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{ "a_id": [ "cekw4ib", "cel9hiw", "celcp57" ], "score": [ 60, 6, 2 ], "text": [ "Hanno the Navigator thought that gorillas, at least, were people:\n\n > On the third day after our departure thence, having sailed by those streams of fire, we arrived at a bay called the Southern Horn[11]; at the bottom of which lay an island like the former, having a lake, and in this lake another island, full of savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom our interpreters called Gorillae. Though we pursued the men we could not seize any of them; but all fled from us, escaping over the precipices, and defending themselves with stones. Three women were however taken; but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and hands, and could not be prevailed upon to accompany us. Having killed them, we flayed them, and brought their skins with us to Carthage. We did not sail farther on, our provisions failing us.\n\n[Source](_URL_1_), [archive](_URL_0_) since the source is very slow.", "The ape shows up in medieval life in several places, beginning in the early high middle ages. We find them in a handful of church sculptures. The dominant view is that apes represented some *evil* aspect of human character, some terrible flaw. This is suggested by correlations to some representations in early art from Iberian Islam and some hypothesizing of influence from Aesop's Fables, both of which entered western European culture just before the high middle ages.\n\nMonkey representation really begins to take off later in [manuscript marginalia](_URL_0_). They are often doing human activities which never explained in the manuscript texts. We infer they acted as allegorical representations of aspects of human character and fate. The British Library's manuscript blog is always a fantastic source of thematic surveys, and [they have one on monkeys playing bagpipes and gardening](_URL_2_). It's hard for us to construct precise allegorical intentions, in part because monkeys aren't alone in representing human activity: rabbits, foxes, bears, dogs and cats all have their turns 'as humans'. Many of these allegories are lost to us, and may be highly personal or meaningful to a certain region or even a joke within a scriptorium. But we can see that western medieval peoples encountered the ape and recognized some correlation with humans.\n\nIntriguingly, these monkeys show up in many late medieval manuscripts from Netherlands-Flemish territories - as with the BL webpage above. And a century later they show up in painting of [Two Chained Monkeys](_URL_1_) by Pieter Breughel the elder. The city in the background of the painting is the great northern Renaissance merchant import port Antwerp, right in the middle of the Flemish-Netherlandish geography.\n\nWe're reading between the lines here, but allegory of human folly and fate in the medieval period seems to shift to metaphor in Breughel's chained monkeys. In the context of Breughel's other moral paintings, the abiding theory of this painting is that the monkeys represent some aspect of human ambition. The nut shells in the painting are often correlated to the Dutch expression \"to go to court for the sake of a nut\".\n\nThe monkey on the left in Breughel's painting looks directly at the viewer. Perhaps a challenge: we can feel in these representations a tension between the ape-as-itself and ape-as-human, reflecting the dichotomy of the Christian allegorical world view. ", "In Bahasa Malay the word \"orang\" means \"man\" or \"person\" and \"utan\" means \"forest\" - an [\"orangutan\" is a forest-person](_URL_2_). \n\nFor years, Western scientists thought stories of orangutans in Sumatra were of a type with bigfoot and yeti, a wild man who lived in the woods, half beast and half human. \n\nThere's still some controversy over a similar cryptid, *orang-pendek*, described by witnesses as an ape that's [about 3 feet tall and walks on two legs](_URL_3_). Because of the name, though (and since one has never been caught and identified), it gets more sensationally called things like \"the [forest hobbit of Sumatra](_URL_4_)\". \n\nThat process - finding something mythological or fantastic that this unknown thing resembles - seems like a human universal. (See also *Architeuthis dux* and the kraken....)\n\nIt might also be worth pointing out that there is a [movement within primatology today](_URL_0_) to reclassify great apes as a species of *Homo* (I think *Homo sylvanus* got suggested for chimpanzees). It's meeting quite a bit of resistance. \n\nThe movement is alluded to in [this article on the personhood of apes by H. Lyn White Miles](_URL_1_), which opens with the following historical quote on orangutans: \n\n > I still maintain, that his [the orang-utan] being possessed of the capacity of acquiring it [language], by having both the human intelligence and the organs of pronunciation, joined to the dispositions and affections of his mind, mild, gentle, and humane, is sufficient to denominate him a man.\n > \n > Lord J. B. Monboddo, *Of the Origin and Progress of Language*, 1773\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://archive.is/ueg8", "http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Hanno.html" ], [ "https://www.google.com/search?q=monkey+in+medieval+manuscripts&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=_5jOUsKRMMa_0QXfxYGAAQ&ved=0CCsQsAQ&biw=1306&bih=739", "http://25.media.tumblr.com/GE10xdC1Ci93lu62MaNhJIu2o1_400.jpg", "http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2012/04/monkeys-in-the-margins.html" ], [ "http://www.pnas.org/content/100/12/7181.short", "http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-m/whitemiles01.pdf", "http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=orangutan", "http://www.orangpendek.org/orangpendek/", "http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4077" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "co447f0" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "The suggestion that 'dukes' and 'counts' are some sort of neat hierarchy of rank is a post-medieval invention, a desire to map a modern fictional 'feudal pyramid' onto the medieval period. In fact, we don't know why all ducal and comital territories were known as such: some disappear into the fog of the Merovingian centuries. There are plenty of theories, but the most discreditable ones would start with a fine sense of modern order imposed on the past, a past where terms like *dux* and *comtes* appear in so many variants in Latin and vulgar texts from 7th to 11th centuries that it's bewildering. \n\nLands could become a duchy because the ruler was a duke, or vice versa; the same for counties, and even for *marches*. There were no rules to it, fixed and immutable.\n\n\nBy 12th century, count and duke were heritable, aristocratic titles attached to land (this is for the nascent high middle ages Francia). Most nobility had multiple titles, not just single count and duke, or sometimes both. These accrued through territorial acquisitions, like badges, reconfiguring with marriage, conquest, exchange. They weren't ranks and only meant as much as communities of nobility gave them credence. So, the Plantagenets could be kings and dukes at the same time (England and Aquitaine/Poitou, respectively), but that dukedom didn't somehow 'rank' over the count of Toulouse." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cy5c7jo" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "Well, it may have popularized [the phenomenon of holding lit cigarette lighters at rock concerts.](_URL_0_)\n\nIt was pouring rain in Bethel, New York on Friday, Aug. 15, 1969. A thunderstorm had moved into the area, drenching 400,000 people at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.\n\nAs [folk musician Melanie Safka took the stage just shy of 11 p.m. that night](_URL_1_), the stage announcer instructed the audience to light candles \"to keep away the rain.\" The candles had just been handed out to the crowd in a mass distribution. The drizzling rain dampened the candles, and attendees whose candles were extinguished (or didn't receive a candle) raised their cigarette lighters in support. The net effect was astonishing from the stage, Safka recalled.\n\nThe experience inspired her to write a song: \"Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)\". That song, released in 1970, reached No. 6 on the Billboard 100 chart, and Safka's fans commemorated the event by holding lighters up at her concerts. Today, [Safka's LinkedIn page declares](_URL_2_), \"My appearance at the 1969 Woodstock Festival prompted the now-common phenomenom of signaling an artist for an encore by holding-up some form of light...(at Woodstock it was candles; which then emerged into cigarette-lighters, and now onto cellular phones! ~It inspired my writing of \"Lay Down, Candles In The Rain)!\"" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2ownn2/people_at_rock_concerts_in_the_70s_held_lit/cmrhlxj", "https://books.google.com/books?id=CT_ViUaYTfwC&lpg=PT14&ots=fTlfTiswR4&dq=lighters%20at%20concerts%20origin&pg=PT14#v=onepage&q&f=false", "https://www.linkedin.com/pub/melanie-safka/61/b7/9b7" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cik0xa2" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Could you elaborate on what you mean exactly?\nThe most common uses (without further context) of \"land bridge theory\" and \"continental drift theory\" describe two different things. (The former how the Americas were populated, the latter how the continents got to be where they are now; these events happened on vastly different timescales.)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ceufpqn" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ " > Music Bands, Choirs & Orchestras\n\nThat sounds very very European... Most of the standard repertoire was composed by European musicians, it is still very normal to find a lot of their music if you are into the Western musical tradition (even if you are somewhere else in the world). \n\nEuropean concert music certainly made an influence in lots of places, and we find composers from the times of the European colonies, plus music composed once countries became independent. These days we can find new music in the classical tradition being composed by musicians from many different cultures. \n\nSo called classical music has had a big \"museum\" component in the last 150 years. Mozart is a household name while many other composers are not known even in their native countries...\n\nIf you are after old music in the Western tradition composed by people born out of Europe, I can tell you about some \"Mexican\" composers:\n\n* [Juan de Lienas (born c. 1640)](_URL_5_)\n\n* [Manuel de Sumaya (born in 1678, first person born in the Western hemisphere to compose an opera with text in Italian)](_URL_0_)\n\n* [José Manuel Aldana (born 1758)](_URL_8_)\n\n* [Manuel Arenzana (1762)](_URL_4_)\n\nThere were quite a few musicians working in what is now Mexico who were born in Spain (and maybe somewhere else in Europe), their music is now considered part of the musical practice of Mexico from that period (some lived most of their lives here). For example:\n\n* [Hernando Franco](_URL_3_). Born in Spain in 1532. The text from that video is in Nahuatl, I think.\n\n* [Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla](_URL_2_) Born in Spain in 1590.\n\n* [Ignacio Jerusalem y Stella](_URL_10_) Born in Italy c. 1707.\n\nWe suspect some composers from the period were not of Spanish descent, or at least were not 100% Spaniards. \n\nGetting closer to our days\n\n* [Carlos Chávez (b. 1899)](_URL_9_) A piano concerto.\n\n* [Silvestre Revueltas (b. 1899)](_URL_1_) Orchestral music.\n\n* [José Pablo Moncayo (b. 1912)](_URL_7_) this is probably the most famous orchestral work by a Mexican composer.\n\n* [Arturo Márquez (b. 1950)](_URL_11_). This is his most popular work, composed in the early 90's, a live performance can be quite an impressive thing with all the brass and percussion involved. It has this visceral punch... \n\nMárquez is still composing. I heard the premiere of a choral-orchestral work a few years ago, here he used famous speeches. There's this VERY strong movement with the text being some parts of Dr. King's I have a Dream. In my opinion, the best part of that choral work is the one with a baritone, based on a speech by \"an Indian chief.\" I am afraid I cannot find recordings of these...\n\nThere are lots of Mexican composers with quite dissonant compositional languages, too. I just went to list easy to listen examples. \n\nI mentioned Mexican composers because, being Mexican, I am more familiar with those. But there are examples from other parts of the world.\n\n* [Chen Gang, He Zhan-hao](_URL_12_) Violin concerto composed in 1959, in China.\n\n* [Alberto Ginastera (b. 1916)](_URL_6_) A piano sonata by an Argentinian composer.\n\n**TL;DR**\n\nIt was \"dead white men\" for a while, but there is certainly more to it. The Western musical tradition has been absorbed all around the world, you can find examples from many places. Ask your teachers and conductors, they might be able to give you some suggestions to start listening to less famous people. If they aren't into that kind of thing, I am sure it will be easy to ask in the musical subreddits for more suggestions." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTA4FMvR9DU", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3dNAIhzcGs", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_kHxNreggA", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF4UDYwXt10", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5clRUGP8MM", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MZF31kyF4o", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-lcnVAoLRE", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkVcwrL1hog", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh8kpDZ2v44", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zozW-UmloRI", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNiQD5GY3Yg", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vwZAkfLKK8", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOuPpyuqcOE" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cgr94u8", "cgrdvmk" ], "score": [ 10, 8 ], "text": [ "For the Roman Empire, the answer is that weapons and equipment were mostly provided by the private sector. In the imperial period new units were always set up in Italy, \"where they could take advantage of well-established Italian industries\" (Herz p.314). The state paid the producers and handed over the equipment to the individual soldiers, who had the costs of the equipment deducted from their pay (over a period of a few years). \n\nFor the replacement of equipment the Roman military camps included workshops where repairs could take place and small numbers of simple weapons could be produced. Larger requirements again were provided by the private sector locally. The local private sector probably wouldn't be as large scale as in Italy (depending on where the unit was stationed), so it likely included any craftsmen who were up for the job. If no sufficient local supplier(s) existed, the military would create its own production site (as happened in Britannia).\n\n-----------\n\nSource: \n\n* P. Herz, *Finances and Costs of the Roman Army* (in: P. Erdkamp (ed.), A Companion to the Roman Army, Oxford 2007, p. 306-322)", "Hello there! The Carthaginian republic seems to have operated its own arsenals (staffed by slaves), though the foreign mercenaries and native levies that formed the bulk of their overseas armies would have supplied much of their own equipment, at least initially. When P. Cornelius Scipio (later Africanus) captured Carthage in Spain (\"New Carthage\") in 209 B.C., he found two thousand slaves who had apparently been making war materiel for the Carthaginians and promised them freedom after the cessation of hostilities if they continued working for the Romans in the meantime (Polybius 10.17.9; Livy 26.47.2); in fact, according to Livy (26.47.6), Scipio's forces had seized \"120 catapults of the largest size, 281 smaller ones, 23 larger and 52 smaller ballistae, [and] an enormous quantity of larger and smaller scorpions as well as arms and projectiles.\" Given that the Carthaginians were able to mobilize large and fully-equipped armies relatively quickly, scholars have naturally assumed that similar facilities existed elsewhere. [1] \n\nThe state also controlled shipyards. The Marsala shipwreck, a rather amazing discovery for underwater archaeologists, revealed that the Carthaginians assembled their vessels using prefabricated and probably mass-produced parts, as each component was numbered with an alphabetic construction mark. [2] Although scholars at the time were more interested in explaining how the Romans, using a captured warship as a model, were able to produce a hundred quinqueremes in sixty days at the start of the First Punic War, it also suggests in my mind some degree of central planning on the part of the Carthaginians. \n\nI hope you find this helpful! :D\n\n[1] Gilbert Charles-Picard and Colette Picard, *Daily Life in Carthage at the time of Hannibal*, transl. A. E. Foster (New York: Macmillan, 1961), 103f.; Yu. B. Tsirkin, \"The Economy of Carthage,\" in *Carthago* (Studia Phoenicia VI), ed. E. Lipiński (Leuven: Peeters, 1987), 132f. See also Anna Chiara Fariselli, \"The Impact of Military Preparations on the Economy of the Carthaginian State,\" in *Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the Western Mediterranean* (Studia Phoenicia 12), ed. Giovanna Pisano (Rome: Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata, 1999), 59-67.\n\n[2] Honor Frost, \"The Prefabricated Punic Warship,\" in *Punic Wars* (Studia Phoenicia 10), ed. H. Devinyer and E. Lipiński (Leuven: Peeters, 1989), 127-35. See also Louis Rawlings, \"The Carthaginian Navy: Questions and Assumptions,\" in *New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare*, ed. Garrett G. Fagan and Matthew Trundle (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), 253-87." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e3l9lqe" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Organised crime certainly did exist in Weimar Germany, much of it in the form of groups known as *Ringvereine*.\n\nYou can read more about them, how they were organised and what happened to them in these earlier responses, with u/commiespaceinvader:\n\n[Fritz Lang's \"M\" (1931) gives the impression of a large organized crime network in Weimar Germany. Was organized crime a large factor in in Nazi Germany as well?](_URL_0_)\n\nand with u/Abrytan:\n\n[Were there famous gangsters during the Third Reich? Or was the totalitarian nature of the regime a good deterrent for organized criminal activities?](_URL_1_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/691c57/fritz_langs_m_1931_gives_the_impression_of_a/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vibnm/were_there_famous_gangsters_during_the_third/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cq1jdno" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Basically, we don't know precisely. Slave records are frustratingly rare, incomplete, and vague. I say this as someone who has been attempting to identify slaves belonging to one family in one decade in one state since January; I think we're up to six names (out of ninety or so slaves). For the most part, the documentation just ain't there to make quantitative comparisons.\n\nIn a broader sense, the mortality rate was higher than replacement levels during the first few decades of English slavery in Virginia, necessitating bringing in a continual stream of slaves to replenish those dead of disease and overwork, but it had significantly dropped off by the late 17th and early 18th centuries. I haven't read up on South Carolina in depth, but as the other major entry point for slaves into the colonial South, it probably experienced a similar trend. Certainly by 1808 - when the international slave trade was outlawed by the United States - slaves were reproducing at beyond a replacement rate, and with foreign importation cut off, a thriving domestic slave trade developed, whereby settlers in the Deep South (the cotton belt effectively extended from East Texas through Georgia) purchased excess slaves from the Upper South, where slave agriculture had been declining in profitability for decades, mostly due to falling tobacco prices as well as the diversification of agriculture and the economy more generally. \n\nI don't want to get into the morality of slave ownership, but I will say that a paternal aspect was often present in slave owners, at least those I have studied. Many of them genuinely thought that they were looking out for the best interest of their slaves, whom they assumed to be incapable of caring for themselves. But purely from an economic standpoint, due to the constricted supply, slaves were generally quite expensive, and slave owners were, as a rule, intensely concerned with turning a profit. For one or both reasons, slave owners generally made a basic effort to keep slaves alive and moderately content. They bought clothes for them; they purchased their garden produce for small sums of cash; and they hired doctors when slaves were sick." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d62bb3u" ], "score": [ 20 ], "text": [ "That would be Teotihuacan, located just northeast of where Mexico City is today in a sub-valley of the Valley of Mexico. At its height, Teotihuacan had a population of between 100,000 and 200,000 people. It's ceremonial core, which is what you mostly see today in the partially restored and open tourist area of the city, covers about 26 km2. Throughout the city's life different neighborhoods and regions were occupied at different times and for whatever reason were abandoned and then reoccupied. Surveys in the 60s by Rene Millon and his team had found that the total area the city covered was 53 km2, with the outer edges of the city consisting of households spaced further apart in order to farm or grow gardens.\n\nDespite it's Nahuatl sounding name, we don't actually know what the city was called, what the people that occupied the city called themselves, or even what language they might have spoken. The name of the city was bestowed upon Nahuatl speakers who came across the ruins hundreds of the years after the city's abandonment. The name itself is translated as \"the place where gods were born\", but whether this had to do with the impressive size of the pyramids of the Sun and Moon, whether this has anything to do with Aztec belief, or something else is uncertain.\n\nTeotihuacan seemed to have meddled in Maya affairs in the 300s going so far as what some might think is an invasion. The ruler of Tikal, a very powerful city-state in the Maya region, had its ruler deposed with someone who had strong ties to Teotihuacan put in their place. While this is an information blackout period at Tikal with little in the way of writing about the events, other sites have documented this entrada. What's curious about this entrada is that Maya artists depict these foreigners not in their own Maya artistic portrayal of people, but in the way Teotihuacan depicts its people. So see monuments with two different art styles along with iconographic elements not previously found in Maya artwork. The emphasis on these foreigners using atlatls is interesting because atlatls were not necessarily the weapon of choice among the Maya, but were the weapon of choice among Teotihuacanos. Within those monuments the Maya had said that these foreigners came from a placed called *Pu*, which in Maya means \"place of many reeds\". However, in Mesoamerica a place of many reeds simply meant a city with many people. In Nahuatl the term is Tollan which you may have heard. Many of the cities in Central Mexico had Tollan attached to their name like Tula Tollan for the Toltecs or Cholula Tollan in Puebla. While the name *Pu* may not have been the Mayanized name for Teotihuacan, it is interesting to know that the association of densely populated cities with a place of many reeds stretches that far back in Mesoamerican history." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cjvzfc6", "cjvzh0m", "cjw8wnb", "cjwzmcj" ], "score": [ 3, 3, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Hans Von Luck's *Panzer Commander* is a good read. It's not a complete whitewash of his role in WWII, but it *is* biased (as are most memoirs). He served in nearly every corner of the war. In particular, I found his post D-Day accounts to be compelling.", "I think von Manstein and Guderian are worth a read. They are NOT unbiased though, and seek to place all blame for the war's military failures and atrocities on Hitler and the SS, and avoid any blame for themselves or the German Army and General Staff as institutions.", "Rudolf Höss (the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau) wrote a patently self-serving autobiography before his trial. Although Höss comes across as a particularly loathsome individual, it's an important window into how some of those involved in Nazi genocide conceived of and presented themselves. Höss takes great pride on being an able administrator and the memoir has the gall at times to be self-pitying (he talks of salving his conscience by going on long horse-back rides in the Polish countryside). \n\nAs for German generals' memoirs, to paraphrase Gerhard Weinberg: their consistent mantra is \"if only the Führer had listened to me...\" but they never finish it with \"then the war would have lasted another three months and then the Americans would have dropped the atomic bomb on us.\"", "Albert Speer's *\"Inside the Third Reich\"* is a very good look at the inner workings of Hitler's day-to-day, changing Nazi policy, and the German war machine/industry. \n\nHowever, it was written when he was imprisoned at Spandau, and while the facts are straight, his opinions and recountings of interactions should be taken with a grain of salt. Lots or credible historians are pretty sure he messed with some facts to paint himself in a better light. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cj8zlg2", "cj8zx1s" ], "score": [ 15, 38 ], "text": [ "In Saddam's words, after Iran-Iraq War he believed that oil prices were low, and this was due to Kuwait. He also accused Kuwait of slant-drilling (drilling at an angle from Kuwait into Iraq), thereby stealing Iraq's oil.\n\nAfter Iran-Iraq War, Iraq owed the Gulf Coast and Arabian Peninsula countries quite a bit of money, and he needed more money to rebuild his country. Saddam believed that these payments should have been/were gifts since Saddam fought against revolutionary Iran (as a bulwark, if you will). \n\nHe also believed that Kuwait and others were planning on invading him since he was weak due to losses sustained in the war. He thought this due to CENTCOM commander and staff visiting countries in the Arabian Peninsula (namely Kuwait). Saddam also believed that Kuwait was weak, and since no defensive preparations existed, that either they weren't completed or CENTCOM planning was offensive in nature.\n\nRegarding drilling, Kuwait also refused to go along with OPEC's pricing scheme to raise oil from $7/bbl to something akin to 25-50/bbl (for reference, oil has been around 80-120/bbl depending on type for last few years).\n\nLastly, his stated reason was to make Kuwait 19th province of Iraq called Kadhima (the area's name in the 18th-19th centuries under Ottoman rule), and to get rid of Emir of Kuwait and give people chance to choose own PM, gov't officials. \n\n\nSource: US interviews with Saddam Hussein after his capture in 2003. ", "The lynchpin to Saddam's strategy for holding onto Kuwait rested upon his very skewed understanding of global politics and where Iraq stood within the international community. Iraq had garnered economic and military support from the various Gulf states during the Iran-Iraq War (for example, the Iraq Air Force had some dispersal airbases around the Gulf) and Saddam conflated this soft support with actual diplomatic strength. In 1989, the Saudis signed a non-aggression and military assistance pact with Iraq, and Saddam misconstrued as tacit Saudi approval of isolating Kuwait. He believed that since Iraq had protected the region from Iran, it would accept the price by acquiescing to the conquest of Kuwait. As Saddam explained to the Yemeni president in August 1990:\n\n > Iraq…who defends them [the Arabs] for ten years [and] they consider his defense as a liability against [Iraq]?…The time has come for every person to say…I’m Arabian…I’m Saddam Hussein…[If] Iraq will pay this amount of money to develop the Arab nation and to defend it [then] the other Arab countries must pay this amount of money…if they don’t we will fight them. \n\nSaddam had hoped that overtures to various Gulf states would fracture any attempt by the Saudis and exile Kuwaitis to form a response against his invasion. Although there was some validity to this assessment of Arab unity, Saddam woefully underestimated the fact that his use of armed force to resolve differences with Kuwait unified political opinion against him within the region.