nI'm going to try anyway.\n\nI'd like to bend your question a little bit, because there's an analogous situation to this in American history that I just can't stop being reminded of. It's not a religion, but it's a very similar situation. The discourse you're hearing today is very much like what was being said in the late 1800s and early 1900s related to Chinese immigration. Yes, Chinese isn't a religion, but humour me and the parallels will become apparent.\n\nOne of the most significant and often cited reasons for why \"they\" should be excluded has to do with their inability to assimilate to \"our\" way of life. You find this brought up again and again during this time by journalists, lawmakers and those employed to enforce the laws (and create a few of their own in the process).\n\nQuoting here from *To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation* by Bill Ong Hing\n\n > An important element in the anti-Chinese crusade was doubt that they could successfully assimilate into American society... As immigrants, the Chinese posed the first serious threat to the melting pot concept. They were believed to be immutable, tenaciously clinging to old customs, and recalcitrantly opposing progress and moral improvement.\n\nThat should sound familiar. The manufactured thread of obedience to the Emperor kept people scared despite not actually being an issue. The manufactured thread of Shari'a is a good analogy.\n\nQuoting here from Erika Lee's *The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–1924*\n\n > While Chinese were considered to be biologically inferior due to their status as heathens and their alleged inability to assimilate in an Anglo-American mold, Mexicans were degraded as an ignorant “hybrid race” of Spanish and Indian origin.\n\nPutting aside the at-that-time very-trendy Social Darwinism, this too has clear parallels. They^1 will not conform to our way of life, they do not follow our God. Thus they should not be accepted.\n\nOne more quick quote, this time from Erika Lee's *At America’s Gates Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943*:\n\n > the witnesses continued to emphasize how Chinese were ‘‘permanently alien’’ to America, unable to ever assimilate into American life and citizenship.\n\nThis was an incredibly important point for people. The eternal foreignness of the Chinese was pivotal to the discussion. This became a major issue not just for immigrants, but for native-born Americans of Chinese descent. There were calls to deport even those that had been born in the states and, in accordance with the 14th amendment, were unquestionably American. Except that it *was* questioned, and often.\n\nVery often, American citizens found themselves being questioned and their credentials being doubted by a system that was intent on removing Chinese from America's shores. At the time this was often based on their language ability and other superficial factors like their dress, the idea being that anyone born in America would be able to speak English just as well as white people.\n\n* \"But Islam isn't a race\" / \"But Chinese isn't a religion\"\n\nSo now I want to get to a point that gets brought up a lot in modern debates and bigotry-apologetics. You will hear people say that they can't be racist because Islam isn't a race. The problem with this argument is that \"racism\" isn't mean't as strictly \"racism\" but simply as bigotry, since the whole notion of race is ultimately a social construct anyway. Here too there are some clear parallels between the situation you bring up and that faced by Chinese-Americans and prospective Chinese immigrants during the exclusion period. The notion of \"Chineseness\" was ever-shifting such that it no longer followed the lines of traditional racial categorisation.\n\nOne notable case of this is that of Lawrence Klindt Kentwell who had been born to a Chinese mother and a British father in the Commonwealth, who had attended Columbia University Law School and who was living in Honolulu. He would regularly get waived through by immigration officers because he looked white. As things progressed and the enforcement got tighter, he too became a target of the policies. Another biracial American, Ms J Morton Riggs, faced similar scrutiny, despite her mannerisms, dress and all outward expressions of culture being that of a white American. One again the notion of being unassimilatable comes up.\n\nOne more point I'd like to bring up. During this period, as today, there were efforts by members of the maligned community to draw distinctions between themselves and the \"bad apples\". Any previously existing lines of solidarity dissolved in time, as members of the community began to distinguish themselves from the undesirable members of the larger community. There wasn't the thread of terror, but the notion that \"our way of life is under attack\" was very much present. This all began as a resistance to manual labourers \"taking our jobs\" in the mid-to-late 1800s in places like California and Hawai'i, but it quickly became a bigger issue that dictated national policy, and it was the very foreignness of the Chinese and the growing Yellow Peril mentality that allowed things to develop to such an extent that California was effectively calling the shots on National immigration policy.\n\nAdditionally, if this is in fact the first time that a religion has been the sole defining cause for limiting immigration, that too has a clear parallel, as the exclusion period was the first time that 'race'/nationality was the sole defining cause for limiting migration.\n\n* Has any major political candidate....\n\nYes, again with the caveat that it's not actually a religion: During this period most major politicians including sitting presidents supported prohibition and often deportation. Letters to the president/s by those with grievances often fell on deaf ears (blind eyes?), and in the early stages of the exclusion period it was *only* that the policies were in violation of the Treaty of Tianjin that in 1880 it was not supported, but then of course two years later the treaty had been amended specifically to allow for what became the Chinese Exclusion Act.\n\nFinally, one more aspect of the historical scenario which merits repeating. Quoting here from Qin (cited below) relaying an 1878 address to the House Committee on Education and Labor on February by Joseph Kennedy:\n\n > Kennedy also emphasized that the Chinese were not Sabbath breakers, criminals, paupers, ballot-box stuffers, Molly Maguires^2, or conspirators against the public schools. Then turning to the charge of nonassimilation, he argued that the Chinese would assimilate with Americans if they were kindly treated, but the desire to assimilate would undoubtedly vanish like smoke if they were maltreated.\n\nThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.\n\n**Infallible Mods:** Let me know if I should reign in the modern connections. I'm not attempting to give an analysis of modern events, but rather just to show how the historical situation should be familiar to subscribers.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n* Hing, Bill Ong (2000) *To Be an American: Cultural Pluralism and the Rhetoric of Assimilation*. New York University Press.\n\n* Lee, Erika (2002chinese exclusion) The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American Gatekeeping, 1882–1924. Journal of American Ethnic History.\n\n* Lee, Erika (2003) At America’s Gates Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943. University of North Carolina Press.\n\n* Mar, Lisa Rose (2010) *Brokering Belonging Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945.* Oxford University Press.\n\n* Qin, Yucheng (2009) *The Diplomacy of Nationalism the Six Companies and China’s Policy Toward Exclusion*. University of Hawaii Press.\n\n* Zeller, Theresa J (2013) *The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Hawaii*. University of Washington Tacoma.\n\nI'm probably forgetting some other source I looked at while typing this so I may have to edit to add it in later.\n\n**Footnotes:**\n\n1. I'm referencing the views of the time here, not speaking for myself.\n\n2. [Molly Maguires](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Maguires" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e53fa41" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "I'm not sure if we're talking about neolithical, bronze age, or iron age cultures; or rather what exactly do you mean by 'great levels of centralization and organization'.In any case, given the neolithical transition from the hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian society, centralization and organization are a necessity to make the sedimentary lifestyle work. Are we talking about the development of agriculture, or development of language and script? What is the exact criteria?\n\nIn any case, the timeframes considered a 'start' for the locales you mentioned :\n\n**\\*Neolithic\\***\n\n*Mesoamerica* : 3500 BC, Tehuacan culture\n\n*West Asia* : 10000 BC, Jericho culture\n\n*China* : 7000 BC, Peigligang culture\n\n*India* : 9000 BC, Bhimbetka culture\n\n**\\*Bronze age\\***\n\n*Mesoamerica* : 1200 BC, Olmec culture\n\n*West Asia* : 3000 BC, Mesopotamia and Egypt\n\n*China* : 1600 BC, Shang dynasty\n\n*India* : 2200 BC, Harappan culture\n\n**\\* Iron age\\***\n\n*Mesoamerica* : never happened on its own, until the arrival of europeans around 1500 CE\n\n*West Asia* : 1600 BC, Hittite culture\n\n*China* : 1000 BC, Zhou dynasty\n\n*India* : 600 BC, late Vedic period\n\nAs you can see, it's very hard to say they come about almost at the same time, as practically none of these 'age starting' periods coincide ( the Olmecs and Shang Dynasty being whole 400 year aparts being the closest, and a huge stretch) with West Asia clearly leading the way in terms of technological development and mesoamerican cultures staying in Bronze age for 2700 years. Also, if we rearrange this table to be locale specific instead, we can see completely different time-technology development curve, with West Asia and India going through the neolithic period in some 7000 years, and Mesoamerica in 2300.\n\nSocietal and technological development is an effect of a million of factors ( like geography, climate, local flora, fauna, and so on), so even in a hypothetical situation that the developments of certain cultures would've coincided to be almost in temporal parallel, it couldn't be surmounted to anything more than a coincidence." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dcl0365" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The short answer for Denmark would be since around the age og absolutism in Denmark. It wasn't as low as modern day Denmark but it was decreasing. This was due to a few new laws introduced to make sure the king held absolut power and that his authority was not to be doubted. It effectively removed many of the nobles whom had their own agendas and replaced them with either better nobles, clergymen or loyal and talented commoners.\n\n-\n\nLater the loss of a lot of territory united the danish people and the country became homogenous with almost only ethnically danes living in the country. This unification through loss meant that danes became more trusting towards each other. Also the country had become a democracy through reforms and had kept the tradition of reforms instead of revolution.\n\n-\n\nOnce again skipping ahead to the 1930s and the great depression effect on Denmark. Instead of squabbling amongst each other forever and letting the people suffer the largest parties came together and made “kanslergade forliget” a compromise starting the welfare state in Denmark. By not abandoning the people and creating the foundation for the modern welfare state in Denmark the idea of solidarity grew in popularity. This became especially true in the last half of the 1900s were the moderne danish state was made. It is stil one of the core values of most danes today.\n\n-\n\nOvertime this low corruption and unification of the danes have grown into trusting of one another which again made bribes and the likes less needed further boosting the growing trust. \n\n-\n\nIt’s important to remember Denmark haven't really been in many serious wars since the endless warring against Sweden except for 1864 were around 1/3 of the countrys farmland was lost. This relativ peace and stability created decent living condition. Not saying they were the best but enough to make sure rebelions an revolutions like the ones in france didn't happen.\n\n-\n\n**These are the most important things about the danish development of low corruption rates.**\n\n- Harsh laws against corruption during the Age of absolutisme\n- Fairly homogenous and unified population\n- Small country\n- “Hvad udad tabes skal indad vindes” (what is lost outward shall be won inwards)\n- Kanslergade forliget (The Kanslergade agrement )\n- Decent or above living standards\n- Social reforms\n- High social mobility \n\n-\n\nSources: \nMette Frisk Jensen - Korruption og embedsetik\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cg1rygh" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Canada spent about two percent of GDP on defense during much of the Cold War. [See the chart on this page](_URL_0_). \n\nFor comparison, Canada had a GDP of about $700 billion (current dollars) in 1990, putting its defense budget at about $14 billion, while the US had a GDP of about $9 trillion and defense spending of $400 billion, about 4.5 percent." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.journal.forces.gc.ca/vol10/no3/06-madigan-eng.asp" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f6p4lna" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "These two answers by u/restricteddata may be of some interest while you await a specific answer to your question:\n\n* [Before Gregor Mendel's work on heredity, how was the scenario of two dark haired parents producing a child with blonde hair viewed?](_URL_1_)\n* [What were people in ancient societies explanation of “genetics”? For example, was it widely understood that a man’s son would (to one degree or another) resemble himself?](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/al3j3z/what_were_people_in_ancient_societies_explanation/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2wjsju/before_gregor_mendels_work_on_heredity_how_was/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ck59568" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "hi! more input is always welcome, but do check out this post from a few months ago\n\n* [How did the banjo, an instrument of African descent, become a staple of Anglo folk music?](_URL_0_)\n\nalso, you may want to keep an eye out for a music documentary film that did the festival circuit a few years ago, *Throw Down Your Heart* (2008) ([IMDB](_URL_2_), [distributor site](_URL_3_), [trailer](_URL_1_)), in which American banjo player Béla Fleck travels across Africa to meet & play with musicians there. The trailer includes a few short clips." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22uisb/how_did_the_banjo_an_instrument_of_african/", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCxaQhhL0A", "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185405/", "http://www.argotpictures.com/throw-down-your-heart.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e46c6z0" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The Allied victory in North Africa was very significant for quite a few reasons, the men fighting in North Africa were battle hardened veterans with years of experience, they had had resounding successes with limited resources, as Hitler didn’t accept North Africa as a primary theatre of war despite Rommel’s insistence, once the Allies had defeated the Axis they captured almost half a million Italian and German soldiers, this in and of itself would be a significant blow to the Axis. In his book “Panzer Commander” Colonel Hans Von Luck quotes Rommel as saying that the war was over (after the German defeat in North Africa) and that Germany should begin peace talks with the Allies.\n\nIn terms of oil production, if we look at The League of Nations reports for 1940 we can see that Iraq and Egypt only produce about 4.5 Mt of crude oil (Mt = million metric tonnes) every year German occupation would undoubtably disrupt the the efficiency of oil extraction causing these figures to be somewhat lower. If we compare these figures to those of the US 182.6Mt or the Soviet Union 30Mt you can see that the Middle Eastern oil production pales in comparison. Opening another front with the Soviets after victory in North Africa would be seen as far more important than seizing Middle Eastern Oil production. \n\nThe Suez Canal was very important. Erich Raeder believed that capturing the Suez Canal could lead to a German victory without the prospect of crossing the English Channel. He argued that once the Suez was in German control an advance through Palestine and Syria would swiftly follow, by this point the Axis would be at Turkey’s southern border, at this point with an Axis dominated Balkans to the West and German forces to the south Turkey would be forced to join the Axis or at the very least provide safe passage to Axis troops and supplies. The Germans could also have potentially pushed into Iran thus cutting off significant amounts of supplies sent to the Soviets by the Allies\n\n\nTLDR: North African and Middle Eastern Oil production/reserves weren’t really significant. Losing the Suez may well have opened another Front with the Soviets and potentially called Turkey into the war. Victory would also stop hundreds of thousands of Axis troops becoming POWs.\n\nSources: \n“Panzer Commander” Hans Von Luck\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/09/world-war-ii-the-north-african-campaign/100140/", "http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/league/le0280ah.pdf" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ctx8ttk", "ctxpg1m" ], "score": [ 6, 8 ], "text": [ "Could you provide a link to the relevant Wikipedia page?", " > \"From its early days, the Nazi Party made a show of raw virility. 'I have seen the sex instinct deliberately aroused in many ways... At mass meetings, speeches dwelling on the copulative process of the Nazi male would send the Storm Troopers marching out of the hall all set for a demonstration. They never had to wait long for a partner. German women would wait outside the meeting places.' With Hitler intent on boosting the birth rate, newsstands displayed 'books and magazines filled with nude men and women...It was plain that Nazi Germany planned all this to but one end.' ... 'The word illegitimate must be blotted out of the German language,' Minster of Labor Robert ley declared... women who felt they needed more social respectability could legally take the name of a soldier who had died in battle.'...This created a class of women 'who clung to Nazism because the Nazi Party would protect their illegitimate children.'\" (from Chapter 11 of *Hitlerland*).\n\nIn addition, the Nazi party had the Lebensborn program that encouraged Aryan births, and accepted Aryan children into government financed homes. They encouraged children born to German soldiers with mothers from occupied nations, to have the children adopted by Aryan families, and they financially supported these children. The Lebensborn program, which was run by the SS, declared every SS soldier should father a child before going to war. Overall illegitimacy ceased being a stigma and became patriotic. \n\nGermans also made it easier to divorce, and 80% of new divorces were of men divorcing wives who were not fertile. Due to WWI, there were a lot more single women than single men. They planned to institute polygyny after the war ended, since World War II did nothing good for the male/female ratio, but they of course never got that far." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cgx6dmo" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Most of the world has proved incompetent at distinguishing anything in Latin America before 1650. It's all just one giant cultural chimera that manages to be everywhere at once on one and a half continents. I've got a stock set of answers for the frequent question, \"The Inca? They were like the Aztecs, right?\" Often, when told that Peru and Mexico aren't the same place, I get the \"Oh, well, close enough. They both speak Spanish.\"\n\nThe most recent screen blunder I can remember is in an episode of Agents of SHIELD earlier this year. The team goes to an archaeological site in the jungles of Peru. Of course, it's a giant Maya pyramid. That's like sending James Bond to Pakistan and chasing a villain into the Colosseum." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "duh0y9n", "duh2w4x" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Hi, not discouraging other responses here, but you may be interested in some earlier threads\n\n* several flaired users in [AskHistorians consensus on Mother Theresa.](_URL_0_)\n\n* /u/Dice08 answers here [The top of r/All says that Mother Teresa never helped anyone. Is that true?](_URL_1_)", "I appreciate /u/searocksandtrees citing me. That gets a lot of the work out of the way so I can just speak frankly:\n\nFrom everything I've seen surrounding her character it seems she is just the charitable person people claim of her and did so in the worst of conditions. However the scale of her work is heavily embellished and her notoriety surpasses the actual scale of her work. To make matters worse, she seemed to went to an extreme with her vow of poverty so it affected the quality of the work and living conditions (there is the oft mentioned story of her being given a free building for her people to work in NYC and her turning it down as the elevator that city hall required was too luxurious for her) but seeing as these standards and medical availability are an issue to the area she was working anyway it is questionable what was her doing and what was consequence of the area she was in. I'd redirect you to my post cited by /u/searocksandtrees for that detail. \n\nOverall, Hitchens' picturing of her as a monster doesn't hold to criticism but there is still much wrong to be said. Especially in what could have been done if she didn't apply her vow of poverty in that way. Contrast that to the current Pope Francis who also is under a vow of poverty but lives in the Vatican in the [Apostolic Palace](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hn2eh/askhistorians_consensus_on_mother_theresa/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/51533v/the_top_of_rall_says_that_mother_teresa_never/dabtvdw/" ], [ "http://udel.edu/~cmyoo/art205/project3/images/vatican3.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eelbase", "eemde3p" ], "score": [ 4, 4 ], "text": [ "As I've mentioned in [other threads](_URL_0_), Wessex during the period in which *The Last Kingdom* is set was actually studded by a fairly extensive and sophisticated network of look-out posts and signalling beacons connected with garisson forces at local *burh* fortifications. This network was also then extended into Mercia and into recaptured areas of the Danelaw. This system was designed specifically to curtail the Viking strategy of mobile warfare and afforded the English both the early warning and the use of the rivers and road network to respond rapidly to Danish threats. Indeed, significant victories such as the 911 Battle of Tettenhall come about because the English are aware of where the Danes are and where they are heading, and are able to outmanoeuvre and surprise them.", "In addition to the excellent answer provided by /u/BRIStoneman in the context of Anglo-Saxon England and the Viking incursions, I may be able to shed some light on the nature of military intelligence and some of the methods by which it could be obtained in the context of feudal western Europe during the High Middle Ages, and to some extent the Late Middle Ages.\n\nFirst of all, I will approach your inquiry from the perspective of organisational stages: initiating the war, the strategy, and the tactics.\n\nSecondly, I will mention the restrictions that decided to what degree feudal combatants were able to achieve strategic and tactical surprise *before* going over the options of military intelligence available to them, as the former dictates the the latter.\n\nLastly, examples and sources I use in the following are local to my area, the western Netherlands, but can in most contexts be applied to much of feudal western Europe due to parallels in feudalism, Christian values, and the perception of knightly honour.\n\n**The (high) nobility operated in a very personalised international social network in which nearly everyone was acquainted in some way, making war a personal affair and therefore predictable in its initiation in terms of underlying reasons and the aimed objectives.**\n\nFrom the High Middle Ages onward, the nobility of feudal western Europe was a well-connected clique of acquainted individuals with vassal-liege ties, marriage ties, or some form of relation through (short-term) coalition or (long-term) alliance. As such, war between feudal combatants was personal: not rarely it involved raising arms against a liege, a vassal or indeed family, either by blood or in-laws. This also meant that wars were generally preceded by conflict in other areas, such as arguments over trade tariffs, the ownership of certain fiefs or rights, or simply over rivalries of some kind or another, leading to diplomatic or economic action that only resulted in war *if* a suitable compromise could not be reached. As such, the onset of war was readily apparent, as was the reason to wage a war.\n\n**The cumbersome nature of the organisation and mobilisation of feudal forces as well as of the logistic apparatus supporting them meant that it was nigh impossible to achieve strategic surprise.**\n\nThe military forces of feudal western Europe were structured on the local approximates of the levy system: the nobility and their retinues, and the common man, were summoned (the former by personal invitation of the liege, the latter by local representatives) and requested to converge on predetermined mustering locations where inspection of the assembled forces would take place. In the County of Holland the period of time allocated to reach these mustering locations was put at 14 days, a period of time that depended on the size of the territory. The levy itself could be fielded for 40 days (this was also true in other fiefdoms in the Holy Roman Empire, as well as in the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of France), at which point a new levy had to be raised, in order to minimise the impact on the available workforce and therefore the economy. The combination of set periods of time between summoning and mustering, the troops assembling at predetermined locations, as well as the limited window in which military goals had to be realised, meant that there was no such thing as a speedily and/or covert build-up of forces. As a result, not only was the initiation of a war an obvious process, it also meant that the initial location of the enemy forces was a predictable one.\n\nFurthermore, the logistics coupled with fielding a feudal army were very observable: rations and supplies were purchased in large quantities in the cities, and carts and barges were commandeered and chartered to transport these goods. This meant that any local merchant or inhabitant was aware of what transpired, and especially knowledge in the hands of the former quickly found its way to colleagues abroad, something I will touch upon later. This also meant that it was rather easy to conclude what the military goal of a campaign was, as the nature and amount of goods hinted towards the strategy employed (i.e. oats for horses in large quantities suggested use of cavalry), as well as the envisioned goal (i.e. material for siege engines implied the capture of a castle or urban centre), which is coincidentally also the reason why receipts of these orders and transactions are some of the most trustworthy primary sources we have on warfare in the High and Late Middle Ages (there is little to no embellishment, for instance).\n\n**The dependency on civil elements in the military meant that passive military intelligence represented a relatively large portion of the available intelligence in comparison to active military intelligence.**\n\nNot only was the common man an integral part of the military in the sense of forming the bulk of the levy, the logistic apparatus also heavily involved the population of urban centres. This meant that it was relatively easy to obtain reliable intelligence on enemy actions. As I mentioned before, the merchants were an accessible source of information, as they relied on an international trade network that was by nature effective in spreading precise information relatively quickly. The active gathering of intelligence happened in two roughly distinctive methods: bribing local representatives or the clergy, and the use of couriers (spies). Especially the use of couriers in the period is well documented, with their costs and payments represented in accounts, often anonymously in order to protect their identity. Between these sources of information, lieges and their councils had the opportunity to be well informed about the strategic and operational intentions of their enemy.\n\n**Relatively primitive methods of communication restricted the coordination of complex tactical manoeuvres, limiting the available options, and simplifying the tactical approach in the field.**\n\nThe absence of a structural and dependable system of communication was a hindrance to tactical creativity, which was further enhanced during moments of *friction* (the appearance of phenomena that hinder plans, such as the weather or disease): a moonless night hampered vision in such a way that it was dangerous to manoeuvre military elements (i.e. two armies fielded by the Bishopric Utrecht failed to united on a night in October 1228, botching the planned offensive^(1)), so would fog or heavy rainfall. This simplification-by-necessity meant that the field of battle between feudal opponents was decidedly less a matter of surprise – which requires maximum communicative effectiveness – and more of cohesion – minimizing the needed communicative effectiveness. As a result, manoeuvring on the field of battle was relatively predictable. \n\nThere were of course exceptions to the rule, which only meant that tactical surprise was all the more devastating when it was achieved (purportedly the citizens of Utrecht thought they were surrounded by the Tartars rather than the West-Frisians in the dead of night in 1247^(2)), but by and large tactical success stories in this time period are occasions of non-feudal opponents, often using irregular forms of warfare, against feudal opponents using regular forms of warfare.\n\n*To conclude, the political and military realities of the period meant that information on strategic and operational intentions were relatively easily obtained, while information on the enemy tactics were more difficult to gather but oftentimes equally predictable. As such, feudal commanders in the High Middle Ages had the potential to be very well informed about an opposing force.*\n\n^(1 Quedam Narracio, Unknown Author, 1232)\n\n^(2 Croniken van den Stichte van Utrecht ende van Hollant, Johannes Beke, 1371)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/774amv/signal_pyres/dojaotb" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cmbwa60" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The sagas describe shield walls a couple of times - the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are *Egils saga*, during the Battle of Brunanburh, and *Sverris saga konungs*. You're not going to get a whole lot of detail, though, as the sagas weren't written like modern novels describing the push of the wall etc., but they *are* used and referenced there." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dm72abk" ], "score": [ 82 ], "text": [ "American Chinese food actually has a lot of influences beyond Toisan (or Taishan) and could be more properly encapsulated by looking at the 4 areas of Sze Yup (Toisan, Xinhui, Enping, and Kaiping), which refers to a specific region in Guangdong where many of the Cantonese speaking immigrants that originally came to America hail from. \n\nFor much of America's history, immigrants from this region as well as nearby Hong Kong made up the majority of the Chinese diaspora living in California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, etc. They came by the tens of thousands and settled in various Chinatowns, participated in the Gold Rush, worked on the infamous railroads, labored in sweatshops, built businesses, and faced much hardship along the way. By and large, these early Chinese immigrants were from the same towns and villages, all spoke Cantonese, and ate the same food. \n\nEven as late as 1987, it seems that a [whopping half of Chinese Americans still claimed Toisan heritage.](_URL_3_.)\n\nThus, it seems natural that the regional cuisine has a major influence on the development of Chinese American cooking. It isn't that the location of Toisan itself is regarded as important but the fact that immigrants who came to America were largely from the Sze Yup area and restaurants that catered to these clientele wanted to give them comfort food that reminded them of home. The lack of proper ingredients that forced cooks to improvise in the beginning of Chinese immigrant history is what created the eclectic fusion of cuisines. \n\nBut it would be wrong to say that Toisan is the main origin of all Chinese American food. I should use this spot as a disclaimer that origins of dishes or food history in general can be extremely divisive since many people/places/institutions can and do argue about the 'true' origin or creator of foods, drinks, styles, and everything else. So unless the creation or origin of something is very clearly documented, much of it is derived from oral or cultural histories where accounts can be muddy if not totally at odds with each other. Keeping this fundamental uncertainty in mind, let us continue!\n\nBy the mid 1990s, much of Chinese-American food that modern Americans would be familiar with had already changed a great deal from the earlier days of what the earliest immigrants would have been serving in their restaurants. The reason for this is two fold. First is that cuisine is not static and of course availability of ingredients, cultural tastes, the audience, and trends change as time passes. Second, the Toisan/Cantonese majority for much of Chinese-American history was displaced by the massive influx of Chinese immigrants during the 1980s and 1990s. \n\nAn aprox. 400,000 Chinese American population of the 1970s [nearly quadrupled in size by the opening of the 1990s.](_URL_4_)\n\nMany of these Chinese immigrants hailed from other regions of China whereas before it had been dominated by Cantonese speakers from southern Guangdong and its neighbors but also increased the populations of those nearby neighbors of Hunan and Fujian. Noticeably, Hunan and Fujian tastes and cooking traditions have also had large effects on what we consider to be Chinese-American cuisine today.\n\nFor example, the modern iteration of ['orange chicken'](_URL_1_) or 'sesame chicken' are generally attributed to Hunan cooks/regional cuisine rather than Toisan or the other venerable regions of Sze Yup, though some have claimed that the Xinhui tradition of being known for using oranges as aromatics has had influence on the development of some variations. \n\n[Chop suey restaurants and the food they serve](_URL_5_) have similarly evolved over time and created endless variations and derivations. Chop suey in and of itself is not a dish that has a set list of ingredients or form of preparation but is a general style of preparation for whatever bits and pieces are lying around in the kitchen pantry. The name itself 雜碎 in Cantonese literally means \"mixed pieces\", with 碎 in particular having a bit of a connotation of leftovers or inconsequential things. \n\nThis belies the history of when Chinese immigrants simply combined whatever was on hand (even if it was simply cheap scraps that most people would ignore or throw away) to make something edible. \n\nParallels could also be drawn to the [Korean dish of bibimbap](_URL_2_), which literally means mixed rice and is also a dish that is seen as a combination of odds and ends pulled together to make food.\n\n[Chow mein](_URL_0_) is similar in that it literally means \"fried noodles\" and the variations that were created in America have differed a great deal from place to place (especially East Coast vs West Coast) over time. While there are 'staples' for different areas, ingredients, preparation, and modifications can all differ greatly. \n\nFinally, with the broad acceptance of Chinese and Chinese-American cuisine, the line has been blurred a great deal as to what is simply Chinese cuisine and what is Chinese-American cuisine. This is because many Chinese Americans would return to their hometowns and either settle back down or visit on a regular basis. Some would bring back Chinese-American cooking derivations and these sometimes influenced mainland cuisine as well. But also because as newer iterations of dishes or cuisine are pushed out, it's becoming more and more difficult to say what is decisively Chinese or Chinese-American except by accepting various levels of arbitrary categorization.\n\nI hope this has been a helpful primer! Let me know if you have any more specific questions and I'll try to point you in the right direction even if I can't personally help you! \n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.lofreeq.net/biteme-tv/images/eatdrinkblog/2010/BlueLotus_ComboChowMein.jpg", "https://freerecipenetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/orangechicken.jpg", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/63/Korean_cuisine-Bibimbap-08.jpg/1200px-Korean_cuisine-Bibimbap-08.jpg", "http://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/04/world/taishan-journal-the-wellspring-of-chinatowns-still-bubbles-over.html?mcubz=0", "http://i.imgur.com/IZCf1gb.jpg", "http://www.galleryintell.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Chinatown-New-York-City-1934.-Gelatin-Silver-Print.-Imogen-Cunningham-%C2%A9-Imogen-Cunningham-Trust.-Image-courtesy-Seattle-Art-Museum-e1468522670744.png" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dp42ruf" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Hi there, I'm just an undergraduate so I don't have a lot of expertise on teaching (mods please remove this if this post isn't up to standards). But I am taking a course about Public History and as a result have spoken to numerous professionals, including historians, musuem curators, and National and State Park interpreters about how they engage with people about history.\n\nHistorians (at least those who work with the public like museum directors) do what is called interpretation of history. This is going beyond just learning about what happened when and where. Interpretation is about engaging the person and making them want to learn about it on their own, fostering an appreciation for the significance of what you're talking about. \n\nIn the case of your mother, I would recommend seeing what sorts of things she's interested in specifically. If its local history, see about taking her to a museum or finding pictures of the people and places in your area. If its something a little broader or farther away, perhaps see if you can find a book or a documentary that covers what she's interested in. Just make sure you're pointing her to stuff that she's interested in. Just \"history\" is too broad to explain, try to come up with specific questions about what she wants to learn about.\n\nYou could also try connecting it to things she's already interested in. If your mother likes to knit and sew like my mother does for example, you might try showing her demonstrations of historical spinning equipment or finding her a book about textile production in Europe or North America. If she likes to cook, see if you can find track down historical recipes in old cookbooks. Just make sure what you're showing her is relevant to her or she might find that she doesn't really care about what you're talking about.\n\nIn any case, I suppose what I'm saying is that you should work with her to find out what kinds of stories resonate with her and start there, and then use that as a starting point to get her exploring on her own. For example, someone who's interested in human stories about families separated in WWII might not be particularly interested in the planning of the Normandy landings. Both are part of the History of WWII, but are pretty different stories, and one might resonate more with someone. Find out what that is, and go from there.\n\nSo to summarize, find out what exactly she's looking to find out about, then try to point her towards things that can help her answer those questions. Try to explain things or find material that is relevant to her. This will help keep her interested and engaged with the history she's learning. Hopefully that helps at least a little, until someone a bit more qualified than me can chime in." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c425rfv", "c428bah" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "To my knowledge, during Tudor England, every time the \"sweating sickness\" (an epidemic that swept the cities every summer, probably brought over from France by Henry VII's army) came, there were methods similar to quarantining. They would tie some mark (I think it was a bundle of straw) to the door of the house to warn people to stay away. The family was discouraged from leaving the house and going abroad after the disease struck their home. and so forth. \n\nThere was also the horrific Lazzaretto Vecchio (_URL_0_) where Venetians with the plague or suspected thereof where shipped until they got better or croaked (I can't imagine the survival rate was very high in such a place). I think that island dates back to the 1400's.", "There were some (very) meagre and mostly unintentional beginnings in the Middle Ages, during the time of the Black Death(1347 - 1351/3), for example there are sources that tell of people that were walled in in their houses after showing symptoms of the plague. This was partly based on the isolation of other victims of infectious diseases from society, particularly lepers.\n\nSame goes with access to cities, in Italy during the Black death people showing symptoms were refused access to neighbouring city states, and sometimes refugees without symptoms weren't let in, either - mostly out of fear, not out of calculation. People sometimes did catch on, that even non-symptomatic people could spread the disease, but they weren't able to capitalise on that knowledge. Then, of course, there was the fact that this particular disease is also spread by rats/fleas, and good luck keeping them out of your city.\n\nThe first real Quarantine (named after the amount of days it was instituted - 40) was the one OleWorms64 referred to, in Venice. Wiki has something:\n\n > The word \"quarantine\" originates from the Venetian dialect form of the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning 'forty days'. This is due to the 40 day isolation of ships and people prior to entering the city of Dubrovnik in Dalmatia - Croatia (formerly known as Ragusa). This was practiced as a measure of disease prevention related to the plague (Black Death). Between 1348 and 1359 the Black Death wiped out an estimated 30% of Europe's population, as well as a significant percentage of Asia's population. The original document from 1377, which is kept in the Archives of Dubrovnik, states that before entering the city, newcomers had to spend 30 days (a trentine) in a restricted location (originally nearby islands) waiting to see whether the symptoms of plague would develop. Later on, isolation was prolonged to 40 days and was called quarantine." ] }