\n\nFurther afield, Saddam also did not understand the geopolitical changes that happened in 1989. In November 1990, his foreign Minister Tariq Aziz gave him optimistic reports that Gorbachev was not in favor of military action and would act to restrain the Americans:\n\n > as I have shared my opinion with you, deducing that the Soviet Union has no interest in a war of this manner happening and at this large scale. Maybe at the beginning and at different intervals the idea of a surgical [military] operation came up. [T]o hit Iraq and force it to withdraw from Kuwait, as maybe a disciplinary move for Iraq; it possibly entered their mind, but when they saw the reality and the fact that the Iraqi power was not something they could control in days or weeks and that this war will lead to major destruction in the region and to political and economic imbalance;\nand because the Soviet Union is worried about Europe and has\ninternal problems, sir, they couldn’t imagine that the situation would explode in the Middle East, seeing that it is their southern border. If a war of this manner happens the situation will explode, the Islamic factor, the nationalistic factor, the oil, and security all these would explode….and as Primakov said to you when you met, after you told him that we would hit Israel, that that was a nightmare they didn’t want to see…[A] nightmare to the Soviet Union, not out of love or care for us, but a nightmare.\n\nAdditionally, Saddam hoped that France, which had developed economic and military ties to Iraq, would also break apart the Coalition. Both of these estimates were off base. Although the USSR was not happy about Gulf War, it was more preoccupied with the domestic turmoil that was precipitating its breakup. A foreign intervention in the Middle East was the last thing Gorbachev needed, especially after the Afghanistan debacle. Aziz played up Mitterrand's ambiguous statements about the invasion and claimed that France would not jeopardize its domestic tranquility because of its large Muslim population. Attempting to use the French to split the Coalition had the opposite effect and the French behaved in a much more hardline fashion. In some ways, Saddam learned the wrong lesson from the fall of the Berlin wall; it made him feel that the age of the Superpowers was ending when instead it was leaving the US much greater latitude to act. \n\nIn short, Saddam believed that if he occupied Kuwait, it would be a diplomatic and military fait acompli. Iraqi strategy was that by turning Kuwait into a large fortified area, the Coalition would naturally fracture and Iraq's occupation would be assured. In a ministerial conference of August 1990, he said:\n\n > [W]e should focus on the historical event, such as the war between France and Germany in 1870 and during the First World War when France retrieved the Alsace Lorraine region and kept it united under regional policy laws, municipal laws, and autonomy after the First World War. France gradually extended its authority to this region until it became internationally and constitutionally part of France.\n\nIn hindsight, Saddam was naive and possessed a highly mistaken grasp of foreign affairs. \n\n*Sources*\n\nSassoon, Joseph. *Saddam Hussein's Ba'th Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. \n\nWoods, Kevin M. *Iraqi Perspectives Project Phase II. Um Al-Ma'arik (The Mother of All Battles): Operational and Strategic Insights from an Iraqi Perspective, Volume 1* (Revised May 2008). Ft. Belvoir: Defense Technical Information Center, 2008. < _URL_0_;. \n\n " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cy241fv", "cy28bm8", "cy2zgbz" ], "score": [ 8, 4, 3 ], "text": [ "First of all, a bit of clarification – the Ming waged several wars against Vietnam – whilst I’m not entirely qualified to write in depth about it, see the Ming–Hồ War and subsequent control of Vietnam by the Ming. To more directly answer your question, it can be conversely asked, why would they invade and conquer their surrounding neighbours?\n\nThrough sheer lack of necessity, through the acceptance (or rather, for lack of a better word, integration) of other cultures by bringing them into the fold of Chinese culture, or simply through the Mandate of Heaven and traditional values that laid the foundation of solidarity in Chinese administration, the empire was able to maintain its basic outline and structure despite many shifts in government rule. Being ruled by different ethnicities (the Han of the Song dynasty, the Mongols in the Yuan, then the Han again in the Ming, and then later the Manchus of the Qing) surely didn’t help in cementing their power amongst the Asian region, and yet somehow it did. The spread of Chinese culture, the sinicisation process, and a significant number of court administrators were core to the preservation of a rather contiguous civilisation, and in a way, answers your question. By establishing common ground with the ‘barbarians’ bordering China to the north and west, as well as giving an impressive display of solidarity and power to other kingdoms, China was engaged in a peaceful tributary system with its neighbours. The benefits are quite clear – a source of income and supply without dedicating large amounts of resources and time (not to mention the destruction of lands) in having to physically invade, conquer, and pacify smaller empires.\n\nAlready this stands in stark contrast to the situations that both the Ottoman and British Empires faced, whereby unlike China they were either unable to maintain unbroken peace or otherwise faced a pressing need to expand. To touch on the first point on maintain civil order – the bureaucratic system of China (despite, yes, steering off that path as seen during the Three Kingdoms era) meant that officials and administrators were undeniably useful in allowing culture to spread, and thus via proxy, order and peace. Of course, asking why this didn’t happen in Europe opens you up to so many different reasons and what-ifs (which really would warrant another question on its own), but suffice to say that the same integration and ‘mixing’ of cultural values did not occur to as deep an extent in European/Near East civilisations as it did in China. \n\nThis also ties in to the need to expand as a way of securing the borders and preventing incursions of external powers – not to mention that the idea of simply invading another empire is somehow an easy task. Again, a hegemonic tributary system established by China was much more favourable, and this idea of not having to invade is compounded by the fact that, comparatively, China’s mainland was rich in resources – whether gathered through the assimilation of cultures or simply by virtue of geography, they had little need to actively look outwards for resources. This was also one of the reasons for the beginning of the Opium Wars and China’s insistence in not willing to trade substantial amounts of their own goods to the British for opium. Similarly, the expeditions of Zheng He served a very important role of both cementing the power and authority of Ming China as well as setting up and maintaining important tributes and monuments.\n\nWhilst the Ming didn’t invade and conquer many of its surrounding empires, it definitely did commit many resources to strengthening its northern frontiers against surrounding barbarians who, despite tributary relationships, were always a threat. Thus, through a combination of several factors such as that of administration systems, cultural and traditional values, and geographical necessity, the Ming did not actively seek to expand outwards as their European and Near East contemporaries would have. It would be important to note too that this systematic treatment of their neighbours is seen in varying degrees across many dynasties of China, and is not limited just to the Ming (although in many ways and at brief glance, it can be concluded that way). \n\nFor further reading specifically on the Ming, I’d recommend John Fairbank’s “China – A New History” (specifically chapter 6, on the Ming government), Jonathan Spence’s “The Search for Modern China” (specifically the first chapter on the Ming), and Patricia Ebrey’s “The Cambridge Illustrated History of China” (specifically the 7th chapter on the Ming). Outside the scope of the Ming dynasty, these books are still great introductions and reference books to China as a whole, and they should also be more than enough to answer most other questions you may have (and even give rise to some more questions).\n", "I can provide some detail on the situation in Korea, which was being ruled by the Goryeo/Koryŏ dynasty when the Ming dynasty was founded in China. Goryeo officials were divided on whether to align themselves with the Yuan or the Ming. In 1388, a Goryeo expedition was sent to attack the Ming (*edited to remove the statement that this was to support the Yuan, since this was after the major Yuan-loyalist forces had already been defeated in the region*) in the Liaodong peninsula under the orders of a Yuan-aligned general. However, the Ming-aligned general who was commanding the force turned around at the border and returned to the capital to stage a coup, and in 1392 overthrew the Goryeo and himself became king of the new dynasty, Joseon/Chosŏn. So Joseon was from the beginning a friendly regime to the Ming, which recognized the Ming as the rightful ruler of China and were willing to play the part in the traditional tributary system of East Asia. For their part, the Ming, who were fighting Manchurian forces loyal to the Yuan, were in no position to make further enemies.\n\nGeography provides a large part of the explanation for why Chinese forces were never able to make lasting conquests in Korea (apart from short-lived commanderies in ancient times), let alone Japan. Korea is a rugged peninsula which will stretch the supply route of any invading force from China (as an example, a disastrous series of campaigns into Korea by the Sui dynasty of China in the 600s contributed to its demise). Even the Mongols needed 30 years to stamp out the last bit of resistance from Goryeo, which unlike China survived as a client state under Yuan overlordship. From the Yuan point of view, it was convenient to leave the Goryeo state intact as a regional counterweight to rival Mongol factions in Manchuria who could always threaten the central Yuan court.\n\nThis brings us to the fact that Manchuria, mostly populated by Jurchen tribes, served as a useful buffer between China and Korea. The Ming and Joseon could each expand their own borders at the expense of the Jurchens or vie for influence over the Jurchens without directly confronting each other. The Ming did eventually win overlordship over most of Manchuria (albeit briefly), but unlike the Yuan they never managed to incorporate it fully into the empire. The Jurchen chiefs, nominal vassals of the Ming, ran their own affairs in Manchuria. Eventually the Manchus, descended from a branch of the Jurchens, would establish the Qing and overthrow the Ming in China.\n\nJapan on the other hand was doubly protected from continental invasions by Korea and by the sea. The only time that continental forces were able to invade Japan was when the Mongols had finally pacified Korea, and the joint Yuan-Goryeo naval expedition to Japan was destroyed by *kamikaze*, the divine wind. The fact that the Mongols were bogged down in Korea for thirty years and had no experience in naval warfare to begin with saved Japan from the full brunt of the Mongol onslaught. Ryukyu was similarly protected by the sea.", "From an economical standpoint, the Ming did not have the economic resources to sustain massive military expenditures needed for conquests. Owing to his background as a peasant, the Hongwu emperor set down the lowest land tax in Chinese history. In the early Ming, the land tax was 0.0335 *dan* (piculs) per *mu* (acreage).\n\nThe Ming collected tax revenue from a variety of sources - grain/rice, cloth, iron, tea, silk, etc., but the two biggest sources of revenue were the land tax (paid in grain) and the salt monopoly.\n\n*Da Ming Hui Dian* Wanli 7 (1578):\n\n* 16,201,436 registered households\n* 60,692,856 registered population \n* 26,692,642 *dan* of grain\n* 1,292,224 taels of silver from the salt monopoly\n* Average tax: 0.038 *dan* per *mu*\n\nIn 1522, 0.45 tael of silver was equivalent to one *dan* of grain, and in the Wanli reign, one tael of silver was around 2 *dan* of grain, so using that exchange rate, the combined income for grain and salt in 1578 would have been 14,638,546.5 taels of silver.\n\nI don't have the military figures for 1578, but in 1593, according to the *Hui Jilu* and *Wu Beizhi*:\n\n* 1) Liaodong: 83,324 soldiers\n* 2) Suzhou: 31,658 soldiers\n* 3) Yongping: 33,911 soldiers\n* 4) Miyun: 52,502 soldiers\n* 5) Changping:28,875 soldiers\n* 6) Yizhou: 34,697 soldiers\n* 7) Xuanfu: 78,924 soldiers\n* 8) Datong: 85,311 soldiers\n* 9) Shanxi: 51,764 soldiers\n* 10) Yantuo: 36,230 soldiers\n* 11) Ningxia: 27,773 soldiers\n* 12) Gansu: 46,901 soldiers\n* 13) Guyuan: 59,813 soldiers\n\n* Total: 651,665 soldiers with 279,158 horses, oxen, and camels\n* Expenditure: 7,154,630 taels of silver and 1,900,000 *dan* of grain.\n\n1,900,000 *dan* of grain equals roughly 900,000 taels of silver.\n\nSo if we assume that the revenue from grain and salt in 1593 was also somewhere around 15 million taels, that would mean **almost half of the Ming's revenue would be spent on maintaining the military *in peacetime*.** During wars, this figure would be even higher.\n\nIt is also important to keep in mind that tax revenues decreased over time for a variety of reasons. So the revenue figures you see here were much lower than during Yongle's reign, which was arguably the golden age of Ming military.\n\nObviously this is a very basic estimate, and I'm not counting other sources of revenue, but this should give you an idea of how expensive military upkeep was during the Ming and why they could not sustain prolonged periods of warfare. There were officials who opposed the Korean expedition in 1593 precisely because they were afraid of draining the treasury.\n\n**Edit 1**: The Ming's central treasury was known as the *Taicang* (the largest of several treasury vaults). Harry Miller's text *State Versus Gentry in Late Ming China* includes a table drawn from Chinese historians showing that that between the periods of 1587 to 1593, the *Taicang* had around 4 million taels of silver in revenue and 5 million taels of silver in expenditures, a deficit of nearly a million taels. James Tong estimates that from 1548 to 1617, between 60-80% of expenditures from the *Taicang* were military expenditures. \n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cf5sn06" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "In the 1930s, \"computer\" wasn't a thing, it was a job description. Insurance companies and banks employed thousands of people wielding mechanical calculators to balance spreadsheets and do what we take for granted with a single computer.\n\nIn the second half of the decade, a handful of the world's best minds (Konrad Zuse, Alan Turing, Howard Aiken) were designing electromechanical calculators, but the general public stayed ignorant. Things started to take off in 1939, and with the benefit of hindsight, it's fascinating to see what was being done. Bell Telephone was creating calculators for automatic telephone switching, universities were creating their own computing machines (University of Manchester, Iowa State University), and the World's Fair in New York gave inventors a chance to get publicity for their computing machines." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5mp1r7", "c5mq0ov", "c5mq9eo", "c5mqa46", "c5mqled", "c5mtywf", "c5mu2d0", "c5mx31v" ], "score": [ 19, 30, 6, 13, 134, 5, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "When: Probably when Jesus began being worshiped and depicted in art by people who looked more like the first image than the second image. So, probably 1st to 2nd century AD. An art historian can probably answer this way better.\nWhy: People relate more to people who look like them. Compare the second image of Jesus to images from Coptic and Abyssinian art.\n\nUpvote for Cage Jesus.", "Jesus is usually depicted as whatever race is prominent in the area where the depiction was made. Here's [Han Chinese Jesus](_URL_0_).", "The modern image we have of Jesus today is theorized to be based off of the Cesar Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI. Alexander was known to be one of the more nepotistic and heavy handed political popes of the time. \ne: [Just look for yourself](_URL_0_)", "I found a [gallery of Christian Iconography](_URL_1_) from different places and times. Perhaps it can answer your question better.\n\nIt should be noted that images of Jesus and Mary differed from place to place; for example, the Virgin of Guadalupe is depicted with a brown skin. So basically, it's most about the place where the paintings were made.\n\nBut [there's a recent rumor](_URL_0_) (**which can't be verified**) about pope Alexander VI asking Leonardo to paint Jesus in the image of his son, Cesare Borgia (cue conspiracy theories about Leonardo and the shroud of Turin).\n\nEDIT: I just remember the story of [St. Margaret Mary](_URL_3_), to whom Jesus supposedly appeared and asked her to show the image of the \"Sacred Heart\" to spread his devotion. The Catholic Church is FILLED with these stories, like the one about Jesus appearing to [St. Faustina](_URL_2_) to spread the devotion of the [Divine Mercy](_URL_4_). How true are these stories? We really can't know.\n\nAnyway, given that most images of Jesus were made in Europe, expect him to be portrayed in the image of Europeans.", "I just wrote out a super long response to this with links to examples and everything and my phone refreshed the page and my response was gone. The short answer is that Jesus has never been depicted as a Middle Eastern man in Western art. If anyone's interested in the long answer, I will retype it up later when I can get on my computer.", "I've seen a blonde Jesus painting at a church in Denmark. I've heard Jesus is black in Africa.", "Related question: what level of racial diversity would people around, say, ~1300 be exposed to? If I'm an artist and have only seen Italians, it would make sense to portray Jesus as Italian. Obviously cities would be a little more diverse, especially the more connected they are to trade routes.", "From what I've heard, some of the earliest converts to Christianity were the barbarians attacking Rome. There are depictions/idols (yes, I know, false idols etc., but comparably we have the manger scene) of Jesus dual-wielding battle axes as some sort of European warrior god.\n\nJesus is/was as adaptable to local customs as needed to be to be accepted. So if you're asking if making his appearance match that of local flavor, that's not a recent development, no. To my knowledge, his accurate depiction as a middle eastern man in art is a relatively recent thing. \n\nA lot of lore about Jesus/the bible (such as the \"birthday,\" of Jesus, etc.) is mostly adapted to other cultures to fit in. I'm not a scholar on such matters, however, simply a historian who is admittedly way far from his period of concentration." ] }

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[ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xin9x/when_and_why_did_people_stopped_portraying_jesus/c5mp1r7", "http://www.popularmechanics.com/cm/popularmechanics/images/QA/face-of-jesus-01-0312-mdn.jpg", "http://www.indianinthemachine.com/sananda2.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/ChineseJesus.jpg", "http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0f7Muu8izqA/TCAPOVyE4hI/AAAAAAAACnY/FlGE7qqWU4U/s1600/ANTHONYGREENjesus_cage.jpg", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xin9x/when_and_why_did_people_stopped_portraying_jesus/c5mq0ov" ]

[ [], [ "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/ChineseJesus.jpg" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Borgia" ], [ "http://www.thehalsreport.com/2010/07/is-the-image-of-jesus-actually-the-image-of-cesare-borgia/", "http://www.pallasweb.com/ikons/ikon-gallery.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Faustina_Kowalska", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Marie_Alacoque", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Mercy_image" ], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cw69ldp" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Memories, facts, half-truths, presumptions and defamation mixed together." ] }

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[ "http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/on_the_front_lines_of_the_culture_wars/2011/04/she-survived-hitler-and-wants-to-warn-america.html" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cedjvkf", "cedkigy" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ "This is simply an incredibly broad question. Different armies at different technological levels with different cultural backgrounds made practically every use of cavalry. Some were merely scouts and harassing units; others were directly involved in heavy fighting. If you'd like to see the classic example of ancient cavalry used to win battles, check out a history of Alexander, who (very simplistically) was famous for using the infantry as an anvil to hold the Persian army where he wanted it so that he could use his cavalry to deliver the knockout blow. The mobility of cavalry meant that commanders like Alexander could deliver a local superiority of force at critical points in the battle despite having fewer troops on the field.\n\nMuch of Hannibal's success came from his excellent Numidian cavalry, and after the Numidians switched sides, he lost against a roughly equal Roman army at Zama.\n\nIn all, cavalry almost always offered mobility. They could also be effective shock troops due to the weight of the horse and the additional height horses offer. Some ancient cavalry was armored more or less as heavily as medieval knights. Cavalry generally tried to outmaneuver and attack from the flank of the enemy where possible, which they could do because of their speed, but we do see Alexander using direct charges to break and disintegrate enemy infantry formations, as at Chaeronea, where he led cavalry under the overall command of his father Philip II.", "I would highly recommend this thread from a few days ago, (_URL_0_). /u/BeondTheGrave, /u/elos_ and /u/Agrippa911 all provide pretty good answer concerning cavalry through the ages, the latter two being more in line with the time period you are looking towards." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ts731/what_are_some_ways_cavalry_dealt_with_spearmen/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c5n3u7x", "c5n46fl", "c5n4dsg", "c5n4fdp", "c5n4ksp", "c5nap8l", "c5neqvu", "c5ny4a8" ], "score": [ 54, 5, 17, 29, 6, 6, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Your question is a bit ambiguous and rests on a couple of false assumptions.\n\nFirst, there's no single US prison system. There's a mishmash of systems--the federal civilian system for those imprisoned for crimes committed under federal jurisdiction, the military system, and individual state systems for crimes committed under state jurisdiction. There are also local systems for petty offenses (typically those for which the term of imprisonment is less than one year or for those awaiting trial on state charges, operated at the municipal level).\n\nFurthermore, full-on \"privatization,\" though in my opinion grossly regrettable, is fairly localized. Some state or municipal systems are; I believe that most still are not. At most, most systems might hire private contractors to handle certain services--e.g. food service, operating prison industries, laundry, etc.", "In Ireland & the UK in historical terms prison as a justice system is fairly new. You had debtors prisons and bedlam in Ireland and you also had [slavery](_URL_0_), transportation and the death penalty for many crimes. You also had corporal punishment. \n\nLocally administered justice administered by a feudal lord was in effect privatised and that is what you inherit your US system from. \n\nIn Europe , where prison sentences are shorter and there is no death penalty , we often wonder how the US system evolved too. \n\nPrison for punishment and rehabilation really dates from Victorian times for us.\n\nSo what are you comparing it too ?", "The [Wikipedia article](_URL_0_) on this subject is actually fairly thorough and well-sourced.\n\nAlso, according to [this](_URL_1_) article, a little under 10% of U.S. prisoners are currently in privately-run detention facilities.", "There are several dozen state prisons that are private. Corrections Corporation of America OWNS 60 prisons.\n\nThe earliest privatization schemes that I know of emerged after the Civil War. This is referred to as \"convict leasing.\" The local or state authorities would sentence someone to prison, and then private individuals would rent the convict from the state. For the most part, this system mainly targeted African American males (it grew out of the false idea that African Americans needed to be controlled, and since slavery wasn't present, something else had to be done). \n\nThe really bad part of this was that the renters did not have a financial interest in their convicts. Under slavery, if someone worked their slave to death, they had to purchase another. Under this system, if someone worked a convict to death, the state simply replaced that convict. A pretty widespread saying at the time was: \"If one dies, get another.\" ---the lifespan of most incarcerated prisoners was about 5 years. \n\nThis made everyone a tremendous amount of money. The state made money from leasing convicts out (so the authorities began arresting and sentencing folks for less and less significant crimes). The renters made significant profits because they were paying super cheap for labor (they also didn't feed the convicts very well at all, and simply locked them in cages at night). Several states actually closed all of their prisons and just rented out every convict they had.\n\nThankfully, this died down around the 1920s or 30s when the public started to become aware of what was really happening (a couple white guys wrote about their experiences as convicts). \n\nCouple of really good books on this are: \nPenology for Profit by Don Walker\nWorse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice by David Oshinsky\n\nNow, Corrections Corporation of America does NOT operate like this at all. Prisoners now have more access to the legal system so the state can't just murder them all. CCA operates just like a regular modern prison. I'm not sure, but I would imagine that they'd be inspected on a fairly regular basis to keep the state from being sued for mistreating inmates. They popped up in 1983 when the US government was embracing privatization and deregulation of several industries. So if you put them into the economic context of the time, they make sense. This was when Reagan and other Republicans were preaching that the private sector was much more efficient in doing things than the government (some things they are, some things not so much). \n\nHope this helps,\nJohn", "According to the US Department of Justice, about 10 percent of prisons are private.", "This article gives a bunch of good information. \n\n_URL_0_", "Not a historian, this is just something I know a smidge about. In places that they are privatized, the states or municipalities usually sold them off to private companies (typically with agreements to keep them at a certain percent of capacity) in order to balance a short term budget deficit.", "I did my senior paper on the prison reform movement of the last half of the twentieth century in the USA but I only touched little on the privatization aspect but here is what I have. \n\nThe model set for the current prison system was set by the National Prison Congress in Cincinnati Ohio in 1870. The NPC set prison as an industry that should be operated efficiently and for profit. The idea that the prison operates \"for profit\" is what makes it a privatized prison. Privatized prison became an increasingly popular in the 1980s for housing inmates as overcrowding was happening.[1] Secondly, marketing prisoners was suppose to create a competitive market driving the cost down. However, 74 percent of all private prisons in the United States are controlled by two companies, Wackenhut (part of GEO Group Inc.) and Corrections Corporation of America.[2] \n\nBonus: The Freedom of Information Act can be circumvented by the for-profit firms' claims that releasing data could compromise their competitive advantage.[3]\n\nHope that helps some.\n\nSources:\n\n[1]Byron E. Price, Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization? (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 2-8.\n\n[2]Price, Merchandizing Prisoners, 148-77.\n\n[3]Price, Merchandizing Prisoners, 47-53." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/IrishHistory/comments/woz7k/whats_the_story_on_irelands_17th_century_slave/" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Early_history_of_prison_privatization_in_the_United_States", "http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-growing-for-profit-detention-industry" ], [], [], [ "http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/4669/" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eeagngq" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ "This is more of a question for r/AskAnthropology. People have known how to count for far longer than we have a historical record for, so other means are needed to find the answer to this question. I have some thoughts on how to get an approximate answer, but they're not appropriate for this sub." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dwsin7d" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Because it would have violated treaties with Portugal. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) established a line of demarcation in the Atlantic. Spain was granted rights to lands westward, Portugal to the east (it travelled through Brazil this allowing colonization there). The line confirmed Portuguese feitorias in Africa and their desire to get to the Indian Ocean and beyond. It also confirmed papal bulls to both nations that supported their expansion as long as they spread the Gospel in lands the reached. In 1529 the Treaty of Zaragoza extended that line around the poles but not perfectly (Portugal received 191 deg. and Spain 169 deg.). Spain's eventual conquest of the Philippines violated the boundary, but did not target an area of Portuguese trade." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c6db0px" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "It depends highly on the specific era. I will talk about what I know, which is Napoleonic Wars.\n\nThe ideal proportion was 6-7 foot infantry for each rider (Waterloo had 4:1!). This was mantained for the French even in the hard conditions of the Peninsula campaign. The spanish army, big but badly administrated, had a much smaller ratio. For example, they had 12:1 in Bailén and 29:1 (!) in Medina de Rioseco.\n\nI dont know about the ACW, I know the cavalry was much worse than in the NW, but it still was incredibly strong. 2:1 proportion sounds off though." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ccaijmb", "ccamn4d", "ccan3z1" ], "score": [ 34, 19, 7 ], "text": [ "Not practical at all. Lets do the math. Let's use [these dimensions](_URL_0_), 50 x 87 cm for the width and height of these hypothetical shields. To stop a full-power rifle round reliably you want 13mm of armor-grade steel. 50cm * 87cm * 13mm = 5655 cubic centimeters of material coming out to a roughly 98 pounds or so. That is a lot of weight to carry. That's going to significantly impede his fighting ability, as well as reducing the number of troops which can be ferried to shore per boatload. Now suppose you want to equip all 156,000 or so allied troops with these monsters. You're looking at just over 7600 tons of steel. All of that material could go into a lot of other things which are actually useful to the war effort-- weighing in at 33 tons, for example, you could make about 200 M4 tanks. \n\nThose numbers are all really *really* loose approximations, but they help to give you an idea. But really, the reasons we didn't use them then are the same reasons we don't use them now. Shields which are large enough to offer meaningful protection while being thick enough to protect against rifle fire are extremely heavy and cumbersome. The sort of shields you see used by police are only effective against pistol-caliber rounds and stuff like buckshot. It is possible to create shields that shrug off rifle fire, but they wind up being so heavy that the guy carrying them can't really do much *besides* that. ", "Do you know what's beter than ballistic shields at stopping small arms and machine gun fire? Tanks. And the Allies planned on having tanks on all of the beaches during the early part of the landings. At every landing except for Utah and Omaha beaches most of the tanks that were sent ashore landed successfully and in the correct location, and significantly contributed toward the destruction of the German machine gun and artillery defenses. The major reason why the Utah and Omaha beach landings were so horrific for the allies is precisely because of the failure of the tanks to either reach shore or to land in the same location as the troops. It wasn't a matter of bad planning, per se, or of intentionally setting soldiers up to a nearly impossible task, where they were sure to be mowed down in the hundreds. It was what always happens in war, some parts of the plan didn't work as expected and difficulties resulted.", "The Germans were firing full calibre rifle rounds from battle rifles (K98k) and machine guns (MG34 and MG42). Those rounds will punch through quite a bit more metal than one might think. When you see police carrying shields they're not for rifle rounds, they're for things such as pistol rounds. To carry a shield thick enough to stop a rifle round it's going to be quite heavy and that will slow you down and thus increase the chance that something else is going to get you such as artillery or you're going to be shot at so much that an unlucky shot is going to get you. \n\nNow, even if you did manage to get shields you're only going to be protecting your front and shots are going to be coming in from the sides and due to bullet drop from slightly above. Forming a tortoise would just present a mass target for artillery. \n\nSoldiers also carry a lot of weight as it is. Quite a few soldiers at Normandy drowned due to the weight they were carrying. If they went ashore with shields more would drown or they'd be the first thing a soldier struggling in the water would drop." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.bulletproofvests.com/ballistic-shield-ALP-SH1.html" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e1v9k3u", "e1w38tc" ], "score": [ 810, 12 ], "text": [ "I'm not an expert on the arrival of horses on the Great Plains, but I do use similar sources of information to understand [the spread of epidemic disease](_URL_3_) into the center of the continent. While we imagine horses transforming Plains cultures completely before sustained European contact, the confluence of guns, horses, and European encroachment simply added to the dynamic changes already occurring. The tendrils of contact arrived unevenly, with some nations like the Osage managing to position themselves to limit the westward spread of firearms to their enemies while utilising horses spreading northwards from New Mexico. In Osage oral tradition this was a golden time of unparalleled influence, when they held unchallenged control over the Eastern plains in Missouri. For others, the story was different. Horses arrived roughly at the same time as contact for the Mandan in North Dakota. When Pierre de la Verendrye made first contact in 1738, the Mandan knew about horses, but had not yet started forming herds. They would later increase horse use as a hunting tool, but would remain mostly sedentary agriculturalists and form the hub of a vast trading network on the Northern Plains. Now, onto the written and oral history.\n\nNorthern Plains tribes (like the Lakota, Kiowa, Mandan, and Dakota) kept historical records in the form of Winter Counts. Winter Counts were a historical record, a list of year names representing the most significant events in the life of the band. Pictorial representations of that event served as a reminder, a kind of mnemonic device, for the keeper of the count to retell the history of the band. We know of 53 Winter Counts that together provide a historical record of the Northern Plains from 1682 to 1920. To better imagine the diversity of Winter Counts check out [Battiste Good’s (from 1821-ca. 1907)](_URL_0_), and [Sam Two Kills](_URL_2_) working on the Big Missouri Winter Count. \n\nBy compiling the Winter Counts together into a master narrative we can establish a chronology, cross-check errors, and be fairly certain the events depicted are accurate to roughly two years. This works well for my interests in epidemic disease spread, but the arrival of the horse often falls into the deeper history of the Plains. By 1675 horses spread from New Mexico onto the Southern Plains of Kansas, and into the Dakotas and Alberta by the 1750s. See [Battiste Good's entry from this early time](_URL_1_), when he simply states, “Found horses among the buffalo again and caught six.\" Horses appear to be a food source, not yet a mode of transportation, in the very earliest accounts, and were either found when out on hunts, or seen when visiting neighbors. The Smithsonian had a searchable online exhibit/database of Lakota Winter Counts, but it appears to have been taken down. Pity. I hope another expert can tell us more about horses in the Counts.\n\nOutside of Winter Counts, the Piegan Blackfeet first saw horses in the 1730s, when an enemy shot an arrow into a Shoshone's mount. \"Numbers of us went to see him and we all admired him.\" The dead pony \"put us in mind of a stag that had lost his horns\" (quoted in Fenn, p.134). The name for horses often indicated comparisons to known species. In Lakota *Sunkawakan* means sacred or powerful dog. For the Cheyenne the arrival of the horse was foretold by the prophet Sweet Medicine. \n\n > This animal will carry you on his back and help you in many ways. Those far hills that seem only a blue vision in the distance take many days to reach now; but with this animal you can get there in a short time, so fear him not. (quoted in Calloway, p.182)\n\nCheyennes reported seeing horses in the early 1700s and remembering the prophecy. \"He thought of the prophecy of Sweet Medicine, that there would be animals with round hoofs and shaggy manes and tails, and men could ride on their backs into the Blue Vision. He went back to the village and told the old Indians, and they remembered.\"\n\nFrom the Apaches to the Pueblos, Kiowas to the Caddos, Comanches to the Shoshonis, Shoshonis to the Crows and Nez Perces, and Arikara to the Lakota, trading partners helped spread horses throughout the West. While popular history assumes a total transformation, Lakota writer Joseph Marshall III reminds us that horses did not create Lakota culture, but it \"took it to levels never dreamed of\" (quoted in Calloway, p.180). The ability to ride, or carry heavier loads changed life in a multitude of ways, enriching life on the Plains. Pretty Shield, a Crow, recalled her grandmother's histories. In the old days when they traveled on foot and loaded packs on dogs, elders were often left behind. With the horse \"even the old people could could ride. Ahh, I came into a happy world. There was always fat meat, glad singing, and much dancing in our villages. Our people's hearts were then as light as breath-feathers\" (quoted in Calloway, p.272).\n\nSources:\n\nFenn, *Encounters at the Heart of the World: a history of the Mandan People*\n\nCalloway, *One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewsis and Clark*\n\nCalloway, *First Peoples: a documentary survey of American Indian history*", "Follow-up/background, and I apologize if this is a silly question. Did horses exist in the Americas prior to the Europeans? I keep finding conflicting answers.\n\n\nThank you! " ] }

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[ [ "http://askhistorians.tumblr.com/post/155036916460/battiste-goods-winter-count-1821-ca-1907", "http://askhistorians.tumblr.com/post/155043374524/found-horses-among-the-buffalo-again-and-caught", "http://askhistorians.tumblr.com/post/155026158240/sam-kills-two-works-on-the-big-missouri-winter", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/22fgyz/monday_mysteries_disease_and_medicine/cgmphuh/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cj3awop", "cj3uwv4" ], "score": [ 11, 2 ], "text": [ "You'll find some disagreement among historians. I hesitate in using the word literacy because the word carries connotations that don't apply in this time period. Being educated did not mean being literate as in knowing how to read and write. Educated people knew poetry, geneology, and stories of various tribes. A few people did know how to read and write but it was not common. It also did not indicate status, a slave might read and write while his owner can't. Anyway, I find it most likely that he could not read/write except maybe his name. There's little other than speculation beyond that. Also, I don't know of any reason why he would have received any type of education after marriage. The concept of formal education didn't exist and if anything, his marriage ended his need to be a traveling merchant.", "One thing to bear in mind is that we know very, very little of Muhammad outside of the early Arabic historical tradition - in particular, the genre of prophetic biography called *sira*. It's impossible for us to say for certain, as we must be cautious in simply trusting this religious tradition. The people writing it down were later Muslims who were writing about their Prophet - for many of them, the most important person who had ever lived! It isn't far-fetched to believe they might have had a bit of \"bias\" when they were writing. \n\nThe point to keep in mind is that every Prophet that had come before Muhammad - the final prophet - in the Jewish/Christian/Islamic tradition had been given a miracle by God that they performed. Moses, for instance, had parted the Red Sea; Jonah had survived the whale. What was Muhammad's miracle? \n\nMuhammad's miracle from God was the holy Qur'an itself - his most perfect message, sent to a man who was illiterate - who didn't possibly have the ability to speak/write something so fine and so pure. It was a clear demonstration that he was God's messenger.\n\nDevout Muslims, of course, believe that this was how it was and it may well be the case. But imagine, for instance, that Muhammad was an extremely well-educated writer/poet/scribe. While the Qur'an isn't any less beautiful or important for Muslims if this is the case, it makes Muhammad's \"miracle\" a bit less impressive, no? " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fiwyo4k" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Dirty peasant tropes are indeed vastly exaggerated. While we might think an average medieval person a little grubby compared to the particularly germaphobic standards of our time, they still valued hygiene and cleanliness. I wrote a longer answer about it [here](_URL_2_). I also wrote a little bit about how a decline in the Roman style of *bathing* gets artificially conflated with a decline in *washing* [here](_URL_1_).\n\nYou might also enjoy /u/MikeDash's rebuttal of the idea that Elizabeth I only took four baths a year, which you can read [here](_URL_0_)." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/eshd9x/did_anyone_really_say_her_majesty_takes_a_bath/ffa4nxf", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ccys40/conflicting_information_on_medieval_bathing/etqwizq", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bqjfh7/what_was_the_reason_for_the_decline_of_basic/eo83nt6" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cckhxid" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Firstly, he could not have been charged with a \"war crime\" because he didn't participate in the war and didn't execute POWs, but that's just semantics. \n\nAccording to his biography \"Tod durch das Fallbeil\" by Johann Dachs, he was arrested by American soldiers in 1945. They brought him to a cemetery and performed a mock execution on him. But they didn't jail him because they had better work for him. On behalf of the Americans he hanged 156 war criminals until 1946, when they didn't need him anymore and put him in the [internment camp Moosburg](_URL_1_), although he hoped he would get a milder treatmed due to his collaboration.\n\nOf course he was totally ostracized in the internment camp by the other inmates because he performed executions for the American occupiers. He tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists, but he was found early enough. Even in the hospital he got beaten up by Nazi inmates. The [denazifcation court](_URL_0_) declared him as \"belastet\" (Offender), which was the second highest category only below the the \"Major Offenders\" who could be executed." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#American_zone", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_VII-A#Aftermath" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cc47b4x" ], "score": [ 38 ], "text": [ "The Special Period is pretty interesting. I know a bit about it from the food systems and energy perspective. Basically when the USSR collapsed Cuban oil supplies dried up. Cuban has a small amount of offshore oil but it's heavy oil and couldn't be refined or produced at rates that would satisfy demand. This had huge implications for agriculture which prior to the special period was largely done on the broadscale industrial model practised by the Soviets. As a result of the oil shortages fuel, pesticide and fertilizer was severely restricted and agricultural output collapsed. The average cuban lost about [5% to 25% percent of their body weight](_URL_1_) as a result of caloric restrictions. Food rations at the peak of the crisis were only about 1/5 of the normal amounts. Interestingly this had a number of long term health benefits including marked reductions in rates of diabetes. \n\nIn response there was a massive movement in towards urban farming and gardening. Vacant land was appropriated by gardeners and while initially illegal or at least legally ambiguous these private farming initiatives were eventually sanctioned by the cuban government. Semi-private co ops were allowed to produce and sell food on a quasi market system. Permaculture techniques (polyculture cropping and integrated animal systems) became quite common. Today 80% of Cuban food is produced with permaculture or organic methods. \n\n[There is a good documentary called the Power of Community here](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2TzvnRo6_c", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2474886/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7xrmoc", "c7xt5oq" ], "score": [ 9, 6 ], "text": [ "To be fair, Seneca was the name of two major Roman philosophers.", "Often it ends up not being named after Iroquois directly, but after *other* things that are named after Iroquois. Given the rise of Seattle (and other Pac NW cities) shortly after the time of expropriation of Iroquois landscapes, it might be logical that people moving west would take local names with them. For example, Genesee County in Colorado probably followed Genesee County, MI which followed Genesee County, NY. Heritage names that are out of place relative to their ultimate origin are after all quite common; George Washington was never anywhere *near* WA. I will, however, tell you that there are a lot of Midwest transplants in WA and OR, which may also explain the transplanted names.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cjpbtvu" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "There was a book published recently on this topic, or very close it. The title is \"Burned Bridge\", with some subtitle. I'm on mobile right now, so I can't provide a better source. The goal of the book is to examine the formation of that border, to look at who moved in both directions and why, to examine why the border was created and who benefitted from it, and to show that it was not as simple as East restraining desperate people from fleeing to a prosperous West." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d5489pp" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I'm not sure what you mean by saying \"But then I learned about the Mandate of Heaven.\" The \"Mandate of Heaven\" was a religio-political theory invented by the Zhou dynasty to justify its overthrow of the Shang dynasty, and later adopted by subsequent dynasties for their own political purposes (as well as by dissidents to support their own criticism of Chinese imperial regimes)." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d1e35o6", "d1e7o0l" ], "score": [ 281, 6 ], "text": [ "The government (and by extension, Moscow), tried to suppress any glorification of Genghis as a threat to the system.\n\nThis is from Alan Sanders's \"Historical Dictionary of Mongolia\":\n\n > In the 20th century, the demands of communist ideology came into direct conflict with historical tradition. After the onslaught against Lamaism in the 1930s and the hardships of World War II, at a time of East-West confrontation when Stalinism was at its zenith, the party returned to matters of ideological reliability. In a resolution issued in 1949, the Politburo of the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) noted in the teaching of history and literature in schools a tendency \"to deviate into bourgeois nationalist views.\" This was allegedly due to the lack of textbooks written from the Marxist-Leninist viewpoint and confusion among intellectuals over the difference between national pride and \"bourgeois nationalism\"-boasting about the conquests of Genghis Khan and idealizing Mongol \"feudalism\" to the point of negating the achievements of the people's revolution in Mongolia, that is, the legitimacy of the party itself. \n\nThat said, it seems that the Mongolian leadership still viewed him as a national hero, and during the Khrushchev Thaw an attempt was made in 1962, the 800th anniversary of his birth, to erect a statue (apparently the first statue of Genghis Khan ever erected by Mongols) of him in Deluun Boldog, Khentii (where Genghis was alleged to have been born).\n\n > Daramyn Tomor-Ochir, a member of the MPRP Politburo and Secretariat, was given the task of organizing the national celebrations, including the unveiling of a monument at Genghis Khan's supposed birthplace at Deluun Boldog, with a speech by a leading historian for the occasion on 31 May and the publication of a set of Genghis Khan anniversary post-age stamps. At about this time, however, Genghis Khan was attacked in the CPSU (Soviet Communist Party) newspaper, Pravda, as a \"reactionary\" whose \"Mongol-Tatar yoke\" of tenor and extortion had laid waste to Russia. In a damage-limitation exercise, the MPRP Politburo. headed by First Secretary Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal quickly issued a new and negative evaluation of the founder of the Mongol state and deprived Tomor-Ochir of his party posts. The new official view of Genghis Khan was that, in founding the Mongol state, he had played a positive role in unifying the divided tribes. \"But all his further activity was doubly reactionary and aimed at the seizure of foreign lands, the mass annihilation of the peoples of enslaved countries and the destruction of their material and cultural values.\" Thus to \"deny or insufficiently emphasize the reactionary nature of Genghis Khan's activities is in essence to deviate from the party's position of principle and to encourage nationalism.\"\n\nOf course since the revolution in 1990 Genghis became ubiquitous. The former Sukhbaatar Square (named after one of the main leaders of the 1921 communist revolution) in Ulaanbaatar lost Sukhbaatar's mausoleum in 2005, a monument to Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire built in its place, and even lost its name and in 2013 was officially renamed Genghis Khan square.", "I seem to remember hearing somewhere that during the Soviet period a conference of scholars was raided, causing one scholar to escape with the Secret History of the Mongols scrolls into China. Is there any truth to this? Does anyone have any sources about it if true?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7i5e87" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Let me start with the first question.\n\nNo, Cambodia was not bombed because of that. Cambodia was bombed due to the North Vietnamese bases at the border, and continued to be so due to North Vietnam. By the time the genocide actually started with the take over in 1975, the bombing had stopped.\n\nThe second one, which is really two question, is far more complicated. Pol Pot's relation to North Vietnam is one that needs to be explored in a far more deeper sense than I can offer at the moment (without any type of references that I can go back to). Pol Pot, if anything, personified the Cambodian minority complex regarding its big brother Vietnam. He was an ally in name only to North Vietnam and was very mistrusting of them and their own interests in the Khmer Rouges. \n\nNow, regarding the recruitment of Pol Pot's irregular soldiers: They were recruited through the means of attraction. Propaganda means, so to speak. it was all about trying to portray the government as the enemy of the ordinary peasant and then channeling that through recruitment into the armed forces. Not many peasants listened or took these messages seriously except those directly affected by the government or American bombings. After King Sihanouk sided with the Khmer Rouge, plenty of peasants joined up because of the wish to reinsert Sihanouk back to the throne." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c85gozf", "c85jpp6", "c85kzkm", "c85l1j8" ], "score": [ 48, 28, 3, 22 ], "text": [ "If memory serves correct, I am not familiar with Hamid al-Ghazali, though I do know that he rejected Neoplatonist and Aristotelian philosophies as being incompatible with Islam, the Mongol Sack of Baghdad, the Collapse of the Fatimid Caliphate, and the Spanish Reconquista were the main forces that drove Islam away from scientific advancement.\n\nMost of the Middle also stagnated under the Ottomans. Originally the Ottomans were one of the most advanced and sophisticated states in Europe, being heirs to both Byzantium and Islam, but their methods of consolidation later stalled and they became the proverbial \"sick man\" of Europe. They rejected many western ideas and curtailed the spread of the printing press, and gradually their technology and science became eclipsed.\n\n\nEDIT: Put bluntly, it bothers me to hell when popularizers of science skew the history and philosophy of science to fit their own intellectual viewpoints. This bothers me because he's going for a \"this happened before, and it could happen again\" to burn down Young Earth Creationism. Now, while I think that Rationalism, Science, and Empiricism, as well as accurate public education, are essential to a modern society, his claim that Al-Ghazali is the reason why Muslims only make up 1-2 Nobel Prize winners total is completely baseless. Put bluntly, almost nothing has such a direct causal chain from the 12th Century. It's a complete whitewash of the major struggles and triumphs that have occurred in the Middle East since the Collapse of the Ottoman Empire and before.", "I dislike the point he puts forward here as he misinterprets the point of Ghazali's work. Ghazali was a skeptic, rejecting the current courses of Islamic philosophy because he believed it should have its roots in Islam rather than being based on the works of Plato and Aristotle. He was more inward looking, but from what I've read he was not anti-scientific as NDT suggests here. True, we might perhaps argue that the _followers_ of Ghazali later interpreted his writings as anti-scientific and based their actions on such interpretations but if that's you're argument then you can't lay the blame squarely on Ghazali.\n\nIf you want to point fingers at philosophers there are probably 'better' choices, like the 12th century Ibn Taymiyyah, the forefather of what centuries later would be Wahhabism (the dominant creed in modern Saudi). But even this is flawed, as with the case of Ghazali you're ignoring the context of the philosopher's times and environments which brought these ideas about. As cfmonkey45 says, it's the decline/collapse of scientific centres such as Baghdad and Cordoba likely had a larger impact on Islamic science than any one philosopher's work.", "What everyone else said. He was wrong.\n\nSome old discussions (which include quotes from Al-Ghazali himself):\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_ (blog post that has good quotes by some redditors)", "al-Ghazali has become a popular target as the watershed for the \"end\" of the Islamic \"golden age.\" It is certainly true that, as cfmonkey45 has said, al-Ghazali strongly rejected Neoplatonist and Aristotelian philosophy that was popular amongst certain sects of Islam - the [Mu'tazilites](_URL_1_) specifically. The Mu'tazilites had gained significant standing in the Islamic world when they gained official court patronage in the early 'Abbasid period, but they had been on the wane already by the time *The Incoherence of the Philosophers* debuted. It is true, though, that the work of al-Ghazali helped to kill off this ideological school. \n\nAs I mentioned, al-Ghazali has become a popular target over the last decade or so for the decline of Islam with regards to science, but there is an excellent - and extremely readable - argument made by Arabist Jamil Rageb for why this is simply false. Rageb also cites in the article some of these attempts to lay the blame at the feet of al-Ghazali, so that you can have a bit more of a look yourself. \n\nThe article: [\"When Did Islamic Science Die? And Who Cares?\"](_URL_0_)\n\nFor the layman, science doesn't simply die out after al-Ghazali's lifetime at all, and Rageb cites a number of significant developments in the sciences that occurred firmly *after* al-Ghazali's death. Examples of this include the discovery of the pulmonary transit,while there was a huge amount of scientific and philosophical texts that continued to be produced and created in the Islamic world centuries after al-Ghazali had died.\n\n**Tl;DR** Science is alive and well in the Islamic realm long after the death of al-Ghazali. Suggestions that science occurred \"in spite of Islam\" and not because of it belong to a long modern discourse of Orientalist scholarship. " ] }

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[ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDAT98eEN5Q#t=6m40s" ]

[ [], [], [ "http://difaa0.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/did-al-ghazali-stifle-science-and-innovation-in-the-muslim-world-re-orthodox-islam-and-asharis-vs-mutazilah-in-science/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyofScience/comments/q9rzn/daniel_dennett_there_is_no_such_thing_as/c3w7t6a" ], [ "http://islamsci.mcgill.ca/Viewpoint_ragep.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27tazila" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dw1coo0" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The [first proper census of people in the New South Wales colony - i.e., Australia - was conducted in 1828](_URL_0_), and it counted 36,287 people. Of these, 5210 had came to Australia as free settlers, 8388 were born in the colony and the rest had been transported to Australia as convicts (though of 22,689 others, only 15,324 were currently in bondage, the rest being freed through completion of their sentences, or having been pardoned). So there were four times as many people who had been transported at this point as there were free settlers.\n\nAccording to John Dunmore Lang's *An Historical And Statistical Account Of New South Wales* (from 1852), Sir Richard Bourke, the governor of the New South Wales colony from 1831 to 1836, put forward a policy of assisting free settlers from Britain to arrive in the colony. In this period, about 12,000 settlers arrived (though only about half arrived on the scheme). Between 1828 and 1836, the population doubled in size from 36,287 to 77,096 people, however, so these 12,000 new settlers would not have overtaken the numbers of convicts transported to Australia (which peaked in the 1830s).\n\nThe point at which more settlers than convicts would almost certainly have around 1840, when transportation to the New South Wales colony ceased (though transportation to Australia as a whole did not cease until 1868.) The emigration scheme started by Bourke snowballed in the 1840s, and between 1836 and 1850, 103,378 free settlers arrived in Australia. As this is a bigger number than the amount of convicts that were sent to Australia *in total* (which was about 80,000), it's very clearly in about this period when free migration that overtook convict transportation (though I can't find specific migration statistics amongst the 1841 census to get a sense of whether the free settlers after 1836 but before 1840 would have been greater in number than the amount of convicts being transported)." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.bda-online.org.au/files/MC1828_Muster.pdf" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cynukxf" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The major purpose of airborne forces on D-Day was to protect the flanks of the invasion force by securing choke points, disrupting enemy forces and defending against counter attacks. [This image]( _URL_0_) shows the insertion of airborne forces, look for the blue aircraft silhouettes at either end of the invasion beaches. On the West of the map the southern-most silhouette has a line to a square with a cross in it, two Xs and the number 101. This is the map symbol for 101st Airborne Division and if you look closely the dotted line ends in three arrows to show the planned landing grounds south of the Carentan Estuary around the town of Carentan. This is an important location as it marks the boundary between the US VII Corps landing on Utah beach and US V Corps landing on Omaha beach. The corps boundary is annotated using a line intersected with XXX and you can see that it runs through the centre of the Carentan Estuary.\n\nThe Corps boundary is important as this is a potential weak spot which could be exploited by the Germans. The hierarchical nature of military organisations means that units instinctively report up their chain of command rather than across to other units. At a corps boundary this means that enemy action sighted by one corps is likely to be reported all the way up to the Army Headquarters (US First Army in this case) before it is reported down to the other corps. This delay in communication can be exploited by the enemy and German doctrine specifically encouraged commanders to look for command boundaries in order to break through and encircle enemy forces. This is what happened during the Fall of France in May 1940 when von Rundstadt’s Army Group A broke through at Sedan on the boundary between the French 2^nd and 9^th Armies. Note that the higher the boundary level (platoon < company < battalion < brigade < division < corps < army < army group) the more command levels information has to traverse and so the longer the delay. A corps boundary is therefore a serious weak point.\n\nSo what does this mean for your Grandfather? As a lightly equipped paratrooper he would have jumped into darkness shortly after midnight on 6 June 1944 aware that he had to find, hold and maintain a defensive position in enemy territory and set about disrupting enemy lines of communication until he was relieved by forces advancing from the invasion beaches. He would have been aware that if this task failed then the enemy could drive a wedge through the centre of First Army and then defeat the US Corps in detail leading to the collapse of the Western end of the Allied beachhead. The good news is that with allied air and naval superiority he could rely on overwhelming fire support.\n\nIn reality 101^st Airborne had mixed luck. Some elements arrived on time in good order, whereas others were ravaged by anti-aircraft fire or blown off course by wind. The Division’s artillery regiment lost all bar one of its guns. Successful missions including securing exit routes form Utah beach to be used by the 4^th Infantry Division; destroying the Saint-Martin-de-Varreville coastal battery; and capturing or destroying a number of bridges.\n\nWhat does this mean for you? Now that you know the unit he was in you can do your own research on what happened. The /r/AskHistorians reading list recommends *Overlord, D-Day, and the Battle for Normandy* by Max Hastings, but for the layman interested in US airborne forces in particular I would recommend *World War 2 Soldier Stories Part VIII: True Airborne Stories of the US Paratroopers* by Ryan Jenkins. *Band of Brothers* by Stephen E. Ambrose is the most famous book on the subject, thanks to the TV series, but it focuses on one company of the 101^st and so may only be representative of what your Grandfather did than a record of what he actually did. Unless of course he was in Easy Company of the 506^th Regiment in which case go and read the book now!\n\nOutside of literature you can contact the [101^st Airborne Division Association]( _URL_1_) with his service details and see what information they have from unit diaries or official histories. Once you find out what regiment/company he was in then there is a good chance you will be able to follow his activities for the remainder of the war." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.military.com/pics/dday_6_12jun.jpg", "http://screamingeagle.org/contact-us-2/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "coto431" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "I can't speak to the cyclical nature of clothing, but I think your first question has a rather simple answer - baby boomers. The Baby Boom generation that was born in the 40s and 50s, came of age as \"hippies\" in the 60s and 70s. Suits and hats for everyday wear was what their parents wore. The movements embraced by the new western youth preached social change, something that was largely incongruent with the \"stuffed shirt,\" rat race\" running image of their parents' generation. They naturally gravitated to more casual, less socially stratified clothing (i.e. clothing not restricted to one social class or another). \n\nThe fashion designers of the 60s and 70s followed suit (no pun intended) and as the Baby Boom Generation became the dominant culture makers in western society, this casual aspect of everyday clothing became more and more ingrained in the culture. \n\nThe real change in Work Wear came about at this time as well. In the 50s and 60s, \"Aloha Fridays\" became very popular in the US due to the popularity of all things Hawaiian in the US skyrocketing in the period just before and after Hawaiian statehood, and marketing promotions by Hawaii itself. Employers around the country were encouraged to allow their employees to wear Hawaiian shirts on Fridays. This eventually morphed into \"casual Fridays\" when employees realized that this was a \"perk\" they could offer to their employees that didn't actually cost the anything. \n\nFast forward to present day. Now the children of the Baby Boomers (Gen X and Y) are the most prevalent age group in the workforce. Having been dressed by their parents in casual clothing their entire lives, they came into the workforce in the 90s and 00s expecting a casual environment and the casual clothing to go with it. \n\nIn summation, the 60s changed everything, clothing included.\n\nAs to your question of why the older generation didn't \"object\" to this casual shift, the short answer is that they did (repeatedly and vehemently) but they eventually lost the argument. \n\n*Just as an anecdotal side note, my grandfather was born in the 20s, went to Europe with Patton's army in WWII, and wore a hat every time he left the house until the day he died. My father was born in 1950, was in the Army during Vietnam (although he never went \"in country\"), and I don't think I've ever seen him in a suit. If that isn't a testament to the differences in their respective generations, I don't know what is." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ef3g8pn", "ef3xioo" ], "score": [ 12, 6 ], "text": [ "The common sources of iron ore that are easily accessible without mining are bog iron and iron sand. Bog iron, as the name suggests, is found in bogs and similar moist environments (e.g., along streams); the deposits of ore are formed by bacteria (which will make new ore, and the bog can be reharvested after a decade or a few decades). Depending on the bog, one might have to dig for the ore, but this involves digging in a soft bog rather than mining in rock. The other easy source, iron sand, is formed by the erosion of iron ore deposits. The iron content in the sand is often low, but the iron grains can be separated from the silica sand by panning or washing.\n\nBog iron and iron sand were, in many places, used as the main sources of iron ore into quite recent times (the 18th and 19th centuries, depending on where). Old-style collection of the ore by hand is not sufficient to sustain modern industrial iron-making (the labour costs would be far too high), but mechanised collection of iron sand is still used (sand mining).\n\nHowever, the limiting natural resource for iron-making was often wood, for making charcoal, as the carbon source and energy source for smelting, and energy source for working the iron. Charcoal making could easily take more labour than collecting ore (assuming the use of bog iron or iron sand), and the lack of plentiful wood would stop the development of a major iron industry (and deforestation could bring a large-scale iron industry to an end).\n\nSome discussion about the labour costs of bog iron, iron sand, mining in rock, and charcoal making in _URL_0_ (and u/tsayper reports a quite remarkable productivity of bog iron harvesting of \"750 kg of bog ore in a day per worker\").\n\nIf there were iron ore deposits suitable for mining close to a source of wood, mining could be used to obtain ore. If the rock was soft enough to be broken by picks, iron/steel picks could be used (before iron, stone hammers, antler picks, wooden picks, etc., were used). If the rock was too hard to be easily mined by picks, fire was used to break the rock. Firewood was piled against the rock face, and lit. Once the fire had burned down, and the rock face was still hot, water was thrown onto the rock, breaking it as the surface cooled rapidly. Picks and fire were also used for mining of other metals, notably copper, tin, lead, silver, and gold. Fire-setting remained the preferred method of breaking hard rock for mining until blasting with explosives became available.\n\nThe advantage of mining large bodies of ore is that there is lots of ore in one place, and while it might take more effort to break the ore and surrounding rock, the labour cost of transport will be lower (assuming that one can smelt the ore near the mine).\n\nOther tools are important or useful for mining, such as wheeled mine-carts, pulleys, and pumps. Bulliet (2016) notes that the earliest known wheeled vehicles are mine-carts from Copper Age copper mines in the Carpathians; ore is heavy, and being able to move the ore in cramped mines makes mine-carts attractive.\n\nAll three of these sources of ore (bog iron, iron sand, and mining large bodies of ore) were used in ancient India. Bog iron and mining were used in ancient China and by the Romans. Iron sand was used in Medieval and later China, but it isn't clear when it was first used. Iron sand was not a major source of ore in Europe, seeing little use (if any) until the Industrial Revolution. Bog iron and iron sand continued in use in India and China into modern times, until the end of the traditional iron industries in India and China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.\n\nReferences:\n\nBulliet, Richard. The Wheel : Inventions and Reinventions, Columbia University Press, 2016.\n\n", "The Romans mined extensively, and used techniques very similar to those used well into the 19th century. For instance, a gold-seeking shaft mine in 1849 California was very similar to a shaft mine in Roman Gaul. The set them into mountains, into the desert, into rivers, or anywhere else the experts thought there might be deposits. They had iron tools which were nearly identical to those of the 49ers. You can see some examples [here](_URL_0_) from the Hedemünden legionary fort. For your request of 400 BCE, there is not much evidence (or any) for Roman mining. That would be a time period for late Classical to Hellenistic Greek activity. Most Roman mining data is from the first century BCE and then into the Imperial period. I know nothing about mining in China or India.\n\nIron was (and still is) quite common, and both the Greeks and Romans had the technological know-how to extract it via mining (they did not need to rely on bog iron, and all the bog iron on the whole earth would not supply the amount of iron a Roman army consumed in a single campaign). In the ancient world, iron deposits were plentiful in Italy, including central Italy. At Noricum, up in the Alps, there was an especially-rich source which was naturally carburized. Spain was also a major source of iron.\n\nGold was extracted also from the Alps, from alluvial deposits using hydraulic methods, and on a massive scale. Spain was also a gold source, especially in the first century AD, where we find evidence of absolutely gigantic operations using hydraulic opencast mining methods for both alluvial and also hard rock deposits. Hundreds of such sites are now known from NW Spain and Portugal. The eastern deserts of Egypt were also a source of Roman gold-seeking, in simple open-pit shaft mines. At one such site, the name of which is completely escaping me, there is some pretty good evidence of ingot casting on-site. \nThis is interesting, because from shipwrecks we find ingots of iron, lead, copper, and tin, but never gold or silver. Presumably the gold ingots from the Egyptian pit mines would be shipped to the sea, or else back to the Nile overland for transport down to Alexandria and the sea. It's unclear exactly why we don't find them in shipwrecks. Some hypothesize that the Roman state, which controlled the extraction of precious metals from the imperial period onwards, would have gold and silver ingot shipped separately, and under heavy guard. That still does not explain how they prevented those shipments from falling victim to storms. Neptune did not discriminate between gold ingots and lead ingots. In shallow water, the Roman state had the resources to mount an operation to recover the lost ingots, but in the deeps those ingots would have been lost. It could also just be a weird accident of preservation of evidence.\n\nFor silver, the major and best source for the Greeks was on the Greek mainland itself, usually in smaller deposits. Famously, the Athenian discovery of a silver mine at Laureion (at the southern end of their territory) enabled that city to propel herself into greatness (by purchasing the materials to construct a powerful fleet of ships). For the Romans, Spain was the site of a veritable \"Silver Rush,\" and the amount of silver extracted, beginning in the first century BCE, from places like San Domingos and Aljustrel is absolutely staggering. \n\nFor your specifically, I would recommend the book by Robert Shepherd, *Ancient Mining* London 1993. This is a basic survey of ancient mining, techniques, technology.\n\nUnfortunately, the other quality academic studies for ancient mining are usually not in English. There are a few good English ones, though.\n\nDomergue, C. (2008). *Les mines antiques: la production des m´etaux aux ´epoques grecque et romaine.* Paris. [if you read French, this is the place to go]\n\nHirt, A. M. (2010) *Imperial Mines and Quarries in the RomanWorld: Organizational Aspects 27 BC – AD 235.* Oxford. [Roman, and late]\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8y6u5g/how_iron_mining_differed_from_bog_iron_harvesting/" ], [ "https://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B4ou7O2v_Jk/RXG2Q5UspaI/AAAAAAAAAAM/Mtyb1bkLlEc/s1600-h/hede6.JPG" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d9yv2ct" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The influential contemporary historian Frederick Turner famously declared that the frontier (akin to 'Old West') in 1890 whereby the Native American population, harshness of the landscape and much of the mystery and intrigue of lands to be explored had been mitigated and suppressed [1]. \n\nThis trend evidenced it can be argued by the creation of the national park system in the US commencing with Yellowstone in 1872. The symbolism of this is that its founders were attempting to recreate scenes of a 'virgin landscape' [2]. The National Parks attempted to restore a lost history and serve as a memorial to the 'frontier spirit' which was the glue which held the early United States together [3]. \n\n___\n\n\n1. Axtel J (1987) Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections, Journal of American History\n2. Cronon W (1995) The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, in Cronon W (1995) (ed) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature \n3. Callicott JB (2008) What “Wilderness” in Frontier Ecosystems?, Environmental Ethics. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dnvef0l" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Well first, Nazi beliefs were not a coherent and logical whole philosophy and aesthetic by any standard, and different Nazis believed very different things. Some of the artists the Nazis denounced as 'degenerate art' had themselves been long-time party members. Second you have the stylistic time period in which they were acting. They'd had backward-looking medieval-revival 'Germanic' art within the_Jugendstil_ movement (~1890-1920). The [Völkerschlachtdenkmal](_URL_5_) is a good example of something supposedly 'medieval' and 'Germanic' (although it's neither). By the time the Nazis were gaining power, it was thoroughly out of fashion though, and with it the backward-looking styles. \n\nThings had moved on into two broad directions. One was completely unadorned, minimalist modernism, the foremost representative in Germany and perhaps the world being the [Bauhaus School](_URL_4_). But Bauhaus was considered too modern, too progressive, and possibly communist by the Nazis, who wasted no time in shutting it down once they were in power. \n\nThat leaves the other option, which is neoclassicism, represented elsewhere as Art Deco, and in Germany with the Nazi version of it. This was not as backward-looking as it seemed, as it wasn't trying to outright imitate or 'appropriate' the Romans or Greeks. Rather, it was looking forward but drawing on what they perceived as a _universal_ tradition. \n\nPerhaps most important, as usual with Nazi stuff, is what Hitler himself thought. And Hitler was a thorough neo-classicist. He had less respect for southern Europeans as people, but did not seem to mind their art at all. In the famous [picture in Paris](_URL_0_) he was flanked by his 'fellow' neoclassical artists - architect Albert Speer on the left, sculptor Arno Breker on the right. Neoclassicism had been back in all of Europe for a good 200 years by that time, and wasn't really regarded so much as specifically Greco-Roman anymore, but something more universally European.\n\nSo with his monumental art Hitler was trying to create something universal, idealistic, new and yet referencing the past. And in that it wasn't very different from the contemporary Soviet neoclassicism of the Stalin era. Hitler was both a revolutionary and a romantic. He did not want to preserve the historic Berlin but [completely reshape it](_URL_6_) and some other cities. With radical new monumental buildings, that were nevertheless neoclassical. In a way they had to be, as history left no ancient Germanic monumental buildings to draw inspiration from anyhow. To build a giant 'germanic' monument they'd have to make it all up, and this inherent 'fakeness' was part of the reason it'd gone out of style.\n\nIt's speculative but Hitler probably didn't want to hark back to a style dominant during the German Empire either. He wanted to abolish the old German Empire institutions and create some new amalgam of racial theories, worship of the medieval German society and other 'ancient' stuff, and yet forward-looking on the military, technology and such.\n\nAnother tiny example is that Hitler actually loathed German [Fraktur](_URL_2_) cursive writing, and insisted that all official publications in the future would use a Roman font. Which is a bit funny considering how Fraktur has later been given so many 'Nazi' associations due to being the more common font in Germany during that period.\n\nThe fascists in Italy, naturally loved neoclassicism too, imagining themselves to be the new Rome. But _unlike_ the Nazis (and more like the Soviets in the 1920s) they had some appreciation of (or at least tolerance for) modernist art,\n and specifically [futurist](_URL_1_) art for the italians. [This striking, daunting art for the fascists 1934 referendum](_URL_3_) for instance, - definitely not neoclassical.\n\nSo in short: They viewed neoclassical styles are more 'universal European' than specifically Greek or Roman, and art policy among the Nazis and Fascists were heavily influenced by their respective leader's personal tastes." ] }

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[ [ "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/db/Adolf_Hitler_in_Paris_1940.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur", "https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Bi15CzneDxI/V2R6d9gdpHI/AAAAAAAAKYk/zNUX_bX0GHIzuAnLWaE2HztCAw-l6AisgCLcB/s1600/The%2Bheadquarters%2Bof%2BMussolini%2527s%2BItalian%2BFascist%2BParty%252C%2B1934.jpg", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Battle_of_the_Nations", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welthauptstadt_Germania" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d0trrft", "d0u2vpr" ], "score": [ 4, 4 ], "text": [ "**EDIT**- I misconstrued the title and saw it as rank/award...which is why I chimed in with what I wrote below. While not directly answering the question, I'm sure followup questions would have asked this. \n\n\nWell, First Lieutenant Vernon Baker's actions in early '45 would earn him a Bronze Star, which was upgraded to the MoH in 1997, 52 years after the fact. The dude was involved in an attack on a German castle that sat on a very high bluff, and basically single-handedly solo'd the whole trip, destroying a machine gun position, phone lines, a pair of bunkers and two machine gun posts. That is pretty impressive. \n\nTwo other black first lieutenants were also posthumously awarded the MoH for similarly-brave actions, also awarded decades after the fact. \n\nThe only black soldier to be awarded the Medal of Honor actually *during* the war was Private George Watson. The transport he was on in the Pacific near New Guinea was hit by Japanese bombers , and as the ship went down he spent time in the water towing/rescuing men who couldn't swim. He spent too long in the water, was exhausted, and the suction of the sinking ship dragged him down. The MoH was awarded posthumously, of course. \n\nIn total, 7 black soldiers of various ranks would wind up winning the award. Watson right after his death, and the other 6 in a ceremony led by President Clinton. ", "The highest ranking black man during the war itself was Benjamin Davis Sr, who reached the rank of Brigadier General in the US Army in 1940. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c918o73" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I think you must mean 'development.' \"What was the most effective military development?\"" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cqrv7uo" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Ooh I question I might be able to answer since some of my research is dealing with this. Unfortunately I'm on my phone so this will have to be a bit brief before I can come back and edit it. \n\nA lot of it has do with how slaves were portrayed in plantation novels(many of them were responses to Uncle Toms Cabin). Those played up the Sambo/Uncle Remus image of slaves as jovial, childish, happy go lucky, jokesters, etc" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d088i9e" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "Let's use family in this context to mean immediate family, as in her husband and children. \n\nAs a child, heir to the throne Prince Edward really did not have too much of a childhood. He was caged inside an intensive education system which did not leave much time for traditional childhood play. However as an adult, he enjoyed shooting, hosting and attending parties, riding, traveling, hunting, and of course dining. He was also very fond of horses and horse racing. He gambled frequently and also bet money on horse races. \n\nNotably, Princess Louise, Victoria and Albert's sixth child and fourth daughter, was an accomplished sculptor and artist. She created the marble statue of Victoria that can be seen today in London's Kensington Gardens Park. \n\nVicky, Princess Royal, was was a prolific letter writer. As Empress Frederick, she took an interest in the Berlin Observatory and added to the growth of the German Society for Ethical Culture. \n\nAlbert, Prince Consort, loved art and with Victoria, amassed a collection ranging from sculptures to paintings, etchings to family portraits. He was a musician and excelled in sports especially fencing and riding.\n\nVictoria herself was an excellent artist. She went so far as to design her own wedding gown and the dresses of her bridesmaids. Victoria drew and painted all the way into her 60s. Windsor has a collection of paper dolls Victoria created as a young girl. She also kept detailed diaries throughout her life. \n\nSources:\n\n[Princess Victoria's Paper Dolls](_URL_0_)\n\n[The Sport of Kings, Shooting and the Court of Edward VII] (_URL_2_)\n\n[Death of an artist: Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll](_URL_3_)\n\n[Victoria & Albert: Art & Love](_URL_1_)\n\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/exhibitions/princess-victorias-paper-dolls-c-1830", "https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/victoria-albert-art-love", "http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1179/cou.2013.18.2.004", "http://royalcentral.co.uk/blogs/death-of-an-artist-princess-louise-duchess-of-argyll-39623" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cn6hgup" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "For Albanians the most accepted theory is either illyrian origin or thracian-dacian origin. All 3 were native balkan people. For slavs like the croats serbs etc most likely extended out from lands near belarus and north ukraine" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cc8uy7r" ], "score": [ 53 ], "text": [ "Well, 67% of the land and 90% of the human population is in the northern hemisphere. A quick look at geography shows that a significant proportion of this southern land is desert. The hemispheres didn't really have a level playing field to start with." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e0i1lt6" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "More of course can be said, but [this old response](_URL_0_) will likely be of interest for you." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2h7p0v/some_question_on_afghanistan_are_the_taleban_and/ckq97cn/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d8f58z6" ], "score": [ 128 ], "text": [ "Well, they didn't. As you intimate, it required the railroad to govern effectively. They controlled pockets all the way to the Pacific by the mid-1600s or so, but they didn't establish direct control over the majority of Siberia until the establishment of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, constructed from 1891 to 1916.