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[ [ "http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070829-venice-plague.html" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e0noulz" ], "score": [ 62 ], "text": [ "Organised formations of pikemen were first used by the Macedonians in the second half of the 4th century BC, and were in use until some time in the 2nd century BC. During this period of less than 2 centuries, they were seen as the ultimate weapon on Mediterranean battlefields. Alexander's successes against the Persians are largely due to his army's dependable core of veteran pikemen. Any Hellenistic kingdom worth its salt would field its own pike phalanx, and states trying to assert themselves on the geopolitical stage (such as the resurgent Sparta of the late 3rd century BC) would sometimes abandon their existing fighting styles and reorganise their infantry as pikemen. For Greek hoplites, this would entail the replacement of their heavy double-grip *aspis* shield for a much smaller round shield suspended from the neck by a strap, and the replacement of their thrusting spear with a very long *sarisa* pike wielded with both hands. In Alexander's day the *sarisa* was perhaps 4.5m (15ft) long, but the advantage of greater reach caused a steady increase over time to a maximum of around 7m (21ft). These pikemen were arrayed in dense formations (typically 16 ranks deep) and presented an impenetrable front of gleaming spearheads.\n\nSo why did this warrior type go out of style? \n\nThe common answer is that the pike phalanx, while very effective in a head-on advance across level ground, was cumbersome and vulnerable from the flanks and rear. It relied on a dense wall of overlapping pikes, which could only be maintained in one direction at a time, and required terrain without obstacles in order to function properly. Quicker and more flexible troops such as the Roman manipular legion were able to exploit this by luring pikemen into broken ground and using small units to engage vulnerable parts of their formation. This led to notable Roman victories at Magnesia, Kynoskephalai and Pydna (among others), which gradually eroded the power of the Hellenistic kingdoms and eventually led to the abandonment of pike infantry and the incorporation of Hellenistic lands within the Roman domain.\n\nBut this is the kind of thing you hear on Youtube channels. It doesn't really look very hard at the question. Aristotle already remarked on the vulnerability of pike formations and their dependence on level ground to function; it clearly didn't stop them from becoming world-conquering troops. Alexander himself suffered the dissolution of his phalanx at Issos but still won the battle. It is from Polybios that we get the contrast between Hellenistic pikemen and Roman legionaries described above, but this is artificial and technocratic and his own accounts of the battles mentioned suggest that Roman victories were much more due to contingency and local decisions than to innate advantage.\n\nA couple of other factors are worth considering. The first is that the maintenance of a pike phalanx required immense investments of manpower and money. The typical pike phalanx was anywhere between 9,000 and 20,000 men strong; the men had to be professionals, carefully drilled and permanently available. The two ways to achieve this were either the establishment of a standing army at astronomical expense, or (the common Hellenistic solution) the allotment of very substantial lands to military settlers. These settlers were often (at least ideologically) Greek or Macedonian, which meant drawing on a rather small pool of immigrants to form a core element of Hellenistic armies. They often proved difficult as a political interest group and could destabilise empires as much as preserve them. Moreover, they were required not only to serve, but to maintain farms and families in order to replenish their own number over the generations. This could result in serious recruitment shortages if heavy losses were suffered in battle. Defeat at Panion in 200 BC proved such a demographic disaster to the Ptolemaic settler-pikeman class that the Ptolemies essentially gave up on fielding a pike phalanx altogether, and reformed their remaining military settlers into more flexible troop types such as *thureophoroi* or cavalry. The Ptolemaic kingdom was one of the richest Hellenistic states; how much more likely were others to keep their pike phalanxes up to strength?\n\nThe second point is that the Macedonian pike phalanx is essentially an overspecialised weapon. It is ideal for battle on level ground against heavy infantry, but practically useless in other situations. As long as the enemy is tactically or ideologically committed to fighting pitched battles on level ground, the pike phalanx is a war-winning weapon; this proved the undoing of the Persians, who had a strong tradition of fighting on prepared battlefields where numbers and cavalry would count in their favour. Similarly, the pike phalanx was both useful and necessary for Hellenistic kingdoms in their wars against each other, since fielding anything less in major pitched battles would be bringing a spear to a pike fight. Within its own self-contained tactical system, pikes begat pikes, and all major players needed a strong phalanx of their own. But Polybios already noted that it would be very unrealistic to expect any enemy to conform to the phalanx's preferred conditions for battle if they had a choice. Anyone who was not committed to fighting in the open with a main line of heavy infantry would be able to choose circumstances for battle in which the pike phalanx would be at a disadvantage. This would require Hellenistic kingdoms to depend heavily on the other arms of their forces, such as light infantry and cavalry - making the huge investment in the pike phalanx seem less attractive and less easily justified.\n\nThe third point builds on the previous two. Considering the extreme cost and the limited use of a pike phalanx, you may start to wonder why the Hellenistic states ever bothered with them in the first place. To explain this, it's important to bear in mind that the decision to adopt particular military technologies or customs is rarely guided by cold cost-benefit analysis alone. For the Hellenistic kings, legitimacy initially flowed from the ability to claim closeness and similarity to Alexander the Great; many of the features of Hellenistic kingship derived from the example he had set, which in turn built on Classical predecessors like Philip II, Iason of Pherai, Dionysios of Syracuse, and Evarogas of Cyprus. This included aspects of court life, relations with elites, cult of personality, the traits that defined kingship, and so on. It also included powerful manifestations of royal power. To put it bluntly, kings justified their status by showing off, and few things could show off power and wealth like a fleet of brand-new quinqueremes, a train of armoured siege towers, and a well-drilled Macedonian-style pike phalanx.\n\nThrough their phalanxes, kings communicated their power, regulated relationships with the Greco-Macedonian minorities in their territory, and established themselves as worthy rivals in wars with other Hellenistic rulers. The phalanx represented a coming together of Alexander-like symbols of power and harsh military necessities in the Mediterranean geopolitical system. As such, it had a brief moment of military dominance, but that its significance was far greater than its mere tactical success. It also meant that it had been steadily losing significance by the time the Romans started wiping the floor with it on the regular. Since the spectre of Alexander had faded, and the Hellenistic states had largely consolidated, and some states were simply no longer able to must significant numbers of Macedonian pikemen, the pike phalanx was already on its way out. If you couldn't impress anyone with a shiny new pike phalanx, and your enemies weren't playing the game, and all it did was drain your coffers, why bother? The Macedonians who fought Rome in the early 2nd century BC were the last to field a major army built around a core of pikemen, and their repeated defeats no doubt accelerated the demise of this way of war." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cffq508" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "In 1402, French adventurers Jean de Bethencourt and Gadifer de la Salle, who were nobles who owed allegiance to King Henry III of Castille, started conquering the islands. They wanted land. They got it. Bethencourt got the title \"King of the Canary Islands\", though he was still an under-king to Henry.\n\nIt took the Castillians until 1495 to finish conquering the islands. (They were also claimed by Portugal for a while).\n\nIn the early days of Spanish control over the Canaries they became one of the world's largest sources of sugar (Maybe the largest). Sugar was very valuable. Eventually, the Caribbean islands became bigger sugar producers than the Canaries.\n\nThe Canaries were also a key stop on the Spanish galleon route from Spain to the New World. Ships would stop there for water and provisions, as the islands were on the best (due to the prevailing winds, not the most direct) route from Spain to the Caribbean." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cbdr6ts", "cbdspbv" ], "score": [ 7, 5 ], "text": [ "“[PAGE 380] [description of a funeral] . . . And this is the Manner of the King’s Funeral. But when any other Scythian dies, his nearest Relations carry him about in a Chariot among his Friends; who receive and entertain the whole Company, in their Turn, setting the fame things before the dead Man as before the rest. In this Manner all private Men are carried about forty Days, before they are buried: And those who have assisted at these Funerals, purify themselves thus. When they have cleansed and washed their heads, they set up three pieces of timber leaning to each other, and laying a good number of Woolen Bags close together, throw burning Stones in to a hollow space left in the midst of the wood and bags. In this country a sort of HEMP grows, very like to flax; only longer and thicker; and much more excellent than ours, whether sowed or produced by Nature. The Thracians cloth themselves with garments made of the HEMP; so well resembling Flax, that a man must have great experience in those materials to distinguish one from the other: And he who had never seen this HEMP, would think their [PAGE 381] their Cloths were wrought out of Flax. The Scythians put the Seeds of this HEMP under the bags, upon the burning stones; and immediately a more agreeable vapor is emitted than from the incense burnt in Greece. The Company extremely transported with the scent, howl aloud; and this Manner of purification serves instead of washing: For they never bath their bodies in water. But their wives grinding the wood of cypress, cedar, and incense upon a rough stone, and infusing the powder in water, compound a thick substance, which they spread over all the parts of the body and face. . . . . “\n\n-herodotus \n\n[link] (_URL_0_) that goes more into detail.", "Cannabis seems to be pervasive throughout Persian history from the pre-Islamic, Zoroastrian ancient era, through the Islamic conquests and Islamic \"Golden Age,\" up until today.\n\nOne of the few surviving books of the Zend-Avesta, called the Venidad, \"The Law Against Demons\", calls bhanga (marijuana) Zoroaster's \"good narcotic,” and tells of two mortals who were transported in soul to the heavens where, upon drinking from a cup of bhang, they had the highest mysteries revealed to them.\n\nCirca 1090-1124 AD in Khorasan, Persia, Hasan ibn al-Sabbah, recruited followers to commit assassinations and legends developed around their supposed use of hashish. These legends are some of the earliest written tales of the discovery of the inebriating powers of cannabis on the *hashashins* or assassins.\n\n*1,001 Nights*, an Arabian collection of tales, describes hashish's intoxicating and aphrodisiac properties quite specifically in the tale of the two hashish-eaters.\n\n > There was once, my lord and crown upon my head, a man in a certain city, who was a fisherman by trade and a hashish-eater by occupation. When he had earned his daily wage, he would spend a little of it on food and the rest on a sufficiency of that hilarious herb. He took his hashish three times a day: once in the morning on an empty stomach, once at noon, and once at sundown. Thus he was never lacking in extravagent gaity. Yet he worked hard enough at his fishing, though sometimes in a very extravagent fashion.\n\nThere are recurring references to cannabis throughout 1,001 Nights and I recommend reading either the original text or *The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights* by Robert Irwin, which provides fantastic contextualization and analysis." ] }