\n\nIs there something more specific about the state of affairs before or after this that I can help expound upon?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ed9pn2x" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "As it happens, one of the mods, /u/agentdcf, wrote a paper about the beginnings of the sub - [You can read it here.](_URL_1_)\n\nI'm also trying to find a post that's an interview by the Reddit admins of our subreddit's founder, /u/artrw, not long after the sub was created. The hunt continues... \n\nedit: well.. I've searched and can't find what I'm looking for, but here's one by /u/artrw from 2012, telling about the early days - [[meta] The culture of r/askhistorians](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sus8h/meta_the_culture_of_raskhistorians/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/682ta1/friday_freeforall_april_28_2017/dgv7zhf/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "crr13if" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Can only provide a very limited answer but will give you what i know!\n\nIn some circles it only solidified it, the wars showed the brutality of modernity, a project which was supposed to bring prosperity and peace. This distrust of modernity (and the science which came along with it) would have cemented religious belief in some\n\nAmong those who grew up during the war (especially ww2) there was a wave of disdain. This is shown in the Angry Young Men cultural movement (John Osborne/Kingsley Amis/John Braine). This disdain was aimed at the institution of the church rather than religion itself. It was felt that people no longer followed the word of God but what the Church told them to believe. In Britain this was rooted in the Spanish Civil War as much as the WW's. Many British fought against Fascism in Spain but due to Britain's neutral position they were treated poorly when they returned. Many struggled to reconcile the fact that family/members of the community went to fight Fascism but were then treated as lepers by the nation, a nation which claimed to be Christian. The book Look Back in Anger pushes this point of people being so busy going to church that they no longer feel compassion towards eachother.\n\nIt's only a small part of what you asked but hope this is of some use!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c719etc", "c71o865" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "For more recent NYC history, Thomas Kessner, *Fiorello H. LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York* is great. I have not yet read *Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898* by Burrows and Wallace, but it was highly recommended to me.", "[This](_URL_0_) is an older book, but it's one of my favorites." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.amazon.com/Epic-New-York-City-Narrative/dp/0786714360" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e0cmbo6" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "Since it includes the term etc. and is listed alongside these other religions, is there a reason not to take the trivial \"everything else\" answer at face value? Practitioners of other religions, with Hindus being a particularly notable exception to the list given?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "delr9vd" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Top row:\n\n* [Purple Heart](_URL_1_), awarded for a wound received in combat against the enemy\n\nBottom Row, L-R; \n\n* A severely faded or worn [American Campaign Medal](_URL_5_), awarded for being in the boundaries of the American Theater from 7 December 1941 until 2 March 1946, and;\n\n > * On permanent assignment outside the continental limits of the United States.\n\n > * Permanently assigned as a member of a crew of a vessel sailing ocean waters for a period of 30 consecutive days or 60 nonconsecutive days.\n\n > * Outside the continental limits of the United States in a passenger status or on temporary duty for 30 consecutive days or 60 nonconsecutive days.\n\n > * In active combat against the enemy and...awarded a combat decoration or furnished a certificate by the commanding general of a corps, higher unit, or independent force that the Soldier actually participated in combat.\n\n > * Within the continental limits of the United States for an aggregate period of 1 year.\n\n* [European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal](_URL_4_) with three bronze service stars. Army campaigns given stars for this medal include;\n\nCampaign|Dates\n:--|:--\nEgypt-Libya|11 June 1942-12 February 1943\nAlgeria-French Morocco|8-11 November 1942\nTunisia|17 November 1942-13 May 1943\nSicily|9 July-17 August 1943\nNaples-Foggia|9 September 1943-21 January 1944\nAnzio|22 January-24 May 1944\nRome-Arno|22 January-9 September 1944\nNorth Apennines|10 September 1944-4 April 1945\nPo Valley|5 April-8 May 1945\nAir Offensive, Europe|4 July 1942-5 June 1944\nNormandy|6 June-24 July 1944\nNorthern France|25 July-14 September 1944\nSouthern France|5 August-14 September 1944\nArdennes-Alsace|16 December 1944–25 January 1945\nRhineland|22 February–21 March 1945\nCentral Europe|22 March–11 May 1945\nAnti-submarine (blanket)|7 December 1941-2 September 1945\t\nGround Combat (blanket)|7 December 1941-2 September 1945\t\nAir Combat (blanket)|7 December 1941-2 September 1945\n\n * [Army Good Conduct Medal](_URL_3_), awarded for one year's infraction-free service in wartime\n\nSource:\n\n[Army Regulation 600-8-22 *Personnel-General, Military Awards*](_URL_0_)\n\n[EAME Campaigns](_URL_2_)" ] }

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[ "http://i.imgur.com/qqX9Kjs.jpg" ]

[ [ "http://www.apd.army.mil/pdffiles/r600_8_22.pdf", "http://www.tioh.hqda.pentagon.mil/Catalog/Heraldry.aspx?HeraldryId=15254&amp;CategoryId=3&amp;grp=4&amp;menu=Decorations%20and%20Medals&amp;ps=24&amp;p=0", "http://www.history.army.mil/html/reference/army_flag/ww2_eame.html", "http://www.tioh.hqda.pentagon.mil/Catalog/Heraldry.aspx?HeraldryId=15263&amp;CategoryId=4&amp;grp=4&amp;menu=Decorations%20and%20Medals&amp;ps=24&amp;p=0", "http://www.tioh.hqda.pentagon.mil/Catalog/Heraldry.aspx?HeraldryId=15299&amp;CategoryId=4&amp;grp=4&amp;menu=Decorations%20and%20Medals&amp;ps=24&amp;p=0", "http://www.tioh.hqda.pentagon.mil/Catalog/Heraldry.aspx?HeraldryId=15297&amp;CategoryId=4&amp;grp=4&amp;menu=Decorations%20and%20Medals&amp;ps=24&amp;p=0" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "faew4w0" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "I am going to assume you are referring to the Inca and Aztec civilisations of South America? In that case, I will plough ahead and give you a reasonable response for the fall of both empires.\n\nFirstly, it is important to note that these cities were very advanced and were praised as such, particularly in Hernan Cortés' letters to Charles V. He praised Tenochtitlan in these letters, so it is clear that the civilisations of South America were quite sophisticated, although when measured against our own moral standards they fall quite short, but that comes with the study of history...\n\nFirstly, the Cortés' expedition led to the discovery of Tenochtitlan which subsequently fell in 1521. Cortés had exploited the fact that Tenochtitlan's military expansionism had led to it developing a number of enemies. Along with these enemies, such as those of Tlaxcala, Cortés captured the Aztec leader Montezuma and through him, he captured the city. Tenochtitlan consequently fell in 1521. Francisco Pizarro too arrived during a period of unrest within this time the Inca empire, and in 1530 his expeditionary force apprehended the Inca ruler Atahualpa, who had killed. Without their leader, the Inca empire withered away and its capital, Cuzco, fell in 1530. Therefore the fall of these empires is easily attributed to civil unrest within these two civilisations.\n\nNext, the population deteriorated rapidly due to ravaging disease. Since everybody has a general idea why, I'll throw in some statistics just to show you how drastically the population decreased. The indigenous population of central Mexico fell from 25 million in 1521 to 2.6 million in 1568. In Peru, it fell from 3.3 million in 1520 to 1.3 million in 1570. The diseases included smallpox and measles which destroyed the populations due to their lack of immunity.\n\nThe policy of *encomienda* was also a factor in the transposition of native and coloniser. It began as a form of lordship where a 'deserving person' could receive payment from indigenous towns and villages. However, it was soon more related to a form of slavery. They ranged in size, Cortés had up to 115,000 indigenous workers across 23 encomiendas. This oppressive dominance over the indigenous population was another factor in the dwindling of population. In less than a century their whole way of life was completely transformed. \n\nAlong with these, there were other factors such as the use of horses (which the indigenous population had interpreted as god-like) and sheer ruthlessness (massacres, etc). \n\nI have to study, so I'll wrap this up with Bartolomé de las Casas' own words on the treatment of the indigenous populations by the Spanish Conquistadors: \n\n*'The common ways mainly employed by the Spaniards who call themselves Christian and who have gone there to extirpate those pitiful nationsand wipe them off the earth is by unjustly waging cruel and bloody wars. Then, when they have slain all those who fought for their lives or to escape the tortures they would have to endure, that is to say, when they have slain all the native rulers and young men (since the Spaniards usually spare only the women and children, who are subjected to the hardest and bitterest servitude ever suffered by man or beast), they enslave any survivors. With these infernal methods of tyranny they debase and weaken countless numbers of those pitiful Indian nations.' -* Bartolomé de Las Casas, *Brevissima relacion de la destruycion de las Indias* (Sevilla, 1552)." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c8kzk29", "c8lagh8" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "I don't know about best/most wanted cigarettes, but Lucky Strikes was easily one of the most widely seen. Lucky strikes, aka Luckies, was the top selling cigarette in the US during the 1930's, and would have been well established by the time of WW2. They even had to change their packaging from the staple green to white, due to shortages of the green dye they used. Lucky strikes still use the white package to this day. Also with a father who smokes and a former smoker myself, lucky strikes have consistently been a decent brand for cigs, they're toasted!\n\nCigarettes were actually a part of GI's rations, with some of the most popular brands at the time finding their way around the world. Many of the popular brands, such as Camels, Kools, Pall Malls, and Chesterfields would face shortages back in the states. \n\n[Source](_URL_0_)", "In Alamein: War Without Hate, both sides (German and British in North Africa) are shown to fetishise the supplies of the other side. Germans preferred English tea while English soldiers felt that German meat rations were superior, I believe, though I don't have the book to hand. The creation of a mythology of the opponent having superior rations is easy to imagine, though." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.americainwwii.com/articles/smoke-em-if-you-got-em/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7k9tea", "c7ke8zb" ], "score": [ 70, 8 ], "text": [ "First recorded instance of a flag being flown at half mast was on the British ship *Heart's Ease* in 1612 when the captain was killed by a native during the voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. It seems likely that this was already a recognized symbol at the time. \n\nIt is speculated that the flag was lowered to allow the invisible flag of death to fly above. That may be why originally in Britain the flag at half mast was flown exactly one flag height lower than usual. ", "To piggyback OP's question, does flying a flag upside down as a distress signal predate the American flag?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ehfvkur" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "Well let's look at a case study in the opposite direction and then circle back.\n\nBritain. Britain was a more or less fully Romanized province of the Empire with its own Romance speaking population, form of Roman urban life, and unity within the broader Roman economic and political world. Then it wasn't. The why isn't super important, the tl;dr is \"terrible economic crisis\". This resulted in quite a few important knock on effects, namely the collapse of urban life in Britain, the destructing of Britain as a politically cohesive whole, and the removal of Britain from the broader Roman economic world. \n\nIn the wake of this economic collapse and the coming political collapse of Roman power in Britain, Roman identity lose a great deal of its cultural cachet in Britain All of a sudden it became a lot less important to look and sound like the Romans than it did the newcomers. Assimilating to Anglo-Saxon society was the new way of career advancement and opportunity, not embracing Roman identity. Now it might behoove the native British to look and sound like a Germanic person. Now through in all the other things humans do, they intermarry, they live next to each other, and so on. This eventually created a new cultural identity that was not the sole production of the wholesale slaughter of the native British by the Angles and Saxons, but by the assimilation of the Germanic newcomes and the native British into a new culture, that while much more obviously Germanic, did retain aspects of Roman life. Robin Fleming breaks down this entire process in her *Britain after Rome* and while there is some disagreement about the scale of violence in this transitional period, I for one think she down plays it far too much, this central narrative of assimilation is currently quite dominant. \n\nSo how is this different from the experience of Iberia, Gaul, Italy, and so on? Well for one, Roman cultural cachet never totally lost its luster, and to say it did in Britain would be a mistake as well (both the surviving British polities and later Anglo-Saxon polities would later ape Romanitas, or the quality of being seen as Roman) We should also keep in mind that this is perhaps a question of numbers as well. While it is inconclusive and controversial among historians, some DNA evidence has suggested that the modern English on the east coast have a higher level of genetic material from Scandinavia and Northern Germany. These findings are not conclusive and are still controversial and may be problematized by later movements of peoples. Yet if this number is anywhere near accurate, we are seeing a truly mass migration into England, nearly 1/3, probably closer to 1/4 or even 1/5th of the populating being newcomers. This far outstrips any sort of estimate for the number of newcomers into Italy, Gaul, or Iberia, and so on. While these groups may have attempted to delineate themselves as a separate ethnicity as we see in laws such as the Salic Law, at first the newcomers would have absolutely paled in number to the established population. \n\nPeter Heather argues that the groups such as the Visigoths and Ostrogoths were not even ethnic groups originally, but essentially armies that eventually coalesced around a shared identity even if the actual constituent members of the group were far flung originally. But armies, even very large ones, could not really be as thick on the ground in places like Gaul and Italy as they could in Britain.\n\nFurthermore in Gaul, Italy, and Iberia Romanitas never really lost sway. There might have been some differences in dress, one certainly can imagine Romans gossiping about how the uppity social climber is now sporting a mustache and trousers instead of keeping to good Roman fashion, but by and large Roman identity managed to hang on and retain some cultural status and importance on a level it did not in other areas. \n\nThis extended to language as well. Language assimilation was not a quick process but it nonetheless happened. Indeed there are, few admittedly, loan words into French and Spanish from Frankish and Visigothic, but they do exist. We really shouldn't imagine that overnight the Franks and Goths woke up and decided to start speaking the local variant of Latin, it was a slow process taking a few centuries to really take hold. \n\nCertainly in much of these areas romance would have been the language of the majority of people and even of a relatively large number of aristocrats and other notables. Now we shouldn't envision the newcomers shedding their language in an effort at greater understanding or in the interests of clarity, it was a far slower process. Some individuals may have elected to learn the language and teach their children, others would have learned it from nurses and mothers, but there was still a great deal of importance placed on maintaining seperate identity as a Frank for example, just see the Salic Law on how laws applied differently to Franks vs Romans. \n\nSo in these areas you've mentioned the Germanic newcomers were a tiny fraction of the population, and despite efforts to strictly mark off Romans vs Franks for example in practice these sorts of identities were fluid and relied a great deal on societal expectations as well as a slow process of assimilation." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ciftgq6", "cifub8c", "cifwj44", "cigal01" ], "score": [ 5, 20, 3, 14 ], "text": [ " > I've read that it may have been as much as a half-century before anyone else discovered the theory of relativity \n\nThat's only General Relativity. Special Relativity was actually a pretty obvious theory - all you needed to do was add an assumption that there's a velocity that's constant for all inertial frames. Someone else would've quickly figured it out if not Einstein.\n\n---\n\nSpecial Relativity is useful to compute energies and velocities of particles and gives rise to mass-energy equivalence which is also extremely useful for calculations in nuclear and particle physics.\n\nSo, yes, the theory of special relativity is very important to nuclear physics. But no, there's no strong indication that without Einstein this leap would've not been made during that time period.\n\nIt's speculated, however, that General Relativity was a huge leap given the existing state of physics and would've taken longer to derive without Einstein. But that's a very subjective and speculative statement and there's no evidence or science you can use to gauge these things - so you're unlikely to get a useful answer regarding that.\n\nYou might enjoy the following Wikipedia pages:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n---\n\nEdit: To definitively answer your question: No, the creation of atom bombs was not possible (unless by accident, somehow) without early quantum mechanics and special relativity.", "Disclaimer: I'm a physicist and not an historian.\n\nSo... Einstein was hugely influential in that he wrote to the president to warn him about the possibility that the Germans were building an atomic bomb, and this was a factor that resulted in the start of the Manhattan project. \n\nRegarding the impact of the theory of relativity, instead, I wouldn't really know, I'm not aware of sources that explore this. Anyway, I can tell you that back then (starting about 1900) was a time of huge revolutions in physics. Discoveries in different fields happened one right after another, sometimes in apparently independent fields. So... Theory of special relativity, with its E=mc^2, is fundamental to justify how can nuclear reactions deliver so much energy. Otherwise it couldn't be explained in any way! Yet again, even today, nuclear physics is usually handled without taking relativity into account. Research on nuclear physics, particle physics and x-rays was already going on independently from relativity at a full pace. Radioactivity was already known, somehow, in 1902. The first cross-over between quantum mechanics and relativiy, the Dirac equation that accounted for particles at relativistic speeds, was developed only in 1928 and it was important only for particle physics, not for standard nuclear reactions. \n\nTherefore I'd guess that they would have been able to build a bomb even without knowing relativity at all. (indeed no relativistic knowledge is needed to build one at any time, if one is fine with knowing that starting from x grams of uranium one obtains x-y grams of other elements and lots of energy, without asking himself how it's possible to convert energy into matter.)", "No it would not be necessary. E = mc^2 applies to chemical reactions as well as nuclear reactions, but people were doing chemistry long before relativity. \n\nRelativity allows us to understand the underlying mechanisms of nuclear weapons, but that understanding is largely academic with existing technology and would not be necessary to actually make the bomb.\n\nSource: Am physical chemist.", "Since you seem interested primarily in the historical context of making atomic bombs, here's a rough overview with relation to Einstein:\n\n* 1895, Röntgen discovers X-rays. People say, \"whoa, there is a whole invisible physical world to probe!\"\n\n* 1898, Becquerel finds that X-ray like emissions come out of uranium. The Curies look into this and dub the phenomena radioactivity. They recognize that in some substances, e.g. radium, the amount of energy being released is _tremendous_ compared to the volume of the atoms in question — that it is much, much more energetic than any chemical combustion, but it is hard to extract that energy because you can't make it all be released at once. Soddy and Rutherford determine ca. 1900 that this is because of atomic transmutation, i.e. the atom is breaking down. They also start some of the first experiments to modify atomic compositions.\n\n* 1905, Einstein publishes his four papers that constitute Special Relativity. One of them derives the mass-energy relationship. It is interesting but has no obvious applications. The two papers that get the most attention from this series is the one on the photoelectric effect, which helps establish the physical reality of the \"quantum,\" and his work on the Lorentz contraction which discards with the idea of a preferred \"rest frame\" and the aether. (Neither have anything specific to do with atomic bombs.)\n\n* 1909, Rutherford et al. do experiments which imply that atoms contain most of their mass in a centralized nucleus, surrounded by whirring electrons. This work is important both for its establishment of an influential (if problematic) atomic model, but also its illustration of the value of using radioactive particles (e.g. alpha particles) as experimental tools. \n\n* 1913, Bohr modifies Rutherford's atomic model, replacing the whirring electrons with electrons in stable orbits that make \"quantum leaps\" between orbits. This resolves some of the problems with Rutherford's model but raises new questions (e.g. why are some orbits stable and some not?). \n\n* 1915: Einstein publishes his General Theory of Relativity, which is essentially a theory of gravity. It has nothing to do with energy release. In 1918 it is apparently confirmed by observations by Eddington which catapults Einstein into a celebrity level of scientific stardom.\n\n* 1910s-1920s: Bohr, Heisenberg, and others develop quantum mechanics. This is distinctly different from the quantum theory of Einstein and Planck. It is full of many unintuitive notions regarding the nature of information, the nature of reality, and the nature of physical theory itself. Einstein hates it and has many impassioned disputes with Bohr about it. (Einstein doesn't disagree with the quantitative results but refuses to believe in a universe where anything is fundamentally unknowable.) \n\n* 1932: Lawrence invents and builds the cyclotron, the first of a new type of high-energy particle accelerator — a machine that lets researchers shoot various particles at targets and see the results. Over the course of the 1930s Lawrence builds successively larger accelerators that allow for higher energies to be achieved, and are used to explore many new atomic and subatomic phenomena. \n\n* 1932: Chadwick establishes the existence of the neutron, a neutrally-charged subatomic particle in the atomic nucleus. It immediately is obvious that it will be a valuable new tool for probing how atoms are made, because of its lack of an electrical charge. (Protons are positively charged and thus repel one another; electrons are repelled by other electrons. Neutrons are repelled by nothing.)\n\n* 1934: The Joliot-Curies announce their discovery of artificial radioactivity — that bombarding elements with radioactive particles can change their atomic makeup and make them radioactive in turn.\n\n* 1934: Fermi conducts experiments involving the irradiation of uranium with neutrons. He finds that when the neutrons are slowed down (moderated, in modern terminology) by first bouncing off of lighter atoms (e.g. carbon and oxygen), they are more readily absorbed. He observes radioactivity after shooting uranium with the neutrons and concludes that new heavy elements are being created.\n\n* 1938: The chemists Hahn and Strassmann, in Berlin, finalize their work that replicates Fermi's experiment but use very subtle and careful nuclear chemistry techniques to isolate the byproducts of the uranium + neutrons reaction. They do not find new heavy elements, they find only unusually radioactive light elements (like barium). They find this inexplicable. Hahn writes to Meitner (a Jewish physicist who worked in their lab but was exiled to Sweden by the Nazis) to ask for her interpretation. She discusses this with her nephew, Frisch, and they conclude the uranium atoms must be splitting. They use E=mc^2 to calculate the predicted energy release — a lot per individual atom, though still not a lot from a human point of view. They dub this splitting process \"fission.\"\n\n* Early 1939: Hahn, Strassmann, Meitner, and Frisch publish papers on nuclear fission. Physicists around the world are fascinated and shocked — it is an entirely new, unexpected physical process. Some suspect that maybe there is a lot of energy that can be released from it but most think that industrial applications are decades off. A few start to wonder about weapons. Szilard, a Hungarian physicist in exile in the USA, immediately suspects a bomb may be possible, because he has long been thinking about the possibility of neutron-based nuclear chain reactions. He attempts to convince other non-German scientists to not publish on the possibility of using fission in a weapons context, and is largely successful. \n\n* Spring 1939: Joliot-Curie and his team do not agree with the self-censorship and publishes evidence (the number of secondary neutrons per fission) that implies that nuclear weapons may be possible. Bohr and Wheeler publish the first theoretical treatment of fission which establishes that two isotopes of uranium are involved and that only one of them is fissionable by both fast and slow neutrons (U-235). They conclude that making an atomic bomb would be extremely difficult.\n\n* Late 1939: Szilard, frustrated that most physicists in the USA are not taking the idea of an atomic bomb seriously — and the idea that the Germans might be able to get one — goes to Einstein and tells him of his fears. Einstein agrees to collaborate with Szilard on a letter to Roosevelt. Roosevelt agrees to establish a government committee with responsibility to look into whether fission is a military question worth worrying about. Einstein is essentially uninvolved with future fission work. \n\n* Late 1942: After a series of slow starts and disinterest, the American work on fission begins in earnest, and the Manhattan Project — the project to actually build an atomic bomb, not just study whether they are feasible — begins. \n\nI've obviously picked and chosen the events to include here, but it reflects my feeling on what sorts of things mattered or didn't. As you can see, Einstein and his work only shows up here and there. There is an entirely separate trajectory of investigation of particle physics that leads directly to the bomb. It was not begun by Einstein's work and Einstein's work played a very minor role in it. E=mc^2 is a convenient way to calculate energy release from fission (though not the only way at all, and not necessarily the most intuitive way), but it is not actually required for any of this. It does however provide a complement to work already going on regarding atomic structure, radioactivity, particle physics, and eventually fission. \n\nWithout getting too counter-historical, I think you can imagine a trajectory of science that develops an understanding of nuclear fission entirely without relativity. The fission process itself is non-relativistic. It is more intuitive to calculate the energy release primarily in terms of electrostatic repulsion of distended parts of a deformed nuclei. In terms of what actually happened, Einstein's work is not entirely alien to it — knowledge of his work was definitely in the heads of the people who worked on this stuff. However if Einstein had never existed and special relativity had never existed, it would not change the above timeline all too much, I don't think. \n\nFor people who are interested in what kinds of things physicists were thinking about in the exciting late-19th/early-20th century, Helge Kragh's _Quantum Generations_ is an excellent (if sometimes perhaps too technical) history of physics, and is not teleological like many bomb-centric histories of physics are (e.g. Rhodes' book on the history of the atomic bomb, while excellent, of course is interested primarily in what led to the bomb — Kragh's book does include the bomb of course but is not oriented around it). " ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity" ], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "crslq59", "crsrkp1" ], "score": [ 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Definitive no, there are hundreds if not a 1000+ tribes originally in Australia. Not all were well documented. It depends which side you are interested in, the view of the colonials or Aboriginal people writing about their own specific tribe/language. ", "You might be interested in u/Reedstilt's recommendations [here,](_URL_0_) though they might not be what you wanted." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/36sxu1/rmapporn_discusses_eurocentrism_in_world_heritage/crhd6n1" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c5b5yw3", "c5b7vji", "c5b8je9", "c5bb2d0" ], "score": [ 5, 9, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "It was very difficult and bloody to a degree which was frustrating and surprising to the Allies. While they did not expect the campaign to be the decisive one, they spent more blood and effort in Italy than they were \"comfortable with\". Italy (in some ways) was an easier place to stand and fight for the Germans than the broad area of France. \n\n", "It was awful. You can read *The Day of Battle* by Rick Atkinson for a good overview of the campaign.\n\nBasically, Italy is long and narrow and has mountains. The Germans created a series of fortified lines in those mountains, and the Allied armies assaulted them head on. It was a bloody, grinding slog.\n\nThey tried to do an end run around by landing at Anzio, but they only landed two divisions, and were soon boxed in by locally superior German forces. Most of the effort at that time was going to the build up for Overlord, and they couldn't land the quantity of troops that would have been needed for a breakout.", "My neighbor who passed a few years ago, was in one of the first divisions to land. He was captured after a few days fighting because they ran out of ammo and food and spent the remainder of the war in a Stalag. He said that there was no choice but to surrender and it haunted him that they were not necessarily abandoned, but forgotten in the heat of the battle. His greatest regrets were that his mother didn't know what had happened to him and would worry, and his friends had all died. He kept a small scrapbook of his incarceration that included a German prisoner list, a Red Cross letter, and a hometown newspaper clipping listing him as missing with a photo of his worried mother. He was alone when he died.", "On the off chance you live in Illinois, the estate of Robert McCormick has a great exhibit devoted to the [1st Division's actions during the Sicily campaign.](_URL_0_)\n\nBefore then I had never thought much about the liberation of Italy and I remember being thunderstruck by how complicated and intense the fighting was for a campaign that's not as well remembered as Normandy or Iwo Jima." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://www.firstdivisionmuseum.org/history/history/wwii.aspx" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f2356i8" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I've touched on this before in regards to how historians look at the various nationalities that were included in the Soviet Union ([here's a recent answer](_URL_0_)). But to summarize that part, during the Cold War historians largely had to rely on emigre information (in the form of memoirs or interviews), official sources (which were questionable at best), or their own understanding of how things were. The results were mixed of course, with the dominant viewpoint being that the Soviet Union was a \"breaker of nations\" (the viewpoint being espoused in Richard Pipes' works, the quote coming from Robert Conquest's biography of Stalin). With access to the archives this view changed, and the more mainstream idea is that the Soviet Union helped develop nationalities, through literary and cultural development (see Terry Martin and Francine Hirsch for two different treatments on that).\n\nRegarding a book that covers the topic really well, I'd readily suggest Ronald Grigor Suny's *Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution*. It was published in 2017 to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, and looks at the historiography of the Soviet Union, from the beginning to the end. Suny is the recognised expert on nationalities in the Soviet Union, and I'd also suggest a couple other books of his to get an idea of how the historiography changed (see below), but this is a one-volume book that will cover what you're looking for, and cites nearly every title released in the past century (though regrettably not in bibliographic form, but just footnotes).\n\nSources:\n\n* Richard Pipes, *The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923* (1954; later editions as well)\n\n* Robert Conquest, *Stalin: Breaker of Nations* (1991)\n\n* Terry Martin, *The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939* (2001)\n\n* Francine Hirsch, *Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union* (2005)\n\n* Ronald Grigor Suny, *Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution* (2017)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c8b73w/in_1991_the_soviet_union_collapsed_the_soviet/esmradp/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fn3p4iv" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Great question!\n\nTheoretically... as long as one was a Roman citizen, one could end up Emperor. In *theory*. That was very rare, and only occurred during the rebellions and usurpations of the 3rd century crisis, and those usurpations were almost always very short lived.\n\nIn actuality, how did promotion in the first century Roman army work? The reality was that meritocratic elevation usually only got you so far. The average Roman citizen would enlist as a *tiro* and could be promoted as high as *Centurio* (Centurion) without having to be a member of the *Ordo Equester* or *Equites Ordines*, (the \"order of the cavalrymen\")which was the old landowning class of the Republic which was worth enough tax value to be deemed able to field horsemen. After about 88 BC, they were no longer explicitly liable to provide cavalry recruits, but this group basically formed the upper echelon of Roman society in the Principate as all of the Senatorial class was a part of it.\n\nUpon reaching the rank of *Primus Pilus,* or first Centurion, one was inducted into the *Equites Ordines*, and only then was eligible for promotion to higher, Senatorial-appointed ranks like *Tribunus Angusticlavus.* Above that were all senatorial class-only posts, such as *Tribunus Laticlavus* and the Legionary commander, *Legatus Legionis*, as well as the various governorships.\n\nThe average Roman soldier typically served for something between 16 and 22 years in the early Principate, with the option to re-enlist afterwards. Many soldiers who re-enlisted were given the privilege of becoming Centurions due to their experience, and those who didn't became *Evocati* (veteran soldiers who were paid more and exempt from most mundane chores). Within that initial span, it was possible to rise all the way from a recruit to *Primus Pilus.*\n\nThe most notable example of this was that of Spurius Ligustinus, who was a recruit from the Sabines in 200 BC, and was promoted to Centurion of the 10th maniple of the *Hastati* by the 3rd year for his bravery in combat. He then re-enlisted in 195 BC, and was promoted to Centurion of the 1st maniple of the *Hastati*. When he re-enlisted in 191 BC, he was promoted to Centurion of the 1st maniple of the *Principes*, and by 188 BC he had been promoted to the 1st maniple of the *Triarii*. According to Livy, he then was invited by Gracchus to petition the senate for a further promotion, who granted him the rank of *Primus Pilus*." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "egm5woa", "egma8xq", "egmaorv", "egmbw9s" ], "score": [ 217, 77, 69, 2059 ], "text": [ "Add-on question: were there different brands of liquor back then, i.e. that you'd be able to order the same liquor from multiple saloons? Or would each saloon source their liquor independently and just sell it as generic house whiskey or whatever?", "A similar /r/AskHistorians post from 4 years ago: [What else did people drink in \"wild west\" saloons?](_URL_0_)\n\nSome great answers by /u/itsallfolklore and /u/Wades-in-the-Water. With this tantalizing intro: \n > I was part of a team that excavated four saloons sites that operated in Virginia City, Nevada between 1863 and roughly 1885.\n\nAnd [excavation pic](_URL_1_).", "Hi, this question sounds like a job for our hero of the Old West, /u/itsallfolklore. While you're waiting, check out their previous answers on saloon drinks, prices, and more here\n\n* [What were the most popular drinks available at saloon in the \"Wild West\"?] (_URL_0_) \n\n* [What else did people drink in \"wild west\" saloons?] (_URL_3_) \n\n* [How much did drinks at a saloon cost in the Old West?] (_URL_4_) \n\n* [In Western movies when someone enters a saloon and orders a beer or whiskey they never ask for a price and there never is a pricelist. They just drop some coins. How much WAS a beer / whiskey during the late 19th century?] (_URL_1_) \n\n* [How did saloons in the 19th century American West operate?] (_URL_2_) ", "Even before the transcontinental railroad (1869), the West was connected with the international marketplace. Products from all over the world were available, although clearly, it took a bit longer for the supply lines to reach newly-founded and/or remote settlements. Primary sources attest to how quickly whiskey and beer arrived, however. J. Ross Browne in his \"Peep at Washoe\" described the newly-established Comstock Mining District (Virginia City, in particular), less than a year after the first strike in June 1859. While trekking across the Sierra in the early spring of 1860 - as soon as the snow storms allowed - he was accompanied by merchants who set up saloons in tents to sell imported products.\n\nIn addition, archaeological excavations of four Virginia City saloons (1993-2000) revealed [a wide array of products](_URL_4_) from the Eastern States and from Europe. These included [ale from Britain](_URL_2_) and [mineral water](_URL_3_) from German states. There was even [a carbon water filter](_URL_5_) imported from London (1863). We even found what appears to be the [oldest Tabasco Pepper Sauce bottle](_URL_6_) with [the company's imprint](_URL_0_), brought from Louisiana around 1870.\n\nThese items stray from your core answer, but they give you a picture of the mercantile tentacles that stretched throughout the world. The mining West produced wealth, and entrepreneurs quickly offered the finest products for sale - often at inflated rates because of the remoteness of many of these mining towns.\n\nAmong the remains found in the saloons, we found [a gin bottle](_URL_1_) imported from England, and we found a wide array of brown bottles without embossing, but which appeared to have held whiskey. Paper labels were rarely preserved, and I can't recall any whiskey labels in the entire collection of 310,000 artifacts that we found, cleaned, cataloged, and analyzed. \n\nParallel research revealed that a great deal of whiskey was brought in from eastern distilleries - so you could expect to find Kentucky bourbons at most saloons. I imagine there was a fair amount of Scotch coming in from the UK - and perhaps some Bushmills - but we did not find clear evidence of that in the archaeological record (references to Scotch do exist in reports of Scottish celebrations). Whiskey and other hard liquors were easily transported, so their importation from elsewhere was something that was consistently done. This contrasts with beer, which is produced (and consumed) in larger volumes, so local breweries tended to provide most of these (acknowledging the hundreds of cream-colored Glasgow ale bottles that we found at each of the sites).\n\nI am not an authority on the history of whiskey production (although I have done a fair amount of research into the subject through consumption!!!). I do not know how production differed in the nineteenth century, but I can tell you that even today, the older distilleries take a lot of pride in maintaining antique equipment and traditional approaches to production. I expect that we would not be startled by a lack of quality in an average saloon. There were some really disgusting bars (just like today), and if you get in a time machine, I recommend you avoid those places - their whiskey may be questionable. Raunchier places were more likely to cut whiskey with water to extend the product.\n\nWith regard to quality, Western towns frequently differentiated between higher and lower-grade saloons. Virginia City and neighboring Gold Hill, for example, had nearly one hundred \"one-bit\" saloons - places where a whiskey, a beer, or a cigar could be purchased for 12 1/2 cents. There were also a dozen or so \"two bit\" saloons where similar products could be had for a quarter, and there was an assumption that there would be a similar increase in the quality of the product: Comstock journalist William Wright - writing as Dan De Quille - told a story about a man who went into a two-but saloon and ordered a whiskey. After drinking it, he placed a dime (which would have been known as a short bit) on the counter. The bartender said, \"Excuse me, sir, but this is a two-bit saloon.\" The man answered, \"That was my understanding when I walked in, but after drinking your whiskey, I assumed this was a one-bit saloon.\" I suspect this account was folklore, but it carries a message that transcends the question about whether it was true or not - namely that there was an expectation that better saloons carried better whiskey.\n\nIn partial answer of the question posed by /u/nalc, saloons attempted to differentiate themselves from competitors by offering unique products, and these include - as indicated by advertisements - specialty cocktails (mixed drinks were becoming very popular by the mid nineteenth century) and an array of liquors - which is usually how they advertised their wares. There was always an effort to bring in something different. At the same time, the array of saloons were each drawing from the same supply line, so one would expect to find many of the same products at each saloon.\n\nedited to add a photo of the [gin bottle](_URL_1_) because we can't overlook gin!!!\n\nedited X2: thanks for the silver (but after all of this I wanted a drink!!!).\n\nedited X3: thanks for the gold (I owe you a drink!!!).\n\nedited X4 I have deleted a reference to watered-down whiskey becoming bad to drink since this is creating too much of a distraction." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/285y5g/what_else_did_people_drink_in_wild_west_saloons/", "http://i.imgur.com/y54bCnc.jpg" ], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/721ike/what_were_the_most_popular_drinks_available_at", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/43ee8v/in_western_movies_when_someone_enters_a_saloon", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bopu5/how_did_saloons_in_the_19thcentury_american_west", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/285y5g/what_else_did_people_drink_in_wild_west_saloons", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1os6nq/how_much_did_drinks_at_a_saloon_cost_in_the_old" ], [ "https://imgur.com/8P5ohaZ", "https://imgur.com/lXo7DCT", "https://imgur.com/VZkqPCZ", "https://imgur.com/PpeQS7L", "https://imgur.com/y54bCnc", "https://imgur.com/BeZrYII", "https://imgur.com/7J1IGW2" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ctxl38y" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Add-on question: why don't we see any Germanic looking descendants in north Africa?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ffwll45", "ffx7vdq" ], "score": [ 3912, 501 ], "text": [ "If one looks back to older recipes such as those presented in *The English Huswife* by G. Markham through to *The Scots Kitchen,* by F. McNeill we see a breadth of ingredients and cuisines available in our history. Additionally, British baking history is brimming with historical recipes. Plum cakes spring to mind, but a great many of our most celebrated bakes are quite old indeed.\n\nSo, what happened? The short answer is rationing. The system introduced in WWII by Lord Woolton did away with a large amount of spices, sugar, and other non-essential \"luxuries.\" As biographied in *Eggs or Anarchy* by W. Sitwell, Lord Woolton had a delicate digestion that reacted poorly to rich or spiced foods. In addition to his own views, the wider strategic view that anything not strictly essential to sustenance was an unnecessary waste of shipping capacity meant that these spices disappeared quite suddenly.\n\nOf course, the British people had to adapt to this new system. The government attempted to aid this by providing example recipes within the Rationing system. The Ministry of Food released many leaflets over the years of the war, which you can read in a collected format in *Food Facts for the Kitchen Front.* This, sadly, is where it all goes downhill. The famous examples of \"Mock Duck\" and other less favoured British foods are present. The instructions often told cooks to overboil food, and seasoning was limited in the directions. Spices were almost non-existent.\n\nNow, I feel I have to note some successes here. Carrot Cake was born from these leaflets, as an attempt to make sweet cake with little or no sugar, using an easily grown native vegetable. Apple Crumble also made its debut in this era, as a simple dish that required less resources than a full Apple Cake. Since foraging and growing your own fruit was permissible, it was an option for many to collect apples for this dish, making it quite inexpensive.\n\nDespite these few successes, a diet of unspiced, overboiled, minimally seasoned food using a limited selection of ingredients had been forced, unilaterally, upon a populace. Even fine dining establishments and upper class households were beholden to it. Lord Woolton intended for the system to appear truly equal and fair to all. Even the King and Queen famously greeted Eleanor Roosevelt with slices of National Loaf for afternoon tea. *The West End Front* by M. Sweet is quite a good book for looking at attempts by high end hotels and restaurants to continue to offer exciting meals to their clientele.\n\nSince the Rationing was so all encompassing, and lasted from 1939 until 1955, it left a culinary mark on a generation. That persisted through the late 20th Century as ingredients, techniques and recipes gradually returned or were introduced.", "While lack of access to spices and flavorings due to shortages and rationing in the late 19th and 20th century as described by u/GrunkleCoffee served as a kind of \"killing blow,\" British cuisine had been known to be bland and terrible long before then. Up until the 18th century we see in British cookbooks a great love of heavily spiced and sugared food. However this school of cooking dropped off throughout the 18th century and had been replaced in the Victorian era with a love of bland, overcooked foods, incorporating as few fresh foods as possible. How did this happen?\n\n* Moral philosophies in the Victorian Era denigrated heavily spiced, flavorful foods as indulgent, irrational, and inflammatory to the senses, while holding up foods that were heavily processed and bland as healthier for the digestion and morally uplifting. Flavorless and mushy food became a moral virtue. You might already know about people like John Kellogg who explicitly linked the consumption of flavorful food to moral decay, specifically masturbation.\n\n* As the British Empire expanded and spices became cheaper and more widely available they lost their power as status symbols. Instead people glorified the French style of high-class cooking which focused on elaborately designed meals with an emphasis on highly refined items requiring intensive manual labor such as decorative jellies and pates. These foods were more attainable now because of industrial technology as well as the expanding ability of the middle class to hire kitchen staff. However they retained their high status because they were now produced with science! Meanwhile fresh ingredients like vegetables and dairy were often adulterated in industrial cities, leading to the following point -\n\n* Fresh food could be rotten or tainted with disease and additives. While in French cuisine fresh ingredients were key to making food taste good, in industrialized Britain they were getting harder and harder to obtain so they substituted them with processed preserved foods. Canned and frozen food had the stamp of approval of modern science and the sheen of new technology, and were embraced in new middle class homes without regard for lost flavor and texture.\n\n* Many of these newly urbanized, middle class families were not able to rely on the peasant foodways which had sustained most of the British population up until then. Housewives had the role as the protectors of the home and morality and took on the load of all the factors I just listed, and were tasked with creating contrived and complex meals to assert their dedication to their family and the kitchen. It was seen as a way for women to be creative as well as scientific in a way that had never really been extended to women before. The emphasis was heavily on appearance and morality, not flavor.\n\nThese converging and related factors all led up to the situation described by u/GrunkleCoffee. By the time these rations and shortages happened there was already a culture that idealized bland, refined food and heavily relied on a dedicated kitchen staff. Then war came, further limiting the range of ingredients available and subtracting from the labor force. These rationing systems made the bourgeois palate into rule of law. The traditional bland British food we see today only goes as far back as these ideologies and economic/social changes. \n\nAlso, to include a positive note, Victorian people absolutely loved ice cream and it became much more popular during that time. And ice cream is delicious :) \n\nReading:\n\n* *Consider the Fork* by Bee Wilson\n* *British Food: an Extraordinary Thousand Years of History* by Colin Spencer" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "crkrspr" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Reparations were postponed indefinitely by the Lausanne Conference in 1932, and resumed to the tone of 16 billion after WWII; they were completed in 2010. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cx135fz", "cx18hlw" ], "score": [ 10, 2 ], "text": [ "Magellan was lucky enough to have an interpreter with him when he landed in the Philippines. Back in 1511, Magellan had taken part in the siege of Malacca, a very influential port in the Asian Pacific. During the siege, Magellan acquired slaves like most conquerors do. One of these, was a man named Enrique of Malacca who would sail with Magellan on his voyage to the Philippines. When the crew landed on the Philippines they couldn't understand a single word that the natives said. However, the rulers and elites of the region all spoke Malaccan which of course, Enrique was fluent in. Being so very influential, Malaccan had become the common language of diplomacy and trade in the region. Which was very fortunate for Magellan and his crew.", "Magellan's slave, Enrique of Malacca, spoke the Malay language and apparently one or more of the Phillipinos could understand that language.\n\nAfter Magellan was killed, his will stated that Enrique was to be freed. The remaining officers continued to treat him as a slave. Enrique later betrayed the crew when about 30 of them were massacred at a feast held by the Raja of Cebu.\n\nSee - 'Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe' by Laurence Bergreen.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c49n87x", "c49ncom", "c49nt0l", "c49nt95", "c49qs0i" ], "score": [ 6, 4, 2, 3, 8 ], "text": [ "It's obviously going to be very difficult to say, since there's not a huge amount to compare them to, but I think it's fair to say that most sculptures of actual people needed to bear at least a passing resemblance to the individual - especially if you were honouring someone who was still alive.\n\nOn the other hand - look what happened with Henry VIII and Anne of Cleves - portraits have always carried a fair amount of artistic license, whether to make someone look more attractive or less.", "Please keep in mind that I am by no means an expert. What follows is what I've learned as an artist studying art history over the years (in a casual/non-school setting)\n\nThey were fairly accurate. But they did take liberties. It's a fairly complex history actually, as there wasn't just one school of thought regarding Greek and Roman art, and both had their own transformations as time went on.\n\nThis particular example isn't really an accuracy thing, but in what is probably the most famous statue of Augustus (Augustus of Prima Porta) for example, he appears barefoot. Traditionally, gods and heroes were depicted barefoot, so this is kind of a hint at Augustus's divinity. Likewise, many statues that followed with future emperors followed a more \"idealized\" image. This was often achieved, for example, by elongating the body and making the head proportionally smaller. \n\nIn that way, the art of imperial Rome sort of reverted back to some of the Greek styles, which could be said to be a bit more idealized and stylized. By idealized, I mean that they would often apply \"idealized proportions\" to the subjects, regardless if the subject actually fit those proportions. Before that (and still continuing afterwards) however, the Romans practiced realism almost to an extreme. Even when portraits were more idealized, they didn't really gloss over imperfections, and sculpted the subject \"warts and all\". That's not to say that vanities didn't come into play, but generally you wouldn't see a bald person being depicted as having a giant mop of hair.\n\nAgain though, there's no one single definition for \"Greek art\" or \"Roman art\". ", "Not an expert, but I learned that while the heads on sculptures could be rather individualized, the bodies of the sculptures were sometimes reused (cutting costs, etc.), which is why you seen \"clean-looking\" headless sculptures. I could've misunderstood though because I learned this from a Spanish art history professor, and Spanish is not my first language. If it's true though, I guess it means that these sculptures were not always accurate, per se.", "Here's a story of a more realistic bust of Julius Caesar, found at the bottom of a riverbed. \n\n_URL_0_", "It really depends on the period. The Greeks valued naturalism and attempted to crate more and more realistic proportions in their sculpture (although the subject matter was often mythological, so the accuracy of the depictions doesn't really come into play). Once they had gotten a handle on naturalistic proportions, they began to become interested in depicting emotion and movement realistically, resulting in a lot of figures depicted mid-action or with great emotion. They also started becoming interested in depicting subjects that were not necessarily beautiful, like old women and tragic figures. \n\nOnce you move to the Romans, there is also a lot of variation. There was a period in the Roman republic where the wrinkles and other signs of old age in portraits of senators were exaggerated to imply that they were extremely wise (because age begets wisdom, so the older and wrinklier, the smarter). \n\nAugustus, the first emperor, was a master of propaganda and had his portrait sculpture disseminated throughout the empire as a way to keep his image in his subjects' minds. To increase confidence in him as a ruler, his portraits tended to be idealized to make him always appear youthful, fit, and heroic. Portraits of his wife Livia were eternally youthful as well. \n\nLater portrait busts of emperors were probably somewhat idealized, but their characteristic traits (Pompey had a bit of a bulbous nose and Nero had a neck-beard) were always included so that you could tell who they were. As a lesson learned from Augustus, keeping your image present throughout the empire was a great way to keep subjects loyal, which is why emperors were interested in their portraits being recognizable, rather than idealized. Emperor's portraits, along with their military and political accomplishments, also appeared on money disseminated throughout the empire. Wealthy nobility other than emperors were a different story because they didn't have the same need for recognition, so there is more evidence for idealization in their portraits.\n\nEDIT: added paragraph breaks" ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/artdesign/story/2008/05/14/bust-caesar.html?ref=rss" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dvf55j7", "dvfe2ch" ], "score": [ 2, 9 ], "text": [ "So, the definitive thing to look at is the Index of Classical Poleis, which I don't have. I checked my available handbooks and dictionaries and couldn't find one, and I couldn't find one at the Ancient Mediterranean Mapping project.\n\nI wonder, though, if that isn't a description, and not a noun, like you might refer to Los Angeles as the City of Stars? Is there context to support a use like that?", "The book you read is called \"soldier of the Mist\" by Gene Wolfe. Its central conceit involves a Latin speaking soldier travelling through the Greek world but not really understanding what he sees or hears. (As you mentioned, he has no short term memory)\n\nOften, he will interpret the things he hears in an over-literal fashion. Therefore, in the story, he renders Athens (named for the goddess of wisdom) as \"Thought\".\n\n\"Rope\" is based on a similar misunderstanding. He is actually referring to Sparta itself. (Which obviously was an actual city, about which much can be found on this sub if you're interested.)\n\nThe author explains this in the book's author's note. He claims the protagonist is mishearing the word for \"cord,\" \"Sparton\"\n\nEdit: for those reading the book, [this](_URL_0_) is a helpful list of \"translations\"." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=WolfeWiki.SoldierNames" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cjq0qce", "cjq0tl7" ], "score": [ 41, 12 ], "text": [ "At first, the absence of direct military intervention from the great european powers. The first Balkan War was concluded rapidly as the Ottoman army was busy fighting the Italians for Libya. The Second Balkan War, that started merely a month after the end of the first, opposed the former winners against Bulgaria. Again, the forces where not equal and the influence of the great Powers stayed relatively diplomatic instead of military. Astonished by the victories of the slavic forces, Austria-Hungary only intervened after the end of the second Balkan War. More so after the assassination of Franz - Ferdinand. The declaration of war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia then played the web of alliances between the east european and european nations, bringing them all in a war with much more players and military potential. \n\n\nTLDR: in the Balkan Wars, Europe looked from afar, playing their diplomatic strings. The situation escalated until much more players were involved, thus spreading the First World War on 4 years. \n\n\nFor more information on the history of the Balkan peninsula, Bogdan, Henry.From Warsaw to Sofia: A History of Eastern Europe, 1989.\n\n", "In the case of the first war, the Ottoman Empire was suffering from a great deal of internal strife as well as military reforms that were ongoing when the league decided to attack. Just four years earlier the Young Turk revolution happened.\n\nAdditionally according to Richard C Hall in his book [\"The Balkan Wars\"](_URL_0_), it was logistically very difficult to transport everything needed to defend a vast area, as it was stated that the entire area along where the attack happened would be defended.\n\nIn \"A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk\", by Edward J. Erickson, he states that:\n\n > In the fall of 1912, the Ottoman political and military leadership was caught completely by surprise and was unprepared for the aggression of the Balkan states. The\narmy’s seasoned recruits had just demobilized (more than 70,000 soldiers) and,\nmoreover, many talented officers were fighting against the Italians or were on their\nway to join the war. \n\n > A reinforced divisional group under the command of Chief of\nthe General Staff Ahmed Izzet Pasha (composed of 29 crack battalions from First,\nSecond, and Third Armies) had just suppressed a rebellion in Yemen and were too\nfar away to return to the war zone on time. The infant army corps and triangular\ndivisions, which were still battling to finish the reorganization, did not have the\nmeans to overcome the efflux of trained and seasoned soldiers and the influx of untrained raw recruits. \n\n > Furthermore, there was a serious political crisis in which different partisan officer cliques were doing everything possible to establish political control and exterminate their rivals. \n\n > Coupled with this, Ottoman political and military leadership obstinately determined to preserve every inch of the empire’s territory, and\nthey had great faith in the military capacity of territorial defense units.\n\nI'm not too sure about the second war, but it appears something similar happened there, a grossly outnumbered army of one nation (Bulgaria) simply couldn't defend against a numerically superior military from a wide front." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fk1liqr" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Not to discourage further responses, but I answered a similar question some time ago [here](_URL_0_)." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7kzofm/american_grenades_in_wwii/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ckzgonx" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It varied among classes. Most high-ranking nobles and royals were married through arranged marriage. In one rather shocking example, Richard II agreed to marry the 7 year old daughter of the French king as part of a peace treaty. However, among peasants there was much more freedom to do as you pleased. The church had a very strong influence on what behavior was deemed appropriate for unmarried people so premarital sex certainly happened, but wasn't commonly talked about. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dob6mmn" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Bloody Mary was a sobriquet given to Mary I (1516-1558), the first queen regnant of England from 1553 to 1558. The daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon, Mary inherited her mother's (and her father's, early in his life) staunch Catholicism.\n\nHer predecessor was her younger brother, Edward VI (strongly protestant), who died at the age of 15. Fearing that she would reverse his reforms and their father's, plans were made to exclude her from the line of succession, which incidentally also excluded her sister, the future Elizabeth I. Under those terms, the crown next passed to the 17-year old Jane Gray, who was deposed after less than two weeks and executed and is now not counted in the list of British monarchs.\n\nSoon after her accession, Mary (who had married the King of Spain Philip II, also staunchly Catholic) had several leading Protestant churchmen imprisoned. In 1553, all of the religious legislation promoted under her brother's reign, mainly by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, were repealed, reaffirming, among others, clerical celibacy. \n\nIn 1554, the Heresy Acts, which had been repealed under Henry VIII and Edward VI, were revived. Under those, numerous Protestants were executed, under what is now known as the Marian Persecutions, with several bishops being burned at the stake; 283 people were executed as a whole, which even some of Philip II's ecclesiastical staff condemned.\n\nAs a whole, she played absolutely no role in the Lutheran reformation itself, being all of one year old when the 95 Thesis were posted. She was viewed as a bloodthirsty tyrant soon after her reign, with England swiftly turning protestant under her sister Elizabeth and their successors. Her sobriquet was known to pop up as early as the 17th century. Historical revisionism has improved her reputation some (her death toll being small when compared to her father's), but she is still a hotly debated subject among historians today.\n\nHope this helped!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c9fy0h3" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The Mayan people of Guatemala and the Moskito people around the Caribbean coastline in Nicaragua are among a number of indigenous minorities that remain largely discriminated against. During the Contra war for example, the Moskito people suffered from discrimination by the Sandinista regime in which they attempted to force a certain national identity such as the Spanish language. A good reading on the subject matter can be found in Ethnic Conflict in World Politics by Ted Gurr. On the case of the Mayan people, \"Silence on the Mountain\" remains a great piece on the downright genocidal imposes of the military dictatorships ruling over Guatemala. \n\n\nIn terms of the last question, the issue with the Mayans in Guatemala reflected the issues of the ruling elite, they simply weren't white. The Guatemalan elite that formed through the coffee industry envisioned a White European society and if anything, the Mayan people contradicted their vision hence, a sort of contempt/prejudice formed against them. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "deyt1qx", "dezewtj" ], "score": [ 34, 2 ], "text": [ "/u/commiespaceinvader has a [good answer here](_URL_0_) to this question. The long and the short of it is that the postwar denazification procedures did not really consider wives as major accessories to their husbands' misdeeds. While this meant that wives of the Nazi elite certainly would lose property and other valuables, they were not in danger of prison terms or execution. Margarete Himmler went through several denazification classifications, ranging from minor offender to fellow-traveler (the least implicated Nazis) to the more serious implicated beneficiary in 1953. Such reclassifications not only speaks to the chaos of denazification, which differed by zone, but also the difficulties in charging the wives of Nazi war criminals with benefiting from position. \n\nEven in the case of property, civil laws sometimes trumped the need for justice and some wives managed to keep their husbands' property. Emmy Göring and her daughter and Edda waged a long series of legal battles to regain some of Hermann art treasures back confiscated by the Federal and Bavarian governments, and they met with some mixed successes. Lina Heydrich was able to successfully use the wider amnesty policies of the FRG to gain access to her husband's pension, which was quite large since he held the rank of a German general killed in action. \n\nThe wives and children of the Nazi elite often managed to exploit their husbands' notoriety for their own benefit. Both Gundrun Himmler and Edda Göring became prominent in the postwar far-right as champions of their fathers' vision for Germany and Europe. Lina Heydrich used her husband's pension to help her open up an inn that became one of the main social gathering spots for SS veterans and other unsavory types. Ilse Heß managed to publish her letters to her imprisoned husband under the right-wing Druffel press. Likewise, Emmy Göring was able to publish her autobiography, a fawning apologia of both her husband and the Third Reich. Many of these immediate family members laid the foundations for postwar Holocaust denialism and other canards of Europe's postwar far right. \n\nWhether or not Eva Braun would have followed the trajectory of her fellow wives is unknowable. While it is very unlikely she would have been charged with a formal crime, it would have been a certainty that she would have had to face a denazification court. Her father and mother went through a Munich denazification tribunal in 1947 as Category II offenders even though they were relatively minor figures. The more serious charge was likely because they were Hitler's in-laws and it was possible that they were beneficiaries of the dictator's largess. It is not outside the realm of possibility that denazification and other civil procedures against Eva Braun would have been more careful and thorough than similar undertakings directed at other wives. The notoriety of Hitler himself would have made it an public relations embarrassment in light of German division and the Cold War. The GDR often made great political hay out of unrepentant Nazis, including widows, making a new life in the FRG. The sight of Hitler's widow managing to draw some kind of pension or selling her memoirs to the highest bidder would have been far more embarrassing to Bonn than the Heydrich inn or even Gundrun's political activities. ", "If I could ask a follow-up question: Hitler killed himself as the Soviets were taking Berlin, and the record of Red Army soldiers of sexual violence and rape in Germany is well-recorded, was there a fear that had/when Berlin fell, Eva would have suffered such violence before being arrested by Allied forces?" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4l8ho5/if_she_had_been_captured_what_would_have_been_eva/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d7jmipo", "d7jt675" ], "score": [ 7, 6 ], "text": [ "I applied to PhD programs twice, the first to study the history of the United States and the second to study art history. In between I completed an interdisciplinary MA, specifically NYU's John W. Draper program. It is my understanding that this program specifically recruits from unsuccessful applicants to NYU's PhD programs (I think the University of Chicago has a similar program - other universities might as well). While I am happy I did this program because I ended up getting into my first-choice PhD program after the two years, I am not happy I did it because it was enormously expensive and I am now carrying a large amount of student loan debt because of it. Right now I'm a newly-minted PhD with no academic job who is doing some freelancing and otherwise being supported by my SO while I'm on the job market again. So, this perspective will inform what I have to say next:\n\n1. As far as increasing your chance to get accepted, the biggest thing that no one at my undergraduate institution told me (or that I was unwilling or unable to hear), is that your statement of purpose needs to be specific. While it's a relatively short document, you need to show an understanding of the outlines of the field you propose to study, as well as propose an actual historical question you want to solve or investigate. You can't just say (even if you say it in really sophisticated language) \"gee golly, I sure do love the Civil War and would love to study that.\" If you're having trouble identifying a concrete historical question you are interested in, then you need to think long and hard about why you are applying to graduate school, or at least to PhD programs. If you are currently in undergrad and your school offers departmental honors or the option to write a thesis **do that**. A history of successful independent research will go a long way towards making you an attractive candidate.\n\n2. What about Plan B (or Plan A for people who think they want a PhD but aren't sure what to study)? First of all, if you come from a well-to-do family or otherwise have $70k-100k to spend on an MA, I really do think that the Draper Program and similar are fantastic. It's just not a good idea to go into debt before embarking on the low pay and uncertain outcomes of a humanities PhD, but if you can afford it, great! I know some people who got MA's from NYU for free or cheap, but that involved either having parents who worked there (tuition remission) or working there themselves (also tuition remission, and also can only attend part time while also working a 40 hour a week job). If you can't afford a private school and can't/don't want to get a job at one, and you didn't get into a program, another option is an MA from a state university, especially if you can do it while working and/or living with your parents, to minimize debt. The history department at your local state flagship university will likely have a terminal MA program that you can attend for in-state tuition, and often part-time. Obviously, this might still depend on your financial and job situation. I'm from a small state where something like 3/4 of the total state population lives within an hour of the flagship university, so maybe if you're from Nebraska this won't work as well. \n\n3. Another Plan B is to get a job in a related field, like at a museum or historical society. This will get you hands-on experience with historical materials and research, and probably allow you to make the acquaintance of historians and other professionals in the field. A bonus of this approach is that you might find you like working and have no interest in going to grad school, in which case you have saved yourself a lot of time and financial hardship.\n\n4. Once you get in: I found there was a fairly serious leap in difficulty from undergrad (at an excellent but perhaps not top-tier state university) to NYU. I had more reading that was more difficult, and I was also working 20 hours a week and commuting from central Brooklyn to Manhattan. I drank a lot of coffee and lost a lot of sleep. I found a similarly serious leap from NYU to my PhD program, where the reading was even more vigorous and the classes were much smaller, giving me less room to hide if I hadn't done the reading. I also added TAing and graduate service activities, but subtracted paid work. My PhD university was on the quarter system, so I also had to cram more learning into a smaller amount of time. But I also found that the PhD program, as much work as it was, was incredibly freeing. **All** you have to do in such a program is work on your chosen field of study. You literally aren't allowed to do anything else. This is a great great feeling if you love the work, and I think it's why a lot of us stick with academia even though the rewards can be so few and far in between.\n\nI found that coursework, especially when I was also TAing, was the hardest I have ever worked. Note that your TA load will vary widely depending on the school you go to. I went to an exclusive private university for my PhD, so my TA load was pretty light (they hardly needed TAs at all - many classes were assigned one just because the grad student needed a TA job as part of his or her training), and I wasn't required to do it at all as a first-year. If you go to some larger, more cash-strapped schools, you might TA from the first semester onward as often as every single semester. This can and should figure into your calculus about which grad program to attend, as should funding, job placement outcomes, and the like. After coursework is oral exams. My programs oral exams were relatively light and informal, but I understand that for many they can be brutal. Hopefully some of the historians here who did old-school history orals can share how that is. After orals is dissertation proposal writing and then dissertation writing. Writing a dissertation is hard work, but I also found that I wasn't terribly busy in terms of total hours worked while writing mine. I'm an efficient worker, and I found that my brain was just not capable of writing for eight hours a day. Research, maybe, but when I was actually writing I would aim to get two hours of good solid writing done in a day. The rest of the time I would spend researching, searching for a job, or taking care of domestic tasks and generally being a supportive partner.\n\nOK, I hope this helps. I am happy to answer questions that anyone has.", "What are good strategies to get accepted?\n\nAnecdotally (but with a bit more than hearsay,) the program I was in depended mostly on faculty recommendation letters than much else. As most of academia is reputationally-based, letters from well-known folks *within the field the applicant was planning on pursuing* were quite valuable. Slightly less valuable was a letter from a well-known scholar for a student planning on studying something outside the recommender's field. Certainly grades and test scores matter, but more as a foot-in-the-door than anything else. In my program, real funding decisions were mostly based on recommendations. This of course presupposes that the applicant is proposing a field of study supported by the program to which they're applying. That is, if you apply to study some field of history that the department to which you're applying doesn't support/have faculty that teach/care about/whatever, you've wasted your time. \n\nHow much work do you have to expect?\n\nThe first year is tough. I went BA-- > PhD with the MA granted as a formality after my second year. I still remember my first day of grad school, being completely lost as my cohort, most of which held an MA, discussed a book. I'd read the book, but had zero clue where it fit in the literature and sat there for three hours, bewildered. I did a lot of outside reading. The most valuable catch-up books I read were Iggers' *Historiography in the Twentieth Century* and Eric Foner (ed) *The New American History.* (Now called *American History Now,* and edited by Lisa McGirr and Foner) Those books saved my bacon. \n\nAdvice for starting out: read the above (if Amercanist, otherwise ask your future advisor for a book similar to Foner/McGirr above that applies to your area) and during your first couple of semesters, read every damned word. As you get better at understanding what books are doing and how they fit in to the greater picture, some skimming and intro/conclusion reading becomes OK. In your third year, skimming is pretty much the norm.\n\nIdeally, you shape your course work as a research launch pad. If you can tailor your courses and seminar work to your later dissertation interest, you'll be able to complete your dissie much more quickly, and will (IMO) increase your chances of completing the degree. \n\nSpeak with instructors as you take your courses, asking if you can tailor writings a little to include whatever you're planning on covering in your dissertation. See if it's permissible to use writing seminar courses to work on your diss. proposal/prospectus. Try not to take much course work outside of your major field. Some will likely be required/unavoidable, but keep it to a minimum.\n\nIn terms of managing stress, I treated grad school like a full-time job. I was lucky in that my spouse was working and I had TA money coming in, so there weren't big financial concerns. This will of course vary. I had my little office where I spent non-class or library time. I was there every day like a job. \n\nMy program was quite rigorous, but also very informal. Professors and students (even most undergrads) used first names. We had frequent get-togethers at local watering holes. Having a couple of beers and arguing historiography with well-known professors is a lot of fun. \n\nAnd lastly, think long and hard about the realities of grad school in the humanities. Jobs are few and far between. At best. I adjuncted for three years before finally landing a tenure-track job. Landing that job required moving my family away from everything we knew. For us, it's worked out pretty well. For others I know, not so much. Adjuncts make less than poverty wages, and Asst. Profs generally not a whole lot more. I didn't get into this for the money, but there are very serious realities to consider. Do you want to be 35 and making $30K a year? Can you live on that? Do you want a roommate for the rest of your life? What of a family? Will you have a spouse/partner that works? Children to feed? I'd bet that most everyone who has completed a PhD knows at least one person from their cohort that left academia over these issues. Likely more than one. Think it through completely before you commit yourself to a decade(-ish) of study and work for very little reward. \n\nI don't mean to be Debbie Downer -- grad school was awesome, really -- but don't go in with illusions, either. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cjjagvd", "cjjdrrm" ], "score": [ 8, 3 ], "text": [ "I hate to come off as annoying, and maybe our local Francophile /u/DonaldFDraper would be more willing to play 20 questions, but I find it much easier to answer a series of questions if I know where the questions are leading and can tackle it in one big post so I can build everything off of each other and know how to approach certain topics rather than making a bunch of 250-500 word posts in complete vacuums without context. \n\nYour curiosity clearly isn't centered around why France wasn't included in the Congress but some questions built off of that as you say yourself. Or maybe it is. That's the issue, I don't know what you really want here but just the first part to a long series of interrogation questions that hopefully by the end would give me some idea of what you really want. By doing it this way I don't know what's important and what's not to getting the point across and may focus on entirely the wrong things for expressing a certain point you may be building up around asking about.\n\nSo really, what are the things you are wanting to know and we can tackle them a bit more cohesively knowing where your questioning is going rather than answering a series of vague questions? Even if you don't want to just post a list of questions at least giving a general idea of where your reasoning is trying to go with this mysterious line of questioning would be helpful.", "I am not a historian, I am only a young guy who is interested in history, but I'll try to answer this:\n\nThe Congress of Vienna took place to restore the political conditions of 1792. So France was the bad guy (from the view of all the others) during the war, but it wasn't lead by a king of the [House of Bourbon](_URL_0_), instead Napoleon was the leader and emperor.\n\nThe Congress of Vienna gave France back to it's 'rightful' owner, the House of Bourbon. It was different from negotiations after the Second World War where Nazi-Germany and its allies clearly where the villains from the view of the winners, while after Napoleon's defeat they gave France back to the true king." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7d8gwc", "c7d8jcs", "c7d8qxk", "c7d8rrf", "c7d98r3", "c7d99yy", "c7dd1yh" ], "score": [ 78, 5, 3, 50, 12, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "The terms \"just\" or \"unjust\" are still widely in use. The terms \"legal\" or \"illegal\" wars have really just come out of the establishment of international legal institutions (League of Nations and the United Nations) in the 20th century. The distinction of \"just\" war usually refers to the qualities that make a war \"legal\" in regards to the UN Charter. Prior to this document, there was no way to consider a war \"illegal\" so the terms just or unjust were used.", "Part of the change also comes from our collective emergence from the feudal system. There was a term called \"Casus belli,\" which meant \"Cause of War.\" You could expect support from others, be it your own vassals, your liege or other players, if you had valid cause to go to war. This could be a claim on a title, a religious cause, or as revenge for some prior misdeed. \n\nAs we as a whole began to get away from the feudal system and more toward nationalism, wars become less about territory and more about causes and ideology. As such, we drift away from the idea of a legal war, and look more at whether or not a war is morally just, where the war is justified because the other side violates human rights, or infringes upon the well being of another group.", "For the Romans and Augustinus and Tommaso d'Aquino, a just war had to have the approval of a higher authority, God, or the gods. For the Romans, this could be assured by following a certain formal \"spiritual\" routine; (Cicero, De officiis 1.11.33 following, in one of the early chapters in Titus Livius is another description, if desired, I search for it) for the Doctors of the Church the war had to meet certain requirements, like not to be lead only for gain, being declared by the proper authority and having peace as goal (Tommaso d'Aqino, Summa Theologica, Second part of the second part, Question 40).\n\nTo make a war illegal, the war only has to break some kind of law, be it national law, for example not having the \"proper\" constitutional legalisation to be declared; or international law, to be against the Kellogg–Briand Pact or later the Charter of the United Nations.\n\ntl, dr: Just and unjust are personal opinions or spiritual concepts, since enlightened lawgiving can't deal with that, nowadays we only have legal or illegal wars. Or, like Daddy_Biggins says, one could simply say \"just\" and mean \"legal\".", "I wouldn't say that these terms have ever been replaced. For example, the founders were greatly concerned with the \"legality\" of war. The best case study for this is the Quasi-War with France during the Adams administration.\n\nThe war really kicked off in earnest due to American refusal to pay Revolutionary debts to France on the grounds that the debts had been owed to the monarchy, not the new French Republic. A cute legal nicety, that really shows how many lawyers we had in government at the time (and still do).\n\nBecause of this, the French began seizing American shipping. It took two years for Congress to authorize action to be taken against the French. At this point, the war was \"legal;\" Adams had ordered no action to be taken against the French. Now that action had been authorized, Adams had to work within the strictures placed by Congress in order for the war to be legal. For example, seizing ships sailing to and French ports was \"legal.\" Seizing ships sailing \"from\" French ports was not. In the case of *Little v. Barreme*, an American captain acting under orders from Adams seized a Danish ship sailing **from** a French port. This action was deemed illegal, and the American captain was liable for damages.\n\nLook at the Constitution as well. In Section 8 we have several clauses including \"To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations,\" and \"To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.\" These are all concerned with the legality of hostilities, and speak nothing to its \"just\" or \"unjust\" nature.", "The idea of a just war has been around for ages (in fact, just war theory is the explanation of a just war by medieval theologians). Although prior to the 20th century, it can pretty much be observed that justifications of war was based off the \"right to conquer\" (basically the idea might is the right to rule). \n\nThe modern peace/anti-war movement grew largely in 20th century United States. During this time period, the United States had a fairly strong peace movement growing in the Midwest. Celebrities such as Charles Lindbergh (keep in mind, Lindbergh was a part of the anti-war America First group), and post-World War I era, made peace a large issue. This movement would eventually lead Frank Kellogg (along with French foreign minister, Aristide Briand) to draft the Pact of Paris (August 1928). \n\nThe Pact of Paris was a pact between its signatories, in which they \"condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy\". The pact was signed by most of the major powers (original signors being the U.S., France and Germany... ironically) and while it didn't make wars illegal, it did state that enforcement of the pact would be through a collective force of its signatories. While the Pact can be seen ultimately as a failure to maintain peace, it did get Kellogg a Nobel Peace Prize, and would serve as the stepping stone for future UN documents which deal with \"wars of aggression\".\n\nThe signing of the Convention for the Definition of Aggression was also another major step towards hammering out the concept of \"illegal wars\". Signed in London on July 1933, the Convention was the first legitimate attempt to actually define what a \"war of aggression\" might be. Many of the signors of this Convention were already signors of the Pact of Paris. The convention had played major role during the events of World War II, first, when the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union from the organization, following its invasion of Finland. The second time would be during the Nuremberg Trials, when Robert Jackson (the American justice) used it to make the case that the actions of the Nazis were unambiguously aggressive. \n\nMost historians would probably mark the Nuremberg Trials as the place where the concept of \"illegal wars\" was finally hashed out. It was in the convention which established the way that the Nuremberg Trial would be conducted that the words \"illegal war\" can be first seen and defined (Article IV). It was also in the same convention, in which the Nuremberg Principles first came about, which defined what war crimes, crimes against peace and humanity are. After the trials, these principles would be enshrined in a number institutions, such as the General Assembly of the UN in 1946 (UNGA Resolution 95), adopted within the Geneva Conventions in 1948, and codified by the International Law Commission in 1950.", "Wasn't it Aquinas who set up the Just war theory? Or am I getting my philosophers mixed up? ", "By traditional just war theory, all illegal wars are unjust as one of the conditions for just war is declaration by a competent authority." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e1ulpwv" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "[The Dynamics of Ancient Empires](_URL_0_) is a fantastic choice. Ian Morris' section on the Athenian \"Empire\" is a classic, and there are also interesting treatments by other contributors like Scheidel. " ] }