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[ [ "http://antiquecannabisbook.com/chap2B/Greco_Roman/Herodotus.htm" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cylivah", "cyliw7w", "cyliyfd", "cyljjzo", "cylkftk", "cylkpcp", "cylkpjc", "cyllkai", "cylo5g9", "cylu46u", "cylufyi", "cylx55r", "cym5glj", "cym7d7q", "cymccuy", "cymhehe" ], "score": [ 3, 7, 6, 11, 5, 7, 5, 6, 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Thanks for doing both this project and this AMA! I noticed that only a few of the individual subject files are online; what are your plans for digitization and making them more easily accessible for folks doing research from home? Having worked with folks here for a few years, I'm constantly amazed at how many people are interested in history, but they don't typically have the resources to go to Washington, D.C. for their research. ", "Thank you very much for being here!\n\nI'm curious to know more about your collection of First World War accounts. With the death of the last living veterans of the war, this repository has become more important than ever; what is the scope of its contents, how are they being preserved, and what do you have planned (if anything!) for 2017?\n\nThanks again.", "I know that the Korean War is often also referred to as \"the forgotten war\". What steps has this project taken to address this problem, or how has this problem affected the project as a whole?", "This sounds like a pretty amazing project! I'm sure that each of you have come across tons of amazing stories and recollections while working on it, but are there any particular ones that really resonated with you that you could share with us here?", "Do you know of similar programs run for veterans in other countries such as the UK or Canada? If do, is any sort of cooperation between your projects?", "I've been following your project for a long time and I think it's absolutely fantastic. Thank you for running something so amazing!\n\nWith that said, my question is that of minorities: How well-represented are minorities in your collections? Is there a particular minority that you have yet to see but that you would like to include in the collections? ", "Talking about time in the war can be difficult for a lot of veterans - do you have any advice for conducting oral history around difficult memories? ", "Hi! Do you have suggestions on questions to ask and how to approach an aging veteran to ask them about doing an interview? My grandfather is 93, served in WWII for the US and I know he was present during D Day(he says he watched the beach landings from a ship) and the Battle of the Bulge. He began in a mail room in England and volunteered to join an engineer group that moved through France and somewhere into Germany. Any suggestions are welcome for questions I could ask. He also has photos of Jewish camps in an album that he will not discuss, photos of ovens and stacks of bodies.", "What is the thing that has surprised you the most when looking at your collection? \n\nHow do you organize such a collection?", "Thank you for making those happen. My uncle's recordings have been on there for years and is a great way for us to get to know about his life and to share his amazing tales. \n\nAre the stories vetted in any way? Corroborated by other witnesses or documentation? Are there any stories that had to be edited due to classified content? ", "Does the project also compile interviews from soldiers from the other side, such as Germany?", "I have 600 letters from my Grandfather to my Grandmother, written from Oct. '41 to March '46. I'd be happy to contribute, but more pressing is how to efficiently digitize such a collection?", "I work with the VHP through my job, as a staffer with a Congressional member in their district office. We usually try to get high school students involved with the project by encouraging them to talk to veterans in the community and in their families, though I've submitted several narratives on behalf of several veterans. I love this project, and I love that there is a place for their stories and the things that meant something to these veterans at one time (the diary for instance, and photographs.)\n\nThank you for all of the work you do!", "Do you accept typed transcriptions of letters? My mom has hundreds of letters that her mom saved during WWII that were sent to her from my grandpa. I am going through them letter by letter and typing them up to preserve them for posterity. They are written in cursive as was the style at the time and the ability to read cursive, especially when it isn't good penmanship, is fading away.\n\nI think I'm getting close to being done with the letters and once my mom, aunt and uncle have a chance to read them we are looking at historical/veterans societies that may be interested in them. I don't know if my mom would part with the physical letters but they would be willing to share the typed manuscript.\n\nIf it helps, my Grandpa was drafted in 1942 into the Army and after training was assigned as a field medic to the 808th Tank Destroyer Battalion with which he deployed to Europe in September 1944 and saw combat including in Luxembourg during the Battle of the Bulge.", "Guam has the highest enlistment rate in the US, and their soldiers have the unique identity of being US soldiers and living through a foreign occupation. \n\nSo why is Guam not on the states and territories list, even though you can find some of them if you search by race? \n\nAlso, how do you feel about Congress continuing to deny reparations to the locals of Guam from WWII?", "I presume that in your work you come into contact with lots of ... shall we say \"negative\" stories. After all the saying goes, \"War is hell\". Does exposure to such stories take a mental toll on you? If it does, how do you deal with it? " ] }

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[ "http://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/category/veterans-history-project/", "http://www.loc.gov/vets", "http://www.loc.gov/rss/vhp/vhp.xml" ]

[ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "do8r9n7", "do9aolb", "do9cia8", "do9my58", "do9w7jx", "dob7z9l" ], "score": [ 442, 39, 102, 29, 72, 14 ], "text": [ "Can anybody recommend a solid, well researched book on Kennedy assassination ?", "If we are talking, what's the historians view on JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass? I tried to ask here but didn't get much.", "To add on: as laymen are there historic detailed questions that would be fruitfull to ask? How could one make the best out of the declassification? And what will be worthwhile to look for in the debate on the new material in relation to old historic questions? ", "Is there any truth to the allegations that some of the files have gone missing?", "I'm disappointed that no one has addressed OP's initial question. Is there any expectation that the new files will bolster any of the theories behind the assassination? Did the earlier release of files add anything new? ", "So this has been sitting for a day now, and I was hesitant to weigh in because, well, this *isn't* my area of study, to say the least, but I do think there are a few things which can be noted nevertheless. For the documents released in the 1990s, I really can't say anything specific on what they revealed, but any reputable work on the history of the assassination that has been published in the past 20 years will likely have incorporated them already, and there might have been bombshells at the time, but by this point that'd be old news, and someone on the younger side might be surprised even to learn that some of what was revealed only came out so late. Certainly, it can be said that the broad narrative - Lee Harvey Oswald was a single gunman, firing from the book depository - has never been impeached, and nothing that came out then did so either.\n\nNow, as for the 2017 documents? Well, as you note, some were released in July, and more will be coming out by the end of the year. [Politico did a write up just after the first patch a week after they came out](_URL_0_), and I think that their summation provides us with a few important points. Namely... don't expect anything to happen too quickly! At the one week mark, as they note:\n\n > JFK historians and the nation’s large army of private assassination researchers are still scrambling to make sense of the latest batch of tens of thousands of pages of previously secret CIA and FBI documents.\n\nWhich is to say, it is a ton of material. A *lot* of it is also useless. Many documents apparently are nothing more than duplicates of records already released. With the July Batch, nothing came out which was a bombshell. The core narrative remains essentially unchanged. There *does* seem to be some interesting material concerning internal communications of the CIA about their concerns of missing some key connection - the possibility Oswald was connected to Cuban elements in some way seems to loom large - *but that is only speculation*. There were some clues which they feel the Warren Commission didn't investigate thoroughly - a trip to Mexico apparently wasn't properly followed up on - but there is nothing in these documents which suggest there actually was a connection, only concern for the possibility that they *couldn't find one that might nevertheless exist*. Their concerns seem, at least in part, to stem from the fear that if that were true, it might have been in retaliation for their own activities against Castro and Cuba. But again, all that that documentation points to is some people in the CIA during the '70s navel-gazing in the wake of the Warren Commission, and in no way points to actual evidence in any way. The key thing that these documents reveal so far, to again repeat and this time give it to Politico, is that:\n\n > None of the files released last week undermines the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald killed Kennedy with shots fired from his perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza—a conclusion supported by 21st century forensic analysis—and that there was no credible evidence of a second gunman.\n\nFor the documents still forthcoming, we can only speculate what they contain, but the chances of them changing the above are scant, and that is charitable. The best likelihood, *if* someone is able to really research these trails which went cold a half-century ago, is providing better elucidation into the motives of Oswald. The documents point to others who believed connections might be out there unfound, and maybe there is something to that or maybe not. But *any* really revelatory information that these might turn up isn't going to show up yet. It would likely take years of further analysis and research before you find any reputable historian publishing a new work, or revising their previous ones, to incorporate these documents even in a relatively mundane way, let alone in a manner which they believe offers new elucidation on the assassination.\n\nTL;DR: There are some tantalizing tidbits at the margin, which with a lot of *honest* investigative work could maybe let us learn more about Oswald's motives, but Oswald Did It, In the Book Repository, With the Carcano.\n\nIn any case, all the documents can be found [here](_URL_1_). The Politico article I referenced is [here](_URL_0_). They in turn highlight one of these internal CIA documents [here](_URL_2_)." ] }

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[ "http://2017jfk.org/countdown-to-2017/" ]

[ [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/jfk-assassination-lone-gunman-cia-new-files-215449", "https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release", "http://www.politico.com/magazine/f/?id=0000015d-a4cc-dd39-a75d-afdfd18d0001" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ecurs3p" ], "score": [ 16 ], "text": [ "The internal borders of the USSR fall into two different categories: those that largely existed prior to the USSR/joining the USSR (so the South Caucasus states, the Baltics, arguably Ukraine); and those created within the USSR (Central Asia is the main example here), with some exceptions. I'll try and answer the specific examples you cited here, and then give a more broad overview answer:\n\n* Nagorno-Karabakh - While mainly populated by ethnic Armenians (then, and now), Karabakh is not easily accessible to Armenia, especially in 1920 when the Bolsheviks occupied the region. There is currently just one road connecting the two, a highway through the mountains that was only properly built in the 1990s and funded largely by the Armenian Diaspora (and is the reason Armenia occupies part of Azerbaijani territory not within the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, which was separated from Armenia by a strip of territory). In the 1920s there was no such road, and it was incredibly difficult to travel between NK and Armenia; however there are no mountains blocking the path to the rest of Azerbaijan, and the main road leading up to Russia (via Georgia) is to the east as well, and indeed is how the Bolsheviks first came to the region (they occupied Azerbaijan first). There was discussion on joining Armenia and NK together, but it was deemed impractical due to communications issues (see the road issue again), so they linked it to Azerbaijan, while making it autonomous. And until 1988 that largely worked.\n\n* Central Asia - First it should be noted that both the five Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) and the others you mentioned (Tatarstan, Buryatia, Chechnya) are all republics, though the first five were made full *union* republics, while the others were merely *autonomous* republics within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and still exist in the modern Russian Federation. Now obviously you mean why did Kazakhstan et al become union republics (and later sovereign states), but I wanted to make sure that was clear. It had to do in part with the policy of state-building in the USSR: they were reluctant to create union republics unless the state had international borders. In part it was to entice local ethnic groups on the other side of the border to join the Bolshevik cause and allow for a stronger future claim for expansion, what Terry Martin referred to as the \"Piedmont Principle\" (after the region in modern France that was the origin of the Italian unification movement). The autonomous states obviously couldn't serve that purpose, so largely were left as they were. There is more to that, but I'm blanking at the moment and would have to look into it, so please ask a follow-up if interested.\n\n* Fergana Valley - This is something I can't actually answer, but I do know of a couple books that look at the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border, of which the Fergana Valley is part of. I'll mention them below.\n\n* North and South Ossetia - Situated right between the two Ossetia's are the Caucasus mountains, making it extremely difficult to travel between the two. The Russians built a military highway in the 1800s to reach Georgia, going through modern South Ossetia, but even then it was treacherous. The easiest way to go between the two is the Roki Tunnel, which was only finished in 1984. Thus it was easier to just keep the two places separate, though some argue that it was also done in order to antagnise the Georgians, who had the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast (or region/province) to contend with; I would dispute that argument, and agree it was a more practical consideration.\n\n* Tajiks in Uzbekistan - I don't know what specific regions you are mentioning here, but it is worth considering that the modern ideas of ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz only dates back to the Soviet conquest of Central Asia. The people there largely did not identify as such, and the Soviets themselves largely created the ethnic identities based on a more rural-urban divide (with the Uzbeks being considered more urban). Thus it was considerably difficult to properly sort everyone into \"their own\" republic (yes, Tajik is a Persian language while Uzbek is Turkic, but even then Uzbek was only formalised in the 1920s, and Tajik was made distinct from Iranian Persian in that era; plus the people there were multi-lingual, so it was not easy to divide them that way either).\n\n* Karakalpakstan - I unfortunately don't know the details behind that at all, so couldn't really tell you.\n\n* Central Russian borders - Again, these people were only really identified and categorised in the early years of the Soviet era. While they had lived there for centuries (or more), they never identified as a specific group, and were largely named as one group or another by Soviet ethnographers. The borders for their territories were largely drawn to encompass their largest concentrations, though without ethnic cleansing that was near impossible (and the Soviets didn't do that in those regions; that type of thing began decades after the borders were drawn).\n\nIt is important to note that prior to the Soviet Union, many of the non-Russian peoples did not have a concept of a national identity as we understand it today. Many of them didn't even have a written language or literary tradition, which while not a definite factor in fostering a national identity, certainly helps it. The Soviets introduced these ideas to them, even though the very notion of nationalism was contrary to Marxist theory. However Lenin argued that these peoples were so backwards they needed to develop a national consciousness in order to advance to the point where they could move into the socialist phases. Thus the policy of *korenizatsiia* (коренизация; loosely translated it means \"nativization\") began, which Martin linked to affirmative action (non-Russian peoples were promoted to high government positions, given university spots, culture developed, etc). This also fed into the creation of national territories, which the Bolsheviks felt was important for their development (an idea not shared by other socialist groups at the time, but I digress). Ethnographers were sent out to figure out who lived in the Soviet Union, so they could be properly developed and advanced into the modern era, and then onto socialism. But of course no region is homogeneous, and thus things like the examples you mentioned happened. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cnhqlwf" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Phillip is pretty wrong and obviously biased, both nationalists and unionists did not officially exist at the the time, those terms came about to describe those in Northern Ireland after its creation, the terms used would have been Republicans/rebels and Loyalists, both denominations fought in WW1, and were not discriminated against because of religious or political belief but purely because they were Irish commoner, who were looked down upon by the English gentry as well as most of the English population as they had always been in servitude to both English and even Irish landlords, much like the Scottish and Welsh were.\nMany thousands of Irish died during WW1 and the irish suffered the heaviest losses at the battle of the Somme, there is even a huge WW1 and 2 memorial in Dublin which was visited by Queen Elizabeth on her recent and first visit ( by any English monarch ) to the Republic of Ireland.\nConscription was never introduced in Ireland and the partition was never completed until 23 May 1921, when the free state was created along with the creation of a Northern Ireland.\nBe careful when asking about Irish history as ignorance and bigotry have prevented most people from actually Being unbiased!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d4kzt2p", "d4kzvgu" ], "score": [ 3, 12 ], "text": [ "Follow up. What's a territory as well in this context? How was say, Puerto Rico viewed as a territory and not a protectorate?", "Generally speaking the four terms could be defined as follows.\n\nMandates - These were awarded to victorious powers after WW1 by the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations), for example France in Syria, Britain in what was then called the Mandate of Palestine. Ostensibly these were territories that had broken free of Ottoman rule but were thought incapable of governing/protecting themselves so Allied powers were called in as guardians. I'm not really qualified to speak at length at how benign or exploitative this 'guardian' relationship may have been, however most political maps would identify mandates the same way as any other sovereign territory held by an imperial power. These mandates had little, if any independence. The term 'Mandate' is still in use today to describe United Nations peacekeeping missions, although obviously these have a different character than the old, Post-WW1 mandates.\n\nProtectorates - Protectorates are similar to Mandates in that they're ostensibly weak or less advanced nations that require the assistance of a great power for economic, or military purposes. Generally they'd have some degree of local autonomy but their foreign affairs were handled by the protecting power. The distinction here is that protectorates weren't awarded by the League of Nations, they were formed (more or less) bi-laterally.\n\nDominions - This is an exclusively British term to refer to their former colonies which had achieved a degree of independence but still acknowledged British supremacy. In WW2 these were (essentially) Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa although Ireland, Newfoundland, and sometimes the then-British government of India have also been characterized as Dominions. Keep in mind that being a Dominion isn't just a matter of historical identification, it brings with it a degree of dependency on Britian and in the case of Canada, Australia, New Zealand (unsure on South Africa) it also means your Head of State is the British monarch. Therefore the United States of America was never considered a 'Dominion'. In modern times, there is a trace of this relationship in the 'Commonwealth of Nations' which is essentially an exclusive club for former British colonies and territories that form an extremely loose political and economic bloc.\n\nColonies - A Catch-all term for any non-European territory that an Imperial power held. It's also not mutually exclusive with the other terms - the British Dominions could all be considered 'Colonies'. I've also heard the French and British Mandates called 'Colonies' as well. This term doesn't necessarily mean that large amounts of immigration from the motherland to the colony in question took place, although of course there was usually at least a small amount." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "czsis60" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Both your questions are asking the same thing. The Persian sea route was the route by which the fleet advanced parallel to the army. Thermopylae was not an action that took place in a vacuum, there was a naval battle at Cape Artemisium occurring simultaneously with the action at Thermopylae. ~~Most scholars would consider~~It's possible the battle of Artemisium was the more important of the two actions, as it ~~appears to~~may have been a true attempt to decisively defeat the Persian fleet, as opposed to the action at Thermopylae ~~which was intended to delay the army enough to allow the Greek land forces to assemble, as well as to support the fleet at Artemisium by preventing the Persian army from taking the harbors to their rear~~. As it was the battle of Artemisium concluded indecisively, resulting in the need to eliminate the Persian fleet at Salamis. But the Persians could not simply land troops in the Peloponnese (also, mind you, Sparta was not their objective, the Spartans were only one part of the Greek forces fighting against them) because the Greek fleet still existed" ] }

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[ "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3a/Map_Greco-Persian_Wars-en.svg/2000px-Map_Greco-Persian_Wars-en.svg.png" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "e71o4fk" ], "score": [ 26 ], "text": [ "The problem - as you hint - is one of terminology, namely, at what point do we call a practitioner of magic a \"witch.\" It is a difficult question to address, as expertly considered by [Monty Python](_URL_1_): throughout European history, practitioners of magic did not generally claim to be witches, nor did they look like what one might think they should (which is why Monty Python's peasants needed to change the appearance of a normal looking woman to make her look like a witch). Conversely, everyone has practiced some form of magic to affect themselves or others, even if it is as small as wishing on a falling star or when blowing out birthday candles. So does that make us witches? It depends on context: if the people around us say that someone who makes wishes on birthday candles is a witch, then that is the deciding factor.\n\nSo then the question is twofold: were people in the \"Old West\" practicing magic and did people regard at least some of these practitioners to be witches? \n\nThe answer to the first question is easy: of course they did - most cultures include some magical practices, so that's no surprise. Mary McNair Mathews in her autobiographical publication, Ten Years in Nevada (1879), describes curating her son's severed finger in a jar of brandy, because that was the only way to make certain the stump would not give the boy pain. Archaeologists at the African American Boston Saloon in Virginia City, found [altered coins](_URL_0_) placed beneath the floorboards, probably in 1866, as a means to encourage the business to profit. The 1877 artist for Harper's Weekly who depicted Chinese immigrants in Virginia City [\"Burning Joss Papers](_URL_2_) believed they were engaging in magical practices. And when Virginia City journalist Alf Doten repeatedly consulted a \"Dial\" - an 1860s counterpart to a Ouija Board - he and his friends were using magical practices to summon the dead (from the Doten dairies, which I am currently transcribing). This is a small sampler of the types of magical practices in one location in the nineteenth-century West.\n\nSo then, the question is whether anyone would have called the magical practices of other people (or their own) witchcraft. That's a difficult question to answer. The West was inundated with people from throughout the world, so it seemed that virtually every nation was represented. Did someone in that complex mix of cultures across the vast region and over the decades regard someone else's \"magic\" as witchcraft? It's hard to imagine the answer not being yes, simply because of the huge spectrum of possibilities. I would be thrilled if I could find an instance of that, but nothing comes to mind. I believe that we would need to conclude that among speakers of English - and in the documents they left behind - people generally did not conclude that witchcraft was being practiced in their midst. For the many other people who lived in the West, speaking a range of languages, the counterpart of that term may have been in use, but I am not prepared to address that." ] }

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[ [ "https://imgur.com/4ANdUp0", "https://www.flickr.com/photos/27128624@N03/4656225270", "https://imgur.com/BIXNl3m" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dg7riwh" ], "score": [ 304 ], "text": [ "Followup question(s): is there a reason why pants are never included in this list of items? Is it because nobody would dream of going out without pants on so it wasn't even thought of, or is it because it didn't fit the alliteration? Or both? Also, what about no \"shorts?\" Some places surely had rules against wearing shorts, but you never see those on these signs." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dlyj0dk" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "Well, suffice to say that they were not flattered by the term. According to David Stubbs' book *Future Days: Krautrock And The Building Of Modern Germany*, 'no German musician of that generation accepts the word 'Krautrock''.\n\nStubbs prefaces the book itself by claiming that the term was invented either by the British music journalist Ian McDonald (author of the Beatles book *Revolution In The Head*) or by Richard Williams of the NME in the 1970s. So it wasn't a term that the German experimental bands of the 1960s and 1970s used to describe themselves.\n\nStubbs also points out that, in writing about this music at book length, he had to walk a careful line; in approaching the bands for interviews, he points out that he referred to their music as 'experimental German music of the sixties and seventies', and the subtext is that the bands won't be happy with the subtitle of his book. \n\nStubbs also provides several examples of members of these bands rejecting the title. The band Faust had a track called 'Krautrock' on their album *Faust IV*; the band used the term sarcastically, finding it 'insulting and injurious'. John Weinzierl of Amon Düül says that Julian Cope is on his blacklist for writing a book called *Krautrocksampler*, and that whoever invented the word is 'criminal'. Sleevenotes for the Harmonia album *Musik von Harmonia* say that 'careless critics and reviews tried to hide their lack of knowledge and expertise by pressing this ghastly label even on the few artists that wouldn't behave like those stoned dancing bears.' \n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cemivhc" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "It's actually unlikely that Fort Mountain was built by either the Cherokee or, especially, the Welsh. I've discussed [the alleged Welsh discovery of America](_URL_0_) before, with emphasis on their supposedly connection to the Mandan, but Fort Mountain gets a brief mention as well. The short of it is that the Welsh discovery of the Americas was a convenient historical fiction concocted by 16th Century British historians to justify their entry in the colonization of the Americas. They capitalized on a vague reference in Welsh folklore to the 12th Century prince Madoc emigration from Wales to an unknown destination, and transformed it into a voyage of discovery. Even if Madoc did hypothetically set sail for the Americas, he and his Welsh colonists were at least six centuries too late to build the Fort Mountain enclosure.\n\nThe idea that there were a prior wave of Welsh colonists in the Americas clung to the culture of the English-speaking colonists. From time to time, a colonists would describe the local language as sounding like or even being Welsh, despite being Siouan or Iroquoian languages for the most part (the Algonquian and Muscogean languages the make up the bulk of the remainder of eastern languages didn't attract much Welsh speculation). Any legendary people with unusual characteristics would soon be transformed into white Europeans in the minds of colonists. Of particular note here are the \"Moon-Eyed People\" that often associated with the Fort Mountain Site. This unusual description has led to speculation that 'moon-eyed' refers to the light color of their eyes, which is then used to cast them as having blue eyes and from there to being European. Going back to the Cherokee sources on the \"Moon-eyed People,\" its more likely that the description is intended to mean they were adapted to seeing during the night, as they were also said to be unable to go out in sunlight. They're not Europeans, but one of several other-than-human peoples that were thought to share the Cherokee's world.\n\nThe Fort Mountain enclosure fits into a series of hilltop enclosures built Middle and early Late Woodland period (about 2000-1500 years ago, give or take a century). These were important sites in the Hopewell religion that dominated the eastern half of the continent at this time. Fort Mountain area was largely outside the core Hopewell area, but still well within their sphere of influence. It seems the people inhabiting the region at the time picked up a few things, like hilltop enclosures, and gave them their own local flavor - the extensive use of stone, which was used sparingly to the north and west.\n\nAt the time, [the ancestors of] the Cherokee were living further north than Georgia, which didn't become part of Cherokee country until their territorial expansion in the 18th Century." ] }

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[ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Mountain_State_Park#Ancient_wall" ]

[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ogxdg/is_there_any_solid_evidence_to_support_the/ccs0vl3" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c8r82hu" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It should certainly be easy to find full copies -- most or all of the Loeb Classical Library's pre-1923 editions [are available for download here.](_URL_0_)\n\nBut summaries? I'm not aware of any that have been made, I'm afraid. There's no Cliffs Notes nor SparkNotes for Plutarch." ] }

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[ [ "http://ryanfb.github.com/loebolus/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c8bg7y3" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Yes just like the Populist movement, prohibitionists, nativists etc. The tea party will probably be mentioned as well." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cz4pftc" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "The Dutch were the first to use the tricolour during their revolution, making themselves a republic. The tricolour then became a symbol of republicanism and became very popular during the French Revolution which shook the ground of Europe, inspiring republicanism in other countries to use the tricolour, for example the Irish tricolour during the easter rising. \n Another interesting fact is that the Russian flag was a tricolour when it was an absolute monarchy, it was because Peter the Great was inspired by Dutch ships to create a modern navy, he adapted the Dutch flag for the Russian navy since the Russian navy didn't have a flag at the time. The flag inspired the flag of pan-slavism which is why eastern european countries have those three colours in their flags (Slovakia for example) then became a symbols of Russia and made the national flag in 1894. Which is why eastern Euroean countries have a similar tricolour." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fnhyqme" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I can speak about Soviet night vision equipment.\n\nDevelopment of night vision devices began in the late 1920s, but there was no prototype produced before 1940. The initial goal was to create night vision driver's observation devices so that tanks could drive at night, rather than fight. Trials in the winter of 1940 showed that the concept had some promise and development continued. Requirements composed in March of 1941 had a second scope for the commander. The goal was still the same, to drive at night with a speed of 10-20 kph (due to realistic expectations of the range of the vision), but there was also a provision for an IR signal lamp for nighttime light signals. However, by May 29th there was already talk of an IR scope for the gunner as well with a range of 200 meters.\n\nThe experiments for a driver's device were still the most promising. By August of 1942 a satisfactory device was developed that allowed the driver to see large objects from 50 meters, vertical items such as a person or a pole from 35 meters and road features from 12 meters. Clarity in complete darkness was similar to observing with the naked eye in moonlight. An experimental batch of 25 devices was produced and sent to the 26th Tank Corps for field trials. Trials showed that it's possible to drive at a speed of 12-15 kph with hatches closed when using the devices, and a human figure can be seen from 30 meters away in motion or 50 meters away when stationary. There were specific complaints made about several features of the devices, even though the concept was deemed promising. The chief of the GABTU ordered 60 more improved devices in order to conduct wider trials. \n\nThe 26th Tank Corps used the devices in battle until the spring of 1943, when they had to be destroyed during a breakout from encirclement. They were still judged to be far from perfect, especially in use during nighttime attacks. No significant improvement was made to Soviet tank-borne night vision devices during WWII and as far as I'm aware they were never used in battle again.\n\nSources\n\n_URL_6_\n\n_URL_3_\n\n_URL_4_\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_5_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.tankarchives.ca/2019/10/night-vision-driving.html", "http://www.tankarchives.ca/2019/10/night-driving.html", "http://www.tankarchives.ca/2020/01/night-vision-conclusions.html", "http://www.tankarchives.ca/2016/12/pre-war-night-vision.html", "http://www.tankarchives.ca/2013/10/night-vision.html", "http://www.tankarchives.ca/2019/10/night-rider.html", "http://www.tankarchives.ca/2015/06/pre-war-night-vision.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eifk018" ], "score": [ 50 ], "text": [ "What makes you think they didnt?\n\nPost war reparations from Japan took two main forms, very similar to what was extracted from the European Axis. The first being cash or free goods and services to both former combatant nations, and former Allied POW's, or the confiscation of money or other financial assets held overseas. The compensation for forced labor by POW's was actually then coordinated by Japan making payments to the Red Cross for distribution.\n\nThe other was the literal transfer of physical assets like remaining machinery, vessels, vehicles, and the like from Japanese control to other parties. Either taken from Japan itself, or whatever was left in newly free nations that was owned by a Japanese company or the govt, was no longer their property. \n\nThe process and parties Japan would be expected to pay and the general amounts were mostly hammered out in 1951 in the Treaty of San Francisco. It both officially ended US military rule in Japan, codified the expectations of the new Japanese govt with respect to honoring things like the decisions of the War Crimes Tribunals, and UN mandates, etc, as well as the financial aspect. \n\nOver the course of the 1950's then Japan concluded agreements with nations like The Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia to work out payment in either cheap loans, outright payments, or goods and services as a result of occupation of those territories. Though the value of Japanese assets in the former occupied nations that was transferred tended to be worth more than the new monetary compensation which was stretched out over 20 years of payments essentially. To put some hard figures out the payments for Burma, The Philippines, Indonesia, and South Vietnam totaled about 1Billion USD collectively in 1950's dollars. \n\nWhile for assets held abroad in one form or another\n\n > According to the Japanese government’s research, as of August 1945, the total amount of Japan’s assets abroad was US$23.7 billion, including: US$4.391 billion in Korea; US$2.658 billion in Taiwan; US$9.158 billion in North East China; US$3.465 billion in North China; US$2.295 billion in Central and South China; US$1.751 billion in other areas. _URL_1_\n\nIt should also be noted that there were exceptions, the USSR was not a party in San Francisco, nor was the PRC. China and Japan would not formally settle claims until the 1970's and a Joint Communique between the two was released wherein China renounced claims.\n\nThere were several other notable issues that were not covered specifically which have since caused tension, notably Comfort Women from occupied nations and any compensation due them directly and specifically. While the framing of long term or low interest loans as 'quasi reparations' would be a sticking point at times, especially as relates to South Korea. That also doesnt mean that private citizens have not occasionally bring new court cases against either Japan itself or private companies for compensation, and while most of the time Japan has been able to point to followup treaties with nations that barred further new claims, occasionally a court will side with the person bringing the suit and these cases can drag out for a decade or more. Nor was this only from Asia, Western POW's have brought cases occasionally as well.\n\n[Text of the Treaty of San Francisco](_URL_0_) if you would like to read it. \n\nI would give this wonderful article compiled by the Library of Congress a look through it examines much of both the process, and context or various forms of payment from Japan, and their challenges afterwards. _URL_1_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.taiwandocuments.org/sanfrancisco01.htm", "https://www.loc.gov/law/help/pow-compensation/japan.php" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dlxkvd3" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "There was absolutely opposition to the agreement in the West. For the most part it took on one of two, similar yet different, forms: one was the outrage at the British Administration for violating the Arab's right to self-determination, and the other was opposition in light of the British not using their influence to obtain *more* from the Arabs.\n\nTwo advocates for Arab self-determination were T. E. Lawrence and Woodrow Wilson. It's widely known that Woodrow Wilson advocated very strongly that each nation, especially those under imperialist overlords, had a right to act independently and govern themselves. During the War, the British convinced the Arabs to rebel against the Ottoman Empire by promising them independence, which was seen by Wilson as an act of goodwill. When the secret agreement was published, he was offended at the encroachment of his ideals for pure political gain. Following the war, his office administered the King-Crane Commission as a last-ditch effort to investigate how a division of the Middle East should take place as though to minimize disaster. However, while originally observed by the other members of the Great Four (Italy, Britain, and France) the Commission was subsequently ignored and the Sykes-Picot Agreement was followed during post-war negotiations instead.\n\nSimilarly, T. E. Lawrence, following his awareness of the agreement, felt that his direct support for the Arab rebellion was based on lies. Held a disdain for the agreement which was showcased in his autobiography. Lawrence knew about it when it was drawn up, due to his involvement with the rebellion, and came to a moral crossroads when it was signed. He struggled with whether to continue to lie to his Arab allies or reveal the truth. In the end, when it was published, Lawrence begrudgingly pushed forward and helped the Arabs in their, now seemingly empty, campaign. As he wrote in *The Seven Pillars of Wisdom*, \"I had to join the conspiracy and assure the men of their reward. Better we win and break our word than lose.\"\n\nDetractors from a pro-British standpoint included William Reginald Hall, the then-Director of Naval Intelligence for Great Britain. He actually was involved in the review of the agreement's draft, but he berated it for ignoring the possibility of including a \"Jewish home\", as well as strategic importance of railroads through Palestine and Egypt, into the agreement. Similarly, Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt at the time, felt betrayed by his superiors that the deal had taken place: he was at the forefront of negotiations with The Sherif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, over British support for Arab independence following the war. He too felt betrayed, as the agreement undermined all of his office's work, on top of making him look like a liar to Hussein and his supporters, who would become local leaders following the war.\n\nThere were no doubt individuals in other notable positions that opposed the agreement for treating the Arabs unequally, or for disrupting good British-Arab relations, but at the time the agreement was seen by the majority of the West as a means of maintaining good infrastructure (the British) or expanding influence (the French). \n\n----\n\nSources:\n\n- Barr, James. *A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East*. New York City: Simon & Schuster, 2012\n- Smith, Charles D. *Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A history with documents*. New York City: Bedford/St Martins, 2016.\n- Lawrence, T. E. *Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph*. London: Anchor, 1922.\n- Danforth, Nick. \"The Middle East That Might Have Been\". *The Atlantic*, February 13, 2013. Retrieved from _URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/the-middle-east-that-might-have-been/385410/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ciwxvlc" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It depends on what type and scale of trade you are talking about. Some types of trade aren't really done from a profit motive, and are more accurately termed \"exchange\". A classic example is the so-called \"Kula Ring\" famously described by early anthropologist Branislow Malinowski, in which the Trobriand Islanders would exchange items to partners who are well known and for reasons of cementing personal bonds rather than gaining economic advantage. Lest we think this is something only weird islanders do, think of Christmas or other gift exchange holidays, in which items are exchanged personally from face to face interaction.\n\nBut if you mean in terms of economic exchange from profit motives, historically this has frequently been done at set market times or fairs. Peddlers, for example, would typically travel a set route corresponding to different market centers, For example, in a workshop in Pompeii the owner had scratched on the wall plaster the schedule for the market fairs in the towns in the surrounding region. This person would thus be able to travel to nearby towns in the knowledge that when he arrives there he could sell his wares from some sort of ephemeral stand.\n\nWhat you are really interested in, I suspect is more large scale affairs. For example, I study the trade between India and Rome, which was largely carried out on large ships travelling between the Roman Egyptian ports on the Red Sea and the ports along south India. We know from literary sources that these ships would make frequent stops along the way and engage in \"tramp trading\" in smaller ports along the way. How did this work? From comparative evidence it is likely that the members of these villages, which would frequently be fishing dependent, would simply sail or row out to meet the larger trading vessel (which could not approach the coast) and engage in barter in that way. They might carry, for example, a load of food or water supplies and exchange it for wine.\n\nHow the trade was conducted when the ship reached its destination is a bit murky. The traditional view, still somewhat bafflingly supported by some scholars like Whitaker, is that the trade was entirely within the hands of \"princes\", that is the local rulers who engaged in it purely to obtain high prestige items. This has no support, but it is likely that local authorities were involved in organizing trade in some way. For example, at the Gujarati port of Barygaza it is said that local ships would go out to help guide the Roman vessels through the shoals, and goods would be led up to a warehouse to be stored before being sold. It is quite likely that these goods would be sold at an auction or through some sort of dealing between merchants. Facilitating this would be Roman merchants who resided year round in India.\n\nAll of these large networks (such as the \"Silk Road\") were really groups of middlemen, depending on your point of view. A glass bowl travels from Italy to China through innumerable different hands by being absorbed into preexisting trade routes." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e58x9dl" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Not to discourage any further answers, but you'll want to read these older posts about the development of alcohol and other fermented beverages in the Americas:\n\n[Before contact with Europeans, were there any fermented alcoholic beverages (beer, wine) being consumed by Native Americans, and if so, what were they like?](_URL_2_)\n\n[What types of pleasure drugs were used in the Americas prior to European colonization and how prevalent were they?](_URL_0_) \n\nBoth by /u/400-rabbits\n\n[Did Native Americans ever produce alcohol?](_URL_1_) by /u/Pachacamac\n\n[Do we have recipes for the fermented chocolate drink favoured by the Maya?](_URL_3_) by /u/Mictlantecuhtli\n\n[What did ancient Native Americans drink?](_URL_4_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1dhvtk/what_types_of_pleasure_drugs_were_used_in_the/c9qsfln/?st=jlk8oclq&sh=ce36579c", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14lq6l/did_native_americans_ever_produce_alcohol/c7ec9u8/?st=jlk8o7f5&sh=509b9d95", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ya99h/before_contact_with_europeans_were_there_any/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5mtfz9/do_we_have_recipes_for_the_fermented_chocolate/dc7edwg/?st=jlk8nwkb&sh=0f5950da", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iursk/what_did_ancient_native_americans_drink/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "chgmi9b" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "None that I know of, however, Southerners before the war had long had pipe dreams of an America that would extend to Panama. All of these new territories would be slave states. More realistic were attempts to gain Cuba as a slave state. One southerner, Walker, established a slave country in Nicuragua by an invasion of the sons of Southern slavers. This regime was overthrown quickly. The Slavers tried to strong arm one of the weak antebellum presidents (Pierce or Buchanan, I forgot which) into forcing the \"purchase\" of Cuba via a secret document called the Ostend Manifesto. It would have worked too, if the document wasn't leaked to the public. The Northern states raised holy hell about a new slave state, and one that would be wrangled from another power at that (insert irony about the Spanish-American War here), and thus the Ostend Manifesto was dropped to maintain the peace." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cpivffs" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "OK, there is a lot here that needs to be addressed. \n\nThe three versions you discuss are the A, B, and C versions. The A version was the original diary that Anne wrote during hiding. The B version is a rewrite, also by Anne, of the first entries from the A version (interestingly, in the diary itself, Anne discusses this, when she mentions wanting to be a writer and wanting to send her diary off as a record of the war, as she had heard was requested by Education Minister Gerrit Bolkestein on Radio Oranje). The C version is the version compiled by Otto Frank after the war from the papers that were saved by Miep Gies after the Frank family was betrayed, arrested, and deported. Almost until his death, Otto Frank maintained that he had only lightly edited the diary, removing only some parts about Anne's physical development (this is the part that some folks get fussy about) and some especially nasty remarks about Anne's mother. In fact, Otto did much more than simple light editing, since he had duplicates of many of the entries (because B entries were rewrites of A entries, both by Anne) but he only included one or the other in the original published version (Het Achterhuis/The Diary of a Young Girl) - he can certainly be credited as an editor of the book, if not a co-author. \n\nAll of this is confused by the fact that five additional pages of the diary were discovered in 1998, after the publication by the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocides Studies of the complete Critical Edition in 1986 (in Dutch). The English translation of this original critical edition was only published in 2001, so after the discovery of the additional five pages, which meant that the English language critical edition was out of date before it was even published. A revised critical edition, which contains all of the texts, side by side for comparative reading, was published in 2003, in English (2001 in Dutch). You can find that edition on Amazon [here](_URL_1_). \n\nSource: [Anne Frank Foundation - Amsterdam](_URL_0_)\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.annefrank.org/en/Anne-Frank/A-diary-as-a-best-friend/At-last-seriously-taken-as-a-writer/", "http://amzn.com/0385508476" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d4qfcw7" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "There's an excellent recent book about tobacco and China by the historian Carol Benedict, \"Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010.\" Like many other products found by Europeans in the Americas (ranging from large quantities of silver to hot peppers), tobacco made its way to China relatively quickly and began having all sorts of social and economic effects." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dwtdu3v" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It was an intentional change to pump up the Carrier Air Wing's CO billet to 0-6. The change was phased in over a number of years that put the Carrier's CO and the CAG on equal footing as partners who both were direct reports to the Strike Group Commander. \n\nIn large part it was an acknowledgement of the power and importance of the embarked air wing as a separate and distinct asset from the ship itself. It also brought the organizational billet in line with the USAF, as they assigned at least a Colonel to lead Wings and a CVW is in reality a composite wing in USAF parlance. \n\nIt also came at a time when air wings were reaching what would become their max size in the post WW2 era. The air wings size had shrunk following WW2 by nearly 50% in some cases. The *Essex* and *Midway* class hulls could fit a lot, but jets continued to increase in size and wait, meaning by the mid 60's carriers might only have 50-70 at most aircraft embarked, and even then either a small number of large patrol aircraft or larger numbers of light daytime attacker or fighters in many cases. Doubly so when we consider many of the *Essex* hulls were re-designated as anti submarine carriers. However the newer super carrier hulls of the *Forrestal*, *Kitty Hawk/JFK*, and most of all the CVN's of the *Enterprise* and *Nimitz* classes changed the game. Once again carriers could embark huge mixed air groups of 90 or so jets. A super carrier air group of the mid 80's might have 2 F-14 squadrons, 2 A-7 Corsair II squadrons, an A-6 Intruder squadron, an EA-6B Prowler squadron, an S-3 Viking patrol squadron, and a helicopter squadron, along with E-2b Hawkeye and C-2 Greyhound detachments. While some squadrons on the smaller carriers in particular were also deploying with the first operational F/A-18 Hornet units. \n\nEven with the status of air wings again today having shrunk back to almost unprecedentedly small sizes, it easy to see why in the late Cold War how a billet in command of multiple squadrons and dozens of aircraft rated more than an O-5. Doubly so with Regan's famous 600 Ship Fleet drive under Secretary Lehman in the background. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7ozb8n", "c7ozkga", "c7oznj3", "c7p43iq" ], "score": [ 8, 2, 2, 4 ], "text": [ "I would imagine this would be really hard to quantify since so much of the South'a economy was also recovering from the loss of life and and other reconstruction efforts after the devastation of places like those visited by Sherman and the Northern army.", "The south was in depression after the Civil War only in part due to the destruction of slavery (the war was much more a cause). The first major economic downturn after the Civil War was the Panic of 1873 which had nothing to do with freeing the slaves.", "the south was demonstrably poorer than the rest of the US well into the 20th century, and is still somewhat poorer, though it has been closing the gap rapidly in recent years. Part of the reason that LBJ was such a big supporter of the space program was his desire to spend a ton of money building a high tech southern economy, particularly in texas, which is why space shuttles launched from florida are controlled from Houston. But that poverty had at least as much to do with the direct damage of the civil war and 100 years of Jim crow suppressing black productivity as it did with freeing the slaves.", "You can't use the time after the ratification of the 13th amendment as a tool to measure abolition/slavery's economic effects - the war had a much larger, lasting economic effect at this time and would distort the data.\nUltimately, you have to keep in mind that most slave-based systems are economically profitable, as was the US system of slavery, and that losing such a system will always have consequences as adjustments are made. \n\nI've made some recommendations here that can give you a decent background on the subject and perhaps give you some leads on more in-depth study:\n\n[Time on the Cross](_URL_2_)\n\n[Slavery and American Economic Development](_URL_0_)\n\n[The Political Economy of Slavery](_URL_3_)\n\n[Without Consent or Contract](_URL_1_)\n\n" ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=0807131830", "http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-31219-5/", "http://books.google.com/books/about/Time_on_the_Cross.html?id=ScpPBinpzwoC", "http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=0819562084" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e6bucfw" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "The problem with finding the origin of a folk belief like this one - that cat's have nine lives - is that when there is no clear answer, folklore typically invents one (the folk abhor a vacuum!). The idea that Ancient Egypt is the source of this belief is likely a bit of folklore in itself, caused at least in part by the understanding that ancient Egyptians revered the cat and are well known for their fascination with the afterlife.\n\n[This site](_URL_1_) attempts to answer the question presented here, but it has unsatisfactory explanations. It attributes the Egyptian source to the Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained: Superstitions, Strange Customs, Taboos, and Urban Legends - a site that does not inspire trust. Of use with the first site, however, is the observation that Herodotus, who is a contemporary commentator on Egyptians and cats fails to note anything about the multiple lives of cats: if this was such an important attribute of belief that we still remember it, one would assume the ancient Greek historian would have mentioned it. The site also notes the early reference to the cat's nine lives in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but that does little more than pin down an early occurrence - not that still earlier ones don't exist.\n\nThe [Wiki site](_URL_0_) on cats lends a bit of insight even though we all know that source is to be shunned. It suggests that \"In many countries, they are believed to have nine lives, but in Italy, Germany, Greece, Brazil and some Spanish-speaking regions, they are said to have seven lives, while in Turkish and Arabic traditions, the number of lives is six.\" We can't trust this source, but it raises a good question: if other cultures - particularly other European cultures have numbers other than nine for the life of the cat, we can assume that the folk tradition is a matter of multiple lives with no consensus on the exact number. In that case, we can set aside the idea that the number nine as significant and focus instead on the serial resurrection of the cat. We could return to the Egyptians as the source of that concept, but we would certainly need evidence rather than conjecture.\n\nKatharine Briggs, the esteemed British folklorist has a book titled Nine Lives: The Folklore of Cats. She was big on description and short on explanation. I don't have the book, but I suspect it won't explain this, and I suspect that your question can only be left unanswered." ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#History_and_mythology", "https://mythology.stackexchange.com/questions/1843/what-is-the-folkloristic-origin-of-cats-having-9-lives" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cm2cyq9" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Well, your best bet for a worm's eye view of Scandinavian society in the early middle ages (or, at least, a 13th century interpretation thereof) are the sagas.\n\nI would recommend highly the Folio Society's *The Icelandic Sagas*, as well as essentially anything published by Penguin. As far as the sagas themselves go, I've always been partial to *Egils saga*, *Brennu-Njáls saga*/*The saga of burnt-Njál*/*Njáls saga*, and *Laxdæla saga*. They give you a pretty good idea of what life was like for wealthy farmers in Iceland during the 9th-11th centuries.\n\nAs far as the mythology goes, get yourself anything written by Terry Gunnell or John Lindow - Lindow's *Norse Mythology: An encyclopedia* is a good reference. Also, you'll want both the Prose and Poetic Eddas.\n\nAs far as culture, I cannot recommend Stefan Brink and Neil Prices' *The Viking World* high enough, nor William Ian Miller's *Bloodtaking and Peacemaking.*\n\nI would strongly recommend keeping away from anything written by Jesse Byock about anything other than archaeology in Mosfellbær, as it's not really his strong suit and essentially everything he writes has been done before and far better by Miller or Anthony Faulks." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c9xklr5" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Well, the Romans reenacted quite few battles at the Coliseum (built 72 C.E.), and I suppose they were reenacting battles before in other structures. I don't know that you could call the people in these events actors." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "er50uam" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ " & #x200B;\n\nMost all of the breech-loaders bought by the US Ordnance Dept. were given to cavalry units. There was no way they could have equipped millions of infantrymen with them, even if they had wanted to replace the millions of rifled muskets already in their hands. Because it is very awkward to load a muzzle-loading gun on horseback, cavalry was equipped with breech-loaders first. But the state militia units were under no such limitations, buying their own arms, and so some militia infantry had Henry rifles.\n\nThe Ordnance Dept bought very few Henry rifles: only 1,731 during the War. When assessed, in 1861, they were judged to be expensive and heavy. They also required special metallic cartridges, and the Dept. was already concerned about how it could supply the diverse ammunition for all the various breech-loaders it had already started to buy, the Sharps, Spencer, Burnside, Smith etc. But because of the state militia units equipped with Henry rifles, the War Dept. ended up buying about 4,000,000 cartridges for them anyway.\n\nThere does not seem to have been any great change in tactics in employing troops equipped with repeaters or breech-loaders. But their greater rate of fire certainly had an effect- as the War Dept itself would note, one solder that had the greater rate of fire of a breech-loader could equal a few equipped with muskets. One good example would be at the Battle of Franklin. Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood was already over-fond of frontal assaults against strong positions , but at Franklin his troops were badly mauled. The Confederate break-through around the Carter house on the first day of fighting was in part stopped by the 12th Kentucky and 65th Illinois militia units armed with Henry rifles." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c799b66", "c79e0fm", "c79jhjn" ], "score": [ 4, 6, 2 ], "text": [ "You should also try /r/whatisthisthing. They have a very good track record identifying historical artefacts.", "We'd need clear pictures, and lots of them, of the hilts, grips, pommels, stampings on ricassos, marks in the fullers, etc. before we could even begin to start thinking of identifying these.", "[not a historian]\n\nThe German student unions, in the beginning of the 20 century, still had academic dueling - it had impressive roots, which you can read about [here](_URL_0_) - and I take it that if these are swords of German officers, then they are also alumni of German universities, and the swords are their little mark of honour.\n\nI am of course not sure - especially given that the wikipedia article explicitly states that fencing (and student unions) were abolished during the Third Reich, and at least one of the swords has the Swastika and the Eagle of the Third Reich.\n\nHowever, comparing the swords to those illustrated in the Wikipedia article might illuminate the matter." ] }

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[ "http://imgur.com/a/9w7np" ]

[ [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_fencing#History" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e2sbz0b" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "[This post](_URL_0_) from four years ago has some useful answers which might help you out." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/27m6po/how_did_the_three_lions_come_to_be_the_coat_of" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d6s7utn", "d6sdmkp" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "The same would go for states like Italy and the Soviet Union of course, could they have kept Albania and Ethiopia, and Bessarabia respectively forever?", "Adam Tooze, *The Paperback of the The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy*, addresses it. The book is well worth reading, and it is well-regarded here.\n\nIt is his opinion that the German state was financially unstable due to economic problems -- what staved them off was first seizing Austria's state assets and reserves, then Czechosolvakia's state assets and production capacity, then Poland. But each step was follwed by expenses necessitating the next step.\n\nFurther, he states that it was Hitler's belief that, because America was a growing power, Germany had to have a broad base with lots of industry and resources just to match it, or else Germany would be enslaved and destroyed. And the only land that was available to Germany was Europe. Further, there were a few factors that came together around late 1939 that gave Germany a little brief advantage. So Hitler concluded that at some point he had to fight or die, and that moment was better/less bad.\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cbirdde" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "First, the vast majority of the Papal States had been lost by 1860 to Italian unification. Only Rome remained in papal hands, and then only because Emperor Napoleon III of France stationed troops there. The Franco-Prussian War (your 1870 date) put an abrupt end to that situation, and Italian troops siezed Rome. The pope (at this time, Pius IX) declared himself to be a \"prisoner of the Vatican\" and the issue remained largely unresolved for nearly 60 years. \n\nAs for reaction, it must first be pointed out that the pope losing control of the Papal States or Rome in particular was not a novel event. It had happened most recently in 1848. Through history, there were many times where the Papal States contracted violently, but most of the time they were restored after some interval of time. So, a situation like that of 1860 or 1870 was reasonably seen as a setback, not a final action. It was not unreasonable to think that this was a temporary situation, and Pius IX always thought that there would be a Catholic power that would come to the papacy's aid. They had in the past (largely out of self-interest that was temporarily aligned with the interests of the papacy, but sometimes out of legitimate piety).\n\nFor the interim, Pius IX barred Italians from participating in politics--*Non Expedit*. One had to choose between being Catholic and being Italian. Holding office and voting were both banned. This may seem like a harsh measure, and indeed in many ways it was. there were many Italians motivated by purely rational and wonderful things like national pride and economic growth and democracy and rights, but there were also concerted actions hostile to Catholicism. There were anticlerical sentiments--some of them violent. There were some that wanted to discard the past entirely, and this meant restrictions against the Church that were at least as strict as *Non Expedit*. The path to Italian unification was a troubled one.\n\n\"The Roman Question\" would linger until 1929, when it was settled in the Lateran Accords (or the Lateran Concordat). During that interval of nearly seven decades, there would be periods of antagonism by one side or the other, and periods of reconciliation. In the end, the papacy accepted being a small but independent nation that was neutral in foreign affairs and renounced any claim to the rest of Rome.\n\nI would be happy to answer any follow up questions that I have the answers to, so feel free to ask away!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cv06r29", "cv08u2o", "cv0bcmr", "cv0e2ht", "cv10kw9" ], "score": [ 16, 7, 5, 8, 2 ], "text": [ "Humorism, or the notion that human health depends on a balance of fluids (or \"humors\") in the body, was a predominant paradigm in health from the time of Hippocrates until the general acceptance of the germ theory of disease. It was believed that there were four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Disease and mental illness arose from an imbalance in one's humors, and treatments ranged from the prescriptions of certain foods and drinks to increase one humor or decrease others, to bloodletting and other direct manipulations of the humors. \n\nAn 11th century poem attributed to John of Milano describes the symptoms of an overabundance of each of the humors (this is just an excerpt):\n\n > If Sanguin humour do too much abound,\n\n > These signes will be thereof appearing cheefe,\n\n > The face will swell, the cheeks grow red and round,\n\n > With staring eies, the pulse beate soft and breefe,\n\n > The veynes exceed, the belly will be bound,\n\n > The temples, and the forehead full of griefe,\n\n > Unquiet sleeps, that so strange dreames will make\n\n > To cause one blush to tell when he doth wake:\n\n > Besides the moysture of the mouth and spittle,\n\n > Will taste too sweet, and seeme the throat to tickle. \n > \n \n > \tIf Choller do exceed, as may sometime,\n\n > Your eares will ring, and make you to be wakefull,\n\n > Your tongue will seeme all rough, and oftentimes\n\n > Cause vomits, unaccustomed and hatefull,\n\n > Great thirst, your excrements are full of slime,\n\n > The stomacke squeamish, sustenance ungratefull, \n\n > Your appetite will seeme in nought delighting,\n\n > Your heart still greeued with continuall byting,\n\n > The pulse beate hard and swift, all hot, extreame,\n\n > Your spittle soure, of fire-worke oft you dreame. \n\n > \n > \tIf Flegme abundance haue due limits past,\n\n > These signes are here set downe will plainly shew,\n\n > The mouth will seeme to you quite out of taste,\n\n > And apt with moisture still to overflow,\n\n > Your sides will seeme all sore downe to the waist,\n\n > Your meat wax loathsome, your digestion slow,\n\n > Your head and stomacke both in so ill taking,\n\n > One seeming euer griping tother aking:\n\n > With empty veynes, the pulse beat slow and soft,\n\n > In sleepe, of seas and ryuers dreaming oft.\n\n > \n > \n > But if that dangerous humour ouer-raigne,\n\n > Of Melancholy, sometime making mad,\n\n > These tokens then will be appearing plaine,\n\n > The pulse beat hard, the colour darke and bad:\n\n > The water thin, a weake fantasticke braine,\n\n > False-grounded ioy, or else perpetuall sad,\n\n > Affrighted oftentimes with dreames like visions,\n\n > Presenting to the thought ill apparitions,\n\n > Of bitter belches from the stomacke comming,\n\n > His eare (the left especiall) euer humming.\n\nMood/personality descriptors based on the four humors are still in usage, though infrequently and largely divorced from the idea that one's fluids might actually be out of balance. If you've heard of someone being described as \"phlegmatic,\" \"sanguine,\" \"choleric,\" or \"melancholic,\" those terms arise from the four humors. In fact, the word \"humor\" itself as a modern synonym for \"comedy\" comes out of Renaissance comic plays -- specifically those of Ben Johnson -- in which characters represented exaggerated imbalances of the humors for comic effect.", "According to John Quincy, in his book \"Lexicon Physico-Medicum\" (1767), doctors should refrain from the following practices...\n\n- Hanging a sign that says ABRACADABRA around the patients neck. Although this has been assigned curative powers by Serenus in his work \"Medicina Metrica\", Quincy condemns this as a trick and as laughable in modern medicine.\n\n- Amulets as medicine are often \"much abused\", but Quincy firmly states that a knowledgeable doctors \"will find no Reason to disbelieve the possible Efficacy of Amulets\". \n\n- Quincy states that Incantations when applied with Charms, although supported by Paracelsus and Helmont and other chemical enthusiasts, is delusional and should pursue a \"better Way of Reasoning\".\n\n- Necromancy that is espoused by some \"enthusiastic Physicians\" is purely a Juggle (deception), according to Dr. Quincy.\n\nA lot of things being condemned by Quincy in this mid 18th century medical book are what we would call sympathetic magic today, but I don't think they have that term back then. When Quincy gets really riled up, he calls them \"Jugglers\".\n\n", "This is not a direct answer, but something to take into account: some successful and thoroughly empirical disciplines have fizzled out because they exhausted their subject matter. They're still taught to undergraduates, and they may be important as technologies, but fundamental discoveries are few are far between.\n\nIn my own field, language and literature, I'm thinking about classical rhetoric, analysis of rhyme and meter in poetry, Indo-European historical linguistics, philology and paleography, phonology and phonetics (except its relation with neurology and AI). \n\nI wouldn't put history in this category. New finds and new theoretical perspectives seem to keep this discipline alive. What do historians think?", "I'm surprised this has not been mentioned yet, but eugenics was very popular in the Western world and was practiced all the way up until the 1970's, and was very popular among people all across the scientific world and the political spectrum. However, eventually scientific advances as well as moral concerns ruled most of it out, as the genetic sources of abnormalities are far more complicated than Eugenicists thought, among other reasons.", "Psychoanalysis, as a medical discipline. In the 1950s, a majority of papers published in clinical psychology and psychiatry journals referenced psychoanalysis or its concepts. By the late 1970s, it was below 1%, and mostly negative. \n\nSome therapies (\"psychodynamic\") claim to be evolved from psychoanalysis but they either don't have much if any supporting evidence for their efficacy, are far removed in practice from historical psychoanalysis, or simply aren't any better than any form of talk therapy. \n\nThat's not to say it's not practiced anymore, far from it unfortunately, but it's declining. The theory is pretty much dead to science, as the huge advances in neurosciences in the past few decades usually contradict the unique claims of psychoanalysis. When they do, it's either the vaguest, unspecific notions (such as the unconscious) or those that aren't even original. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "chas23w" ], "score": [ 35 ], "text": [ "The Europeans were actually quite a bit more advanced than the late Romans.\n\nThe horse collar and the associated harness allowed for heavy plows and the tilling of land that had not been able to produce as much grain as previously. Farmers could plow deeper and seed the soil in a way that protected the seeds against the frost better, and land further north became more productive.\n\nThe introduction of the scythe to replace the sickle also made it possible not only to harvest more crops (it seems farmers started to use the scythe for harvesting crops towards the end of the medieval era) but also to scythe hay to keep livestock over winter much forther nort, and to keep more livestock alive. Dairy and dairy-based products become more common during this era as a result.\n\nThe horizontal loom allowed for more effective weaving and gave birth to the English-Flemish wool industry.\n\nThe invention of the windmill, to drain land, irrigate or mill allowed deeper mines, easier milling away from streams or the usage of humans or animals in a treadmill.\n\nThe introduction of optics - both for early telescopes and for glasses during this era allowed the study of astronomy and for learned men to read and work for longer.\n\nNavigation became easier - the invention of the compass and quadrant and the introduction of larger vessels built with cravell technique (such as the carrack/nau or the caravel) and multiple masts with multiple sails all allowed more extensive trade over longer distances.\n\nBy the 14th century, rudimentary cannons had been introduced, complication fortification construction and revolutionising warfare. The stirrup and the medieval saddle had made medieval cavalry far more dangerous than its Roman counterparts ever were.\n\nThis is just a small excerpt on things in which medieval Europe was more advanced than the Roman Empire.\n\nAs for the industrial revolution, it is my experience and pet theory that the industrial revolution does not happen, or is severely retarded in places where large landowners hold the economical and political power. To them, slavery or serfdom is profitable and preferable and they have little incentive to invest in labour-saving machinery, tools or factories, thus providing neither the market nor the investment needed for an industrial revolution." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc5y9rr" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "First of all, modern Zionism began in the late 1800s/early 1900s, not 1948. But beyond that nitpicking, the answer is mostly no.\n\nAfter the series of failed revolts against the Romans, desire among Jews for political independence by-and-large faded. There were, at various times, movements of Jews to migrate to Israel, but these were based on a (largely religious) desire to *live* in the Holy Land, not to obtain political control of it. The idea of nationalism didn't really exist yet, and political independence for Jews in the Holy Land tended to be linked to religious conceptions of the messianic era, not an actionable political idea.\n\nAt any rate, just because the Romans were gone didn't mean that things were ripe for re-asserting independence. Over the centuries many other powers controlled the area. While there were perhaps times of a relative power vacuum, they weren't the norm. More importantly, the actual Jewish population in the area was fairly small, so it would be difficult for Jews to actually assert their independence, when they were a minority." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cyxppcy" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Both started out as pan-Ottoman movements seeking to preserve the state through representative government involving all of its constituent peoples. But whereas the Young Ottomans came to see Islam as the basis of a core identity for the empire - uniting as it did Turks and Arabs to the south - the Young Turks increasingly (and especially after their return to power in 1913) saw a Turkish national identity as the future, alienating even Muslim non-Turks but prefiguring the secular nationalism of the later Republic. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "exibils" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "[This answer](_URL_0_) by /u/kieslowskifan explains that the French really wanted to build the line along the Belgium\\german border and planned to pay for their construction. The plan was that Belgium fortifications and natural terrain would delay the Germans long enough for French forces to join up with Belgium forces and drive invaders out.\n\nThe reason that France did not build fortifications along the french \\Belgium border was that if Belgium fortified their border with Germany then the French fortifications would be a waste of resources. Also the costs of building and maintaining forts were a major factor along with overestimating the natural defences delaying german forces long enough for the French to reinforce the Belgiums." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/62qp4p/why_didnt_france_heavily_fortify_the_belgian/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d1s92tv" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ " > However, the technologies (except for the machine gun) used at the beginning of the war appear to be fairly similar.\n\nNothing could be further from the truth; the Franco-Prussian War was fought using muzzle and breech-loaded artillery pieces, without recoil systems. from the 1890s onwards, artillery pieces began to appear with recoil systems, mostly hydraulic based, that allowed for a far higher rate of more accurate fire. In the case of the French 75mm Mle 1897, it could fire 15 75mm rounds per minute.\n\nRifles were magazine fed, and utilized smokeless powder which gave bullets a higher velocity, longer range, and flatter trajectory. Throw in machine guns, and weapons technology was far more deadly in 1914 than it was in 1871.\n\nNow add in wireless communiations, motorized transport and aircraft, and it's clear that 1914 was a different kind of warfare than that waged in 1870-71. The armies of 1914 were far larger than those of 1870-71, so that also must be factored in. The Second Industrial Revolution had changed the way war was fought." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d53t62f" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Chinese migrant labor in the US railroad industry was more or less pioneered by the Central Pacific Railroad, which was a corporation in practice based in Sacramento CA, and building one end of the transcontinental railroad heading east. Until the trans-continental railroad was complete Chinese railroad laborers were in effect a California only phenomenon. Most of them came directly from China by ship across the Pacific to Sacramento, and then the Central Pacific moved them by rail to the work sites in the Sierra or further east. Shipping goods and people across the Pacific had been done for centuries by the 1860s.\n\nThe reason the Central Pacific decided to employ Chinese labor and in effect recruit in China was because of a labor shortage on the west coast specifically. East Coast Americans or Europeans who took the long boat or boat and rail (across the Central American isthmus) were able to easily find work in mining or agriculture and would demand a premium in order to work on the railroad, and frequently struck for better wages. Chinese immigrants had fewer options because of rather intense racial prejudice in California. The eastern and midwestern railroads generally did not employ Chinese labor before the trans-continental railroad was complete, since they had greater access to laborers from Europe or the US east coast." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "eedokpg" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ "I'm going to limit my answer is scope, so I want to be really specific about terminology because I THINK I know what you're asking. The phrase \"cardiac arrest\" can cause a lot of confusion, and even major media outlets mess it up a lot (for example, calling it \"heart failure\" which certainly sounds like it would be a synonym but is a completely different phenomenon). Cardiac arrest means a sudden loss of heart function, no matter what the cause. This is a medical emergency, and if not addressed will naturally cause death. If I'm working on the wards and one of my patients goes into a cardiac arrest, I would follow the AHA Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) algorithm. You can take a look at it here ([_URL_0_](_URL_0_)). I am required to undergo training in this algorithm, including \"mock codes\" every two years, as is every other doctor and nurse who provides patient care in the hospital.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nCardiac arrest can be caused by different things -- but it's an emergency, and you worry about the exact causes later. If you'll look at the algorithm you'll see that the major branch point is whether the patient has a shockable rhythm (VT/Vfib), or has pulse electrical activity or asystole, Despite what you see on TV, you CANNOT shock asystole back. So what you're talking about -- defibrillation and CPR -- refers to only a specific type of cardiac arrest, the VFib/VT arrest, which is what I'm going to talk about.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo before I go any further, I'll give a brief historical overview. What constitutes death has been an ongoing debate starting in the late 18th century, and continuing to this day. 18th and 19th century physicians recognized a condition called \"suspended animation\" -- a death-like state from which a patient could be revive. There were widespread beliefs that drowning victims could be revived from suspended animation by a tobacco smoke enema, and famously emergency smoke enema kits were near rivers in many cities (I was reading a few days ago about a charitable society in 1790s Philadelphia that supplied them). That cessation of heart as a primary cause of death (aka cardiac arrest) existed was not truly recognized until the mid 1800s, associated with \"coronary thrombosis\" (an MI, or heart attack).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBy the late 19th century, physiologists had largely characterized the electrical conduction system of the heart (the His-Purkinje system). In 1901, Willem Eintoven invented the first prototype of an electrocardiogram (EKG in German -- see here for an early diagram: [_URL_1_](_URL_4_)) which for the first time allowed a direct tracing to be make of the heart's electrical activity. Rapidly doctors described the EKG essentially in the terms we used today (P waves, QRS complex, T waves -- though the first EKGs ran right to left which is confusing as I'm looking at them now). By 1910, Lewis and Gallavardin had shown that both ventricular tachycardia and ventricular preceded cardiac arrest and were \"terminal rhythms\". Smith then did a number of dog experiments (poor doggos), which confirmed these findings -- prior to cardiac arrest, the heart would be into V Fib or VT.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nDoctors naturally postulated that if there were a way to TREAT V Fib or VT, they could likely save the patient's lives (many of these studies were focused on people with structural heart disease, especially heart failure, who tended to go into V Fib, but also VT). By the late 1920s, there was decent evidence that quinidine could stop VT (today we know that it's a class I antiarrythmic), and a study in 1950 found that quinidine given via IV could stop an arrythmia. Armbrust and Levine considered quinidine to be the standard of care, despite the unpleasant side effects: \"The fact that the patient becomes nauseated, dizzy, weak, or develops diarrhea or ringing of the ears should not discourage the physician from persisting with this therapy, when the alternative is likely to be a fatal termination.\" Procainamide and IV lidocaine started to be used in the 1950s and 1960s, largely with the same effects as quinidine, with fewer side effects (also class I antiarrythmics).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nWhich, of course, leads to the development of defibrillation and closed-chest cardiac massage (AKA CPR, based on the previous technique of opening a patient's chest and actually squeezing the heart, still done in penetrating chest trauma in emergency departments, and intraoperatively). By the late 1950s, defibrillation had been experimentally done (and later cardioversion), and by the 1960s, coronary care units were being developed with constant telemetry monitoring and \"crash carts\" to immediately defibrillate a patient (as well as give IV antiarrytmics) in an attempt to resuscitate them. But I've gone on long enough.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nSo, the **TL;DR**: prior to the invention of defibrillation and CPR, if a patient went into cardiac arrest from an unstable arrhythmia (VT or V Fib), the doctor would give intravenous quinidine or procainamide. If an EKG showed pulseless electric activity or asytole, however, this would have been synonymous with death.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nHope that answers your question!\n\n & #x200B;\n\nEDIT: Just for fun: V Fib: [_URL_2_](_URL_2_); VT: [_URL_3_](_URL_3_)\n\n & #x200B;" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.acls-pals-bls.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ACLS-adult-cardiac-arrest-algorithm.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem\\_Einthoven#/media/File:Willem\\_Einthoven\\_ECG.jpg", "https://pcs12.azureedge.net/ekgtracings/5.gif", "https://media.chemotherapyadvisor.com/images/dsm/ch4594.fig1.png", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Einthoven#/media/File:Willem_Einthoven_ECG.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dkrwkcm" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "_URL_0_\n\nThis thread from a couple of years ago seems to have the most in-depth answer that I found, by /u/tayaravaknin" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/30izkc/why_didnt_the_usa_apply_the_monroe_doctrine/?st=J5LS68MR&sh=a58789c4" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "djk8lfa" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "I've never heard of any involvement at all by auto companies. What source suggested there was?\n\nSuperhighways were the response of the highway engineering profession to the problems of growing auto traffic and the appalling crash rate when autos were used on the streets and roads laid out in previous centuries. The concept of a limited-access, grade-separated, multilane facility was demonstrated in the 1930s with short urban stretches in and near New York City and Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. Several similar facilities were in place around the country by 1940, when the Pennsylvania Turnpike demonstrated the demand for cross-country superhighways as well. By 1957, about 1.5 percent of \"federal-aid\" and toll highways were already superhighways; today—though the statistics are not strictly comparable—about 19 percent are.\n\nPlanning for such facilities continued through the war years, and state highway departments began building as soon after the war as they could, using whatever funds they could scrape together. In several states, toll financing provided the way to get such highways built. A federal-aid financing program for a new network of superhighways took three years of congressional wrangling [discussed in this previous thread](_URL_0_) before finally resulting in the 1956 Interstate program.\n\nAs the Interstate program became law, Ford put out a widely distributed booklet, \"Freedom of the American Road,\" that touted the safety and efficiency of the new highways. From the date, it seems unlikely to have appeared in time to influence congressional debate. Undoubtedly General Motors and the insurance industry did similar public relations booklets and films, but I've never heard them mentioned in discussions of the legislation.\n\nI like Earl Swift’s *The Big Roads* as the most readable history of the Interstates, but Mark Rose's *Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939-1989* is the more scholarly source on the congressional machinations. A more recent book by Joseph DiMento and Cliff Ellis, *Changing Lanes: Visions and Histories of Urban Freeways,* recounts the history of how traffic engineers and city planners wrangled with this new force reshaping the city.\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6678ql/dwight_eisenhower_is_usually_described_as_a/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cwdvlgu" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "[This answer covers some of the main themes pretty well!](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kw75g/why_didnt_scotland_or_france_invade_england/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d2pbtvm" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Depends a bit on what you mean by a water source. Ancient settlements in Yemen were able to support themselves based on the collection of monsoon rains in mountain valley dams, cisterns, and underground aqueduct systems. The Marib dam is one such example and is thousands of years old. It's my understanding that these areas would not otherwise have had any significant local water source like a permanent river or natural aquifer." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d37dvd6", "d37pvmu" ], "score": [ 18, 5 ], "text": [ "Well, first off, I would say that this isn't an entirely clear-cut process; there were ships using square sails when lateens were prevalent, and vice versa, and the \"classic\" full sail rig we think of developing around the time of the Napoleonic wars incorporated fore-and-aft sails. *HMS Victory* was launched in 1765 and as built had a mizen course with a [long lateen-style yard](_URL_3_). \n\nAs far as we know, both the classical-era Mediterranean galley and the ships of the era in northern Europe carried a square sail. That's most likely because the sail was meant to provide power, but the ship's oars allowed it to move without the sail, so sail power for traveling upwind was less of a consideration than it would be as ships got bigger. It's also fairly simple to make and rig a square sail, in terms of both the cloth-making and also the tackle for the mast and yard. \n\nIn terms of the \"progression\" of sail rigs, the lateen rig seems to have entered the Mediterranean around the [late second/early third century](_URL_2_). The advantage of the lateen is that it allows for the ship to work upwind more easily, as the triangular sail can be braced around more forward. The disadvantage is that it takes either a large crew or a great deal of time to tack or wear with a lateen, as you have to pass the yard entirely around the mast to do so (unless the boat is extremely small or you're in very light airs). \n\nMoving forward substantially in time, we see the lateen rig exit the Mediterranean and be used in western ships around the time of the Portuguese voyages of exploration, when the caravel and carrack style ships appeared. The [caravel](_URL_0_) was generally smaller than the carrack, and could carry either a square or lateen rig, and the carrack was generally larger and would generally mix the rig, with square sails forward for driving force and lateen sails aft. Some carracks could be quite large -- Henry VIII's [large ships were carracks](_URL_1_) -- but nearly all of them lacked what we'd later call a \"made mast,\" that is one comprised of several sticks above one another. The *Mary Rose* pictured above has only topmasts, for example. \n\nAs the carrack style developed into the galleon, you started to see a more or less standard large ship type with usually four masts, usually at least two lateen rigged. The classic galleon, though, was a very large ship with very many men on it, and they could afford the manpower to work four lateen sails (two courses and two topsails). \n\nIf you're talking about the earliest version of the \"standard\" square rig of the Napoleonic period, the fluyt is probably the first ship to have it, where you have two entirely square-rigged masts and a lateen on the mizen. This was a sail plan that provided good driving force but maneuverability with the fore-and-aft jibs and the mizen lateen, and didn't cost too much in manpower (that is, it could be handled by a merchant crew). The Dutch ships' sail plan and hull form was copied by other designers, and gave rise to the \"classic\" man of war plan, with additional masts (royals and above) added, and the lateen being supplemented by staysails and multiple jibs. The gaff spanker replaced the lateen course by the latter part of the 18th century, although as we saw above ships retained the lateen yard, vestigially, even late in the century. \n\n**Edit**: I can't spel gud ", "Some clarification on terminology: square sails are so called not because they have a square shape, but because their neutral position is square, i.e. perpendicular, to the length of the ship.\n\nA lateen sail is a type of fore-and-aft sail, whose default alignment is along the length of the ship. Other types of fore-and-aft sails are the gaff rig and the Bermuda rig.\n\nThere are multiple tradeoffs in these types of sails, but historically many sailing ships with multiple sails have had a combination of both.\n\nThe first thing is what route the ship is intended to run. Ships that travel along the trade winds doing trans-oceanic shipping will primarily be going downwind so they don't need fore-and-aft sails as much and downwind performance is more important. \n\nShips that run along the coastline, eg shipping or fishing need fore-and-aft sails because the winds are more variable, and because if the wind is blowing toward the coast you need to be able to point into the wind to avoid getting shipwrecked, or get anywhere really.\n\nThis is part of the reason why lateen sails are emphasized in the story of Portugese exploration of the African coast - since they were proceeding along the coast they needed that ability. But for instance in the pacific islands and the Indian Ocean a lot of exploration was done with square sails.\n\nIn the 19th century two important American sailing ship types were the clipper, which was a square-rigged trans-oceanic shipping vessel, and the schooner, which had fore-and-aft sails and did shipping and fishing along the coastlines.\n\nAnother tradeoff is manpower. /u/jschooltiger points out that a lateen sail can be difficult to tack, but other fore-and-aft sails do not have that problem. In particular, a bark rig, which has square sails on the first few masts and a fore-and-aft sail on the rearmost mast, is said to have gained prevalence because it required a smaller crew than a ship with square sails on all the masts (called a full-rigged or ship-rigged vessel).\n\nHowever, one problem with fore-and-aft sails is that they are asymmetrical when going downwind. This makes them dangerous because a wind shift can cause them to swing violently to the other side. For this reason, square sails have sometimes been preferred in long range shipping even if technically a fore-and-aft sail might provide better performance.\n\nAnother issue is that a square rigged mast will usually have multiple smaller sails, while a fore-and-aft sail on the same mast will be bigger. This can make it more difficult to control and reducing sail in a downwind scenario can be impossible, because the ship must head to wind to relieve the load on the sail, and turning a ship around in heavy seas can sink the ship. \n\nAnother consideration is that before synthetic materials, both lines (I.e. ropes) and sails themselves were weaker. So the very large fore-and-aft rigged yachts that we see today would have been more technically challenging before the 1950s when such materials became available. Modern pleasure boats are also generally derived from a tradition of racing yachts which has also influenced the rigging styles we see in sailing today.\n\nI'm sure there are other things I've left out, but the point is that it's not a straightforward evolution as typically presented in basic narratives of European exploration." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.theportugalnews.com/uploads/news/1150-24.jpg", "http://www.archaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Geoff-Hunts-painting-of-the-Mary-rose-under-sail-Geoff-Hunt-The-Mary-Rose-Trust.jpg", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2fs8qr/", "http://www.hms-victory.com/sites/all/modules/nmrn_bones/img/poi_1-1-7.jpg" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c4gcv0u", "c4gdre2" ], "score": [ 2, 8 ], "text": [ "The only 2 that immediately come to mind is Armenia and maybe Greece.\n\nArmenia was created in a relatively short amount of time but I do not believe there was any sort of mass migration, or at least that I know of. \n\nI only say Greece because it was under Ottoman rule for so long and after breaking away there was mass population shifts of Greeks into Greece and Muslims out.", "The creation of Pakistan from India. Heavy migration of Muslims from all over India to the western part of the subcontinent. To the extent that many of the local rulers (nawwabs) lost their riches and power in favor of the new state.\n\nThe whole process, from inception to actual independence is about 7 years, I think." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ca228au", "ca26koq" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "Hello there!\nA little Japan firearm background:\n\nFirearms were brought over from China as early as the 13th century but the application and use of these weapons in armies were scarce at best. The 15th and 16th century saw the arrival of European firearms which were much more advanced than their earlier Chinese counterparts. The Sengoku period (1467 to 1573) was a period of war between feudal states in Japan that fought for control of the nation and due to the widespread warfare, matchlocks were widely used among the feuding armies. The Sakoku period (mid-1660's to 1853) resulted in firearm production grinding to a halt and the use of such weapons declining due to the country turning to a very strict isolationist policy. \n\nI have studied about samurai culture, read extensively into their rise and fall and have been fascinated with the way samurai devote themselves to the mastery of their katana sword in 'the way of the warrior', in Japanese, 'bushido'. With all this in mind, the best word I can use to describe the implementation of *European* firearms and matchlocks in Japan is this: devastating. \n\nFirearms not only gave a minimally trained person the capability of killing a veteran samurai in one shot, but combined with others could devastate an entire unit of samurai that have spent their entire lives studying, practicing and ultimately perfecting their martial art. Matchlock troops were much cheaper and far easier to train. This means it was cheaper and a lot easier to replace a dead *ashigaru* (foot soldier) than a samurai. \n\nMultiply that scenario hundreds of times and you'll see how the reluctant adaption of firearms took hold in modern Japan in the mid and late 19th century. Despite the fall of the samurai their teachings and way of life survives in books and pop culture today. \n\nThis answer has a lot of missing information due to summarizing but if you have any other questions I'd be happy to answer them.\n", "One particular battle of note in this case is the Battle of Nagashino in 1575. In this battle, Oda Nobunaga used his arquebusiers to great effect and decimated the Takeda cavalry, which was, up to that point, one of the most feared fighting forces in all of Japan. It is often considered a turning point in warfare in Japan, as it showed decisively that foot soldiers with guns could defeat highly trained samurai." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dxpkc9r" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "If we assume a time period approximate to June 18th, 'Britain's finest hour', then certainly, Britain's position was not an enviable one, but defeat was not a foregone conclusion. In the eyes of the world at least, especially the US, Britain's survival seemed dependent on its ability to resist the inexorable German invasion. After all, the panzers had rolled across Western Europe in little over a month, Operation *Sealion* was surely mere weeks away? Such viewpoints were popularised largely by propaganda, though not at all helped in the popular narrative by speeches such as [this](_URL_0_).\n\nThe Netherlands, France, Belgium and Luxembourg had all capitulated, with the French armistice coming into effect by June 16th. At home, the British Army, now with returned units from France and newly raised units, consisted of around 22 divisions at roughly half strength, with more still mobilizing. These units lacked much of their light and heavy artillery, motor transport and critically, ammunition \\- much of it having been left behind. It is estimated \\(generously\\), that Britain possessed around 500 tanks at this time, most of them in the light to medium 'cruiser' variety, and around 800 medium to heavy artillery pieces. The Local Defence Volunteers had been founded in early May and by June consisted of around 1.5 million volunteers whom, like their professional counterparts, were woefully under equipped, but in good morale.\n\nIn the naval theatre, the loss of the French navy and their Atlantic bases was a body blow to the Royal Navy. Prien's U\\-Boats now had access to the Atlantic, and enjoyed their first 'happy time', sinking around 270 ships before October. The loss of 10 destroyers in the Norwegian and French campaigns, and a further 10 in the Atlantic compromised an effective naval response to invasion, and to policing its convoys \\(though this was remedied by the Destroyers for Bases Agreement\\). Compounded with the Italian entry into the war, the RN was now stretched in its commitments from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. In the Mediterranean it had to guard British possessions from Gibraltar to Palestine, as well as support Greece and the army in Egypt from a modern and effective *Regia Marina*.\n\nThis being said, the Royal Navy still effectively dwarfed both the *Kriegsmarine* and the *Regia Marina.* For any effective invasion operation to be undertaken, Germany would need clear naval superiority, something which it could not accomplish against the Royal Navy's Home Fleet. The *Kriegsmarine* had lost 3 cruisers and 10 destroyers in the Norwegian campaign, which would have provided the bulk of any invasion fleet. While the Royal Navy had taken similar losses, these were easily absorbed and were soon to be rapidly replaced with a massive expansion program begun in 1938. German naval losses had also disenfranchised Hitler to the need for a large surface fleet, and despite Prien's objections, the *Kriegsmarine*'s surface units, including its precious battleships, would lose their limelight to the u\\-boats.\n\nDespite the desperation that would be seen in the Battle of Britain, Britain remained strong in its air assets. The loss of 106 aircraft covering the Dunkirk evacuation was quickly replaced with Britain's steadily increasing industrial output. Around 750 single\\-seat fighter aircraft were available to Fighter Command at this time, the majority the sturdy Hawker Hurricane, but the remainder being the superb Supermarine Spitfire. Most concerning however were the losses in pilots. Most RAF pilots lacked the experience of their Luftwaffe counterparts, being quickly trained, though their officers had often seen action over France, and were helped by significant contributions of pilots from the Commonwealth and other Allies. Fuel stocks had been expanded in the prelude to hostilities, as had the number of airfields. The RAF's Dowding System \\- of Chain Home Radar stations and a hierarchy of reporting stations, providing undoubtedly the finest air\\-interception system in the world at the time.\n\nOverall, Britain's defending forces both navally and aeronautically were well equipped to deal with German invasion, but limited in any offensive operations, while the British army was nowhere near equipped to handle a German attack until at least the following year. However, opposing German forces are often over\\-exaggerated in their ability to affect an invasion or destroy Britain's supply lines.\n\nThe Luftwaffe's air forces ranged against the UK consisted of around 2500 aircraft; 800 single\\-engine and 300 twin\\-engine fighters, 1000 medium bombers and 300 dive\\-bombers. Germain air\\-crews gained valuable experience in the Spanish civil\\-war, as well as over France and the Low Countries. Their primary aircraft consisted of the capable Dornier Do17 and Heinkel HE111 medium bombers, and the excellent Messerschmidt Me\\-109. These fighters would however, be substantially hindered by their short operational range, possessing perhaps 20 minutes worth of fuel for operations over Britain. The early successes enjoyed by the Luftwaffe were largely the result of it being a 'tactical' air force, designed for operations in support of the army. Certainly the stunned allied troops in Belgium could attest to its awesome capacity as aerial artillery, however the need for deep\\-strikes against British industrial centres and distant RAF airfields revealed key weaknesses in the Luftwaffe's capacity for strategic operation. Moreover, the Luftwaffe's hitherto poor record against warships precluded it from effectively disrupting RN operations, and would mean in any amphibious operation, it would remain dangerously overstretched.\n\nThe requirements to be placed on the German Army for any attempt at crossing the channel were also far in excess of its capabilities. Army High Command \\(OKW\\) had originally called for a landing of 40 divisions, which was ultimately revised to a still unrealistic 9 divisions. \\(By comparison, the Normandy landings consisted of 8\\). No doubt the German Army, with its emphasis on mobility and armoured penetration, and fighting a vastly under\\-equipped British Army, would have been able to secure substantial bridgeheads had it been landed, however it is likely that its Blitzkrieg style assault may well have faltered upon encountering as dense an urban area as London. London of course, the largest city in the world at this time, would have made dangerous ground for tanks, and German infantry would be slowed by extensive house\\-to\\-house operations against a familiar and fanatical defender. German airborne forces were recognised as a significant risk by British High Command, especially following the daring assaults on Eben Emael and Rotterdam. However the saturation of LDV units across the countryside would have hindered attempts at airborne link\\-ups, or at the very least, forbade paratroopers any hope of landing stealthily.\n\nPerhaps the most critical factor in determining the success of an invasion however, was the ability of the *Kriegsmarine* to first transport and then supply such a force. As detailed above, the surface escorts of the German navy were no where near numerous enough to support an amphibious landing, especially not one conducted in the face of the Home fleet, which would be forced to 'unerringly commit its naval forces'. Despite Admiral Donitz's guarantees of being able to keep the RN at bay, a mass, albeit piecemeal, assault by the RNs largest units, as well as the 500 or MTBs hidden along the south coast, would likely result in slaughter of the hapless embarked infantry, and the marooning of any that had disembarked. Not only this, but the *Kriegsmarine* was desperately lacking amphibious craft, especially for an operation of such magnitude. The 2,400 requisitioned barges from Dutch and Belgian canals were woefully inadequate for a channel crossing, and the specialised craft far too few in number. Donitz would be forced to settle for his protracted u\\-boat campaign to force Britain from the war.\n\nTo conclude then, Britain's position in June 1940 was poor. The Royal Navy was overstretched, its air force was small, and the army desperately poorly equipped. It stood no chance of waging an offensive war in Western Europe without substantial help. However, the commonly held views that invasion was imminent \\(that it was saved by the 'divine providence of the few'\\) and Britain was completely vulnerable to it, are misconceptions. The weaknesses of the Home Fleet and the RAF, and the capabilities of their German counterparts to adequately support an invasion are grossly over exaggerated. While the u\\-boat campaign would ultimately evolve to become a very significant threat, arguably the greatest the country has faced, in June 1940 Britain was certainly very far from 'screwed'.\n\n^(Please be kind this is my first response on this) ^(sub)^(.)" ] }

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[ [ "https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/we-shall-never-surrender/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c6qzcr7", "c6r1ahn", "c6r1f1l" ], "score": [ 3, 2, 6 ], "text": [ "Well, if you want to know in 1900, Google Books has something for you:\n\n[Jane's Fighting Ships (Cosmopolitan Naval Annual), 1900](_URL_0_). It's immediately contemporary. Granted, it will not have perfect information, what with a lot of things being under construction or even secret. So you'll need some other reference volume that is not necessarily free, and perhaps compile your own statistics, to gain perfect knowledge--but that's what naval aficionados and young militarists would consult at the time. Its information on foreign navies (non-British) was however prone to flubs because of their secrecy before Jane.\n\nAs far as British naval power itself, Paul Kennedy's *Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery* will give you the contours of the policies that animated the RN. Go there for the intellectual matter.", "Not sure where you could find something similar for other world navies, but [here's a chart](_URL_0_) detailing the U.S. Navy's force levels from 1887 to the present.", "The size of the fleet fluctuated, rising significantly during war time and shrinking during peace. It also varied significantly over the time period because of the change in technology. \n\nThe standard policy just before WWI was to maintain a fleet the size of the next 2 fleets combined. That started to become impractical. By the Washington Naval Treaty (1922) the U.S. fleet was limited to the same capital ship tonnage as the British but was still a bit smaller. During WWII the U.S. passed the British and never looked back.\n\n\nHere are some sources with numbers: \n\nNumber of British Ships of the line during the Napoleonic era (not Ships of the line are only the big ships not everything on the fleet).\n1808-09: 113\n1811: 107\n1813: 102\n1814: 99\n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_0_ (see chart at bottom)\n\n\nIn 1939 they had the largest fleet: 15 large battleships, 15 heavy cruisers, 46 light cruisers, 7 aircraft carriers, 181 destroyers and 59 submarines.\n\nToday:\n_URL_1_" ] }

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[ [ "http://books.google.com/books?id=C2RCxi8jZwYC" ], [ "http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/org9-4.htm" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_naval_arms_race", "http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8049674/Navy-to-reduce-to-smallest-size-ever-to-save-carriers.html", "http://www.napolun.com/mirror/napoleonistyka.atspace.com/navy.htm" ] ]