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[ [ "https://www.amazon.com/Dynamics-Ancient-Empires-Assyria-Byzantium/dp/0199758344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1530819662&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+dynamics+of+ancient+empires" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c8xckq4" ], "score": [ 18 ], "text": [ "The Anglo-German arms race seems like a great example. The British and the Second German Empire had a traditionally strong relationship. However, with the ascension of Kaiser Wilhelm II, an arms race pushed Great Britain to side with the French on the eve of WW1, as opposed to remaining neutral as they had in 1870. \n\nThe cause for this has often been attributed mainly to a naval arms race between the two nations. Wilhelm and Admiral Tirpitz decided that Germany needed a navy which would rival the power of the British Royal Navy. For the English's part, they realized that the object of the German's plan was to threaten the dominance of the Royal Navy. As such the British retaliated by building newer, better, ships; the arms race then did what arms races generally do, it escalated. This was accompanied by political negotiations in which Britain basically promised the Germans neutrality in a coming conflict if the Germans froze their construction. But Wilhelm was far more interested in becoming the Admiral of the Atlantic, and so the arms race continued. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "caob2dp", "caoeci5", "caokhcm" ], "score": [ 29, 7, 3 ], "text": [ "I believe I can provide a summarized case study:\n\nOne example is the Paiute War (1860-1), in which the Paiute tribe of Pyramid Lake, Utah Territory (now Nevada) fought against the US. Though tensions were rising, and attacks both by and on Indians were rising, no open fighting occurred until a massacre of American workers at a way-station, who had supposedly kidnapped and raped an Indian girl. \n\nAfter this, a militia force was rounded up, and led to Pyramid Lake. It was ambushed and destroyed, by the greenness of its troops as well as the tactical ability of the Paiute leadership. Soon after, US troops took the same route, and though never winning an outright victory, the Paiute resistance petered out. In the end, a truce was signed. \n\nHere is an example of both organized and disorganized violence in the \"Wild West\", and the trouble differentiating them. The militia, raised from Carson City and Virginia City -- do we count them as army or as civilian? The Paiute attack on Williams Station -- is this an act of war, terrorism, or simply a few rogue Indians with revenge in their hearts? The US troops -- did they fight an Indian army or armed civilians? As often, the lines are blurred.\n\nAfter the first battle at Pyramid Lake, as far away as Sacramento civilians were clamouring about the \"Red Menace\" -- not commie, but Injun -- and how there would be ten thousand Indians at their doorstep any second. But... it never appeared. The threat existed entirely through xenophobic paranoia, and the loss of invincibility. \n\nImmortalised by the Pony Express and its hagiographers, an image stuck in many's mind is that of the rider being chased by hordes of Indians, arrows flying. My two cents: It is likely a fantasy, dreamed up by nostalgic fronteirsmen and entertainers (such as Buffalo Bill). \n\nAlthough this only provides limited scope into the threat of Native Americans to US civilians, I hope it's been informative!", "Out on the plains of the Llano Estacado in West Texas, or just in most parts of the state being attacked by a party of Comanches was not unheard of. Unless you had some sort of agreement with what ever local band was nearby safety was not guaranteed. And as different Comanche bands did not recognize the treaties of other bands (something the settlers didn't understand) this would cause unrest, confusion and bloodshed. There are many notable raids to back this up, the most infamous being the raid on Parker's Fort in 1836. Now the Comanches fought with the whatever force confronted it, most notably the Texas Rangers and the US 4th Cavalry (*IIRC*), but there were occasions in which an entire town of settlers had to fight off a Comanche raid, the most famous being the Second Battle of Adobe Walls in 1874. Now these encounters and events I have given only pertain to the Comanche's of Texas, so this is not encompassing of all tribes in the \"wild west\", but due to the size and notoriety of the Comanche nation in American history along with Hollywood never caring about differentiating tribes this has probably led to the skewed portrayal of violence between civilians and indians in westerns. Hope this answered something.", "There's a couple of ways to answer this question: through studying the actual events of history (as /u/ChiefBlanco and /u/zclcf30 have already done here), and studying the genre of Western films in context both with the time of their creation in the mid 20th century and with knowledge of the actual events of 19th century they purport to portray.\n\nI highly recommend the work of Richard Slotkin on this second approach. His trio of big books -- sometimes called the gunfighter trilogy -- explore the mythologizing of violence in American popular culture and the production of historical memory. In particular, he advances a number of theses about this violence, including ideas about \"regeneration through violence\" and attempts to locate an otherwise elusive national mythology in stories of such violence. *Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860* is where the trilogy starts, then through *The Fatal Environment* (my favorite) and then the final, and best well known, *Gunfighter Nation*.\n\nI think that final book is what you want -- If your observation is that \"I have this inadvertent imagine of the West as a place where everyone was constantly killing everyone,\" then this book offers an explanation as to why that storyline of violence has gained prominence. This mythology has served different purposes for many audiences, making it a useful legend to resurrect and re-tell over and over again.\n\nNB: this is not to say that westward movement was *not* violent; this analysis simply examines why we retell these stories so much, at the expense of other viewpoints.\n\n_URL_0_\n" ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://books.google.com/books?id=-9XOsW7YwJ4C&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;q&amp;f=false" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cgqkzva" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "In order to maybe cut down on some of the lackluster answers, I'll put in a few clarifying questions on what the original question (I presume!) is asking:\n\n1. When did a driver's license first become a valid form of identification in the US? Did it replace an older form of state issued ID? \n2. When did stores in American first have to ask for a form of identification to sell everyday age-controlled items like cigarettes and alcohol? (This is the most common reason to need a form of driver's license/state ID on you at all times) \n3. When did common government and non-government services start requiring an ID to access, such as setting up a bank account, voting, or getting a library card? " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fgeykpq" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "/u/midwesternphotograph talks about [the evolution of Judaism from polytheistic to monotheistic](_URL_0_)\n\n/u/lcnielsen also [has a writeup about it](_URL_1_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d66ttx/how_did_the_earliest_monotheistic_religions/f0t68iy/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9860qb/howwhen_did_judaism_become_monotheistic_when/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ff5fpvr" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "I cant speak for the possible usage of Llamas and Alpacas in combat, though maybe one of my South American counter parts could weigh in on the liklihood of releasing the Camelids of War. But in North America the only animal that may have been used would have been the domesticated dog. Dogs were commonly found across North America, and probably would have served to help defend a community in someway. Dogs make for great sentries, they can warn you of newcomers and are usually pretty good at seeing, hearing, and smelling those trying to approach your dwelling. The nature of conflict in pre-Columbian North America centered around raiding which itself focuses on swift actions to catch an enemy unaware. Ambushes occured both within and outside the confines of your community, and with this in mind it is plausible that dogs as travel companions as well as living in town could have helped to combat the ability for an enemy to sneak up on you. However this is a pretty universal human usage of domesticated dogs, and would not have been as much of a focus for warfare as other domesticated animals. \n\nOne quick side note would be that dogs were sometimes used for transport beyond the stereotypical sled dogs of the north. But again I do not think this was used primarily for warfare and any benefit from it would have been a result of transport becoming easier in general as opposed to dogs being used primarily to transport items for war. \n\n\nTLDR: the only animal that was domesticated and that would have played any role during conflict was the dog, however dogs and humans have such a deeply linked relationship that any benefit in warfare would have most likely been only an added benefit and far from the sole reason these communities had domesticated dogs." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dgy88e5" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Yes. After D-Day, the 2nd Ranger Battalion took part in the Battle for Brest in September 1944, the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest in December 1944, and the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and January 1945. They then participated in the crossing of the Roer River and advanced into Germany in early 1945. The 5th Ranger Battalion took part in D-Day as well as the fighting at Brest, but was transferred to the U.S. Third Army in the Lorraine and Saar areas for a short time in fall 1944 before entering combat in a defensive role on the very southern flank of the German Ardennes offensive. In February and March 1945, the battalion aggressively entered Germany and then assumed military government duties.\n\n**Battle Casualties of 5th Ranger Battalion During Operations:**\n\nOperation|KIA|WIA|MIA\n:--|:--|:--|:--\nNormandy|23|89|2\nNorthern France [Brest]|25|130|2\nRhineland [Lorraine/Saarland]|18|106|5\nRhineland [Irsch-Zerf]|34|140|12\n\nThe 1st, 3rd, and 4th Ranger Battalions, part of the 6615th Ranger Force (Provisional), were destroyed during the calamitous [Battle of Cisterna](_URL_2_) in Italy in late January 1944. The remains of the three battalions were later deactivated at varying dates in 1944. The 6th Ranger Battalion served in the Philippines from October 1944 until the end of the war, taking part in the raid on the Cabanatuan prison camp in January 1945, which freed over 500 American prisoners thay had been held there since the Bataan Death March of 1942.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n[Ranger Battalion Histories](_URL_0_)\n\n[Ranger Battalion Histories II](_URL_1_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.wwiirangers.com/index%20pages/history.htm", "http://www.ranger.org/resources/Documents/Ranger%20History.pdf", "http://www.flashman.com/Cisterna.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cvvb1s9", "cvvdsnz" ], "score": [ 11, 8 ], "text": [ "Always room for more discussion, but there is [a section of the FAQ](_URL_0_) devoted to this very question. \n\nThe only episode I have seen that I am qualified to comment on is the \"Neolithic Revolution\" episode. It is far from perfect, but it certainly isn't too far from the consensus in the field at the moment. It is pretty much on par with what you can expect from a well-written textbook on the subject, which is to be expected given the huge breadth of topics covered by the series. ", "I second the \"check the FAQ\" posts, but my overall opinion: it's not bad for a populariser of history, and if you want a basic primer on historical topics you don't know anything about. \n\nI suspect I'm not the only historian to react like this but basically, I found the episodes on topics I'm not an expert at all in to be quite interesting, while those that I do know quite a lot about seemed like ELI5 videos. Though I guess that's inevitable. Also, occasionally something he says about your specialist topics can annoy you incredibly disproportionately (my most pedantic point of irritation is his incorrect pronunciation of \"Jacobins\", for example).\n\nTo be fair to John Green, I think he learns from and tries to respond to criticism. In his second World History series, he did indeed try to incorporate more historiographical debates and conceptual analysis, and I commend him for that." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_john_green.27s_.27crash_course_world_history.27" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "di488o0" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Could you be more specific about which technologies were (supposedly) lost? " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fcvlq3r" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "This submission has been removed because it is [soapboxing](_URL_1_.) or [moralizing:](_URL_0_) it has the effect of promoting an opinion on contemporary politics or social issues at the expense of historical integrity. There are certainly historical topics that relate to contemporary issues and it is possible for legitimate interpretations that differ from each other to come out of looking at the past through differing political lenses. However, we will remove questions that put a deliberate slant on their subject or solicit answers that align with a specific pre-existing view." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_political_agendas_or_moralising", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22soapboxing.22_or_loaded_questions" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d7uj87d" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I dont know the answer, but I do know the Eastern Orthodox Church predates the catholic church by a few hundred years" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cdngkvw", "cdngp3k" ], "score": [ 2, 4 ], "text": [ "One roll played by many Irish was one of leaving. My only source on this is John Rawlston Saul's book \"A Fair Country\" talking about the mixed nature of Canadian identity. In this book he states that the United Empire Loyalists, the groups of Americans that fled the United States for Canada following the loss of the revolutionary war, was made up of several groups. The largest group was German religious minorities, fairly sceptical of religious freedom in the states' new melting pot, and the second largest group was Irish and Scottish Catholics, fleeing again religious persecution (remember one of the intolerables was that Canadian Catholics had the vote, there was a strong religious undertone to this).", "Well;\n\n''Irish immigrants of this period participated in significant numbers in the American Revolution, leading one British major general to testify at the House of Commons that \"half the rebel Continental Army were from Ireland.\"[16] Irish Americans signed the foundational documents of the United States—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and, beginning with Andrew Jackson, served as President.''\n\n_URL_1_\n\nThe cited source is:\n\nJump up ^ Philip H. Bagenal, The American Irish and their Influence on Irish Politics, London, 1882, pp 12–13.\n\nAlso;\n\n_URL_0_\n\n''A few following documented facts will reveal some accurate history of Irish participation in the American Revolution.\n\nBattle of Lexington (April 19, 1775), 174 Irish were present.\n\nBattle of Bunker Hill (June 17, 1775), 698 Irish were present.\n\nA prominent American, Joseph Galloway, also an English Tory, on Oct. 27, 1779, told the English House of Commons that one-half of Washington's Continental Army was Irish.\n\nOn April 2, 1784, Luke Gardiner, afterward Lord Mountjoy, told the English Parliament, \"America was lost by Irish emigrants ... I am assured from the best authority, the major part of the American Army was composed of Irish and that the Irish language was as commonly spoken in the American ranks as English, I am also informed it was their valor that determined the contest ...\"''\n\nHowever, I'm not too sure about the second claim, seeing as it's a newspaper." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20110622/discuss/706229716/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_American#17th_to_mid-19th_century" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dz1hv7t" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ "Conquistadors were not really soldiers in the modern sense. They were not paid a salary, so their recompense was typically in looted goods, preferably gold and silver. However, their motivation to go and become a conquistador was to win an encomienda, which is a quasi-feudal institution where a population of 'indians' were given as a labour force to individual Spaniards. Of course, getting an encomienda was closely related to wining honours from the Spanish Crown, including coats-of-arms and other forms of status recognition. Thus, the ultimate goal of each Conquistador was to achieve social status. When a Conquistador had achieved this, they would settle on an estate, or more frequently, in a 'newly founded' Spanish city in the New World and live as a noble citizen.\n\nAt least, this was the 'ideal.' Many conquistadors did not receive much wealth from their conquests, as many native societies were not as rich in gold and silver as many of the Spaniards had assumed. Furthermore, the the rights and labour grants they thought they were entitled did not always materialise, either because the labour was not available, or because the Crown did not want to give too much political and social power to what was essentially a band of raiders. So many conquistadors kept on going, heading to the next raid in the hope that it would prove more productive than the last." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d05viba" ], "score": [ 28 ], "text": [ "The reason why we tend to think of slavery as being synonymous with large plantations, and why these portrayals are the norm in popular media, is because this was essentially the normal experience from the perspective of the enslaved. The vast majority of *slave owners* though did not have a substantial number of slaves and were not operating plantations. In 1860, we estimate that about half of all slave owners in the Old South would have owned only a single slave; a similar percentage would have owned fewer than half a dozen across the entire South. Missouri in particular stands out for the prevalence of small-scale slave ownership: about nine in every ten slave owners in that state had fewer than ten slaves to their name, and plantation farming was comparatively rare, the norm instead being a culture of slave ownership where master and slave worked alongside each other on small estates in a much more intimate environment than the plantation economy provided for. In general, the 1860 census of slaves and owners seems to suggest the vast majority of US slave owners owned fewer than 10.\n\nAll in all, the figures from the 1860 census indicated that there were 393,975 slave owners in the United States owning 3,950,528 slaves - in other words, the average slave owner only had about 10 slaves, which is half the number normally required to denote the distinction between regular farming and plantation farming. The actual figure, it should be noted, might be slightly higher or lower because the Census is only a snapshot of the day it was taken (and so sometimes slaves might be on the wrong estate, working for someone who didn't own them, etc., and this isn't always identified). That average is of course heavily skewed by those minority of owners who did have many slaves working on large plantations and who formed the centre of the Southern elite. All in all, that actually means only about 5% of the Southern population owned slaves. It is crucial to understand though that there is a distinction to be made between someone who *owns* a slave and someone who *has access to slave labour*.\n\nGenerally speaking, slaves would be owned by a single person - usually the white male head of the household. The owner's spouse and children (who stood to inherit ownership, and who cannot generally, of course, legally own a slave before the age of maturity) are not included in that figure, even though they would have obviously benefited from slave ownership. Nor are other family members, friends and associated who benefited from slave ownership. Likewise, practices like hiring out surplus slave labour or having slaves perform services for the wider community (like refuse collection in urban environments, or working in commercial services for white people) mean that many, many more people had access to and benefited from slave labour even if they were not slave owners themselves. The general consensus is usually that around one-third of all white southerners had a *direct* interest in the continuation of the slave system, though there is debate as to how widespread the wider benefit of that ownership is precisely, and of course there are variations between region to region and county to county. In South Carolina for example, probably about one-in-ten people actually *owned* slaves, and five times that number belonged to a family that did, in 1860.\n\nThe affordability of a slave would vary enormously depending on circumstance - the state, the particular market, the perceived condition or value of the slave, the terms of sale the owner or trader was willing to accept (some sellers would happily accept certain agricultural goods in lieu of cash) and so on. But generally speaking, you would be looking at an investment of *about* $800 for a slave in the late antebellum period, assuming you wanted a 'decent' worker. Consider this this extract from an abolitionist's account of a slave auction in Montgomery, Alabama held on March 24th, 1854, listing the various prices for a slave typical of this period:\n\n > Woman and small child, $1050; man aged 19, $950; man and wife aged 18 and 17, $2000; boy aged 14, $640; girl aged 10, $525: man aged 24, $860; boy aged 11, white, $585; boy aged 11, white, $625; woman aged 25, $900; man and little boy, aged 50, $1020; woman age 46, $395; man, with the gravel , aged 19, $700; man, perfect aged 40, $1600; woman 40, girl 8, $600; man aged 27, $1410; boy aged 12, $725; girl aged 4, $300; girl good looking, aged 14, $855; girl, a little blacker, aged 15, $845. [from The Liberator, \"From the Car Leader\", April 21, 1854]\n\nYou will notice that the \"perfect aged\" man (i.e., a healthy, male worker) aged 40 goes for $1,600; a young couple for $2,000. But you could also have acquired a young boy for much less, or opted for a woman and child for half the price of the young couple. The average price across the whole group of 23 slaves is $721, though this is of course an *auction*, and so another auction with a different set of slaves or a different set of buyers could produce an average price above or below that. From the perspective of someone looking to set out as a slave owner for the first time, the most logical investment would arguably be the young man and wife; their extremely high price reflects in part their reproductive value as well as their labour potential, in the sense that they would have a very good chance of having one or more children who would in turn become your slaves as well, both adding to your labour force *and* to your wealth (because you now have two more slaves you can in turn sell yourself).\n\nFor reference, $800 in 1860 would be roughly $23,500 today in terms of what that money could *buy you* if you went shopping with it. But in 1860, the wider economy was not nearly as affluent or prosperous as the modern-day economy is; put simply, there was less money to go around. As a share of the total value of the economy measured by GDP (how much money the national economy is worth based on everything it produces in one year), $800 is about the same share of national wealth in 1860 as $3.2million USD is today. So in other words, $800 in 1860 has the *purchasing power* of $23,500 today, but it is about as *wealthy* as having $3.2million USD today. Whichever way you look at it, it puts into perspective just quite how much wealth was tied up in slaves and how much of an investment even a single slave could be: if you think of stocks and shares and property in more recent times, how many people have the wealth of equal to just *one* slave tied up in assets today?\n\nWhen you think of it in those terms, it is not surprising that only a minority of white southerners actually were directly involved in slave ownership; a 'decent' slave costs a lot of money - though as we've seen, you could certainly opt for cheaper investments, or be smarter in how you invest your money to make a long-term profit. And of course, sometimes slaves could be purchased on credit, though this phenomenon has perhaps been overstated by some historians. So the answer to your question really depends on what you mean by a \"middle class\" American. Many of those small slave holders presumably made a significant and costly investment in just one or two slaves in the hope that the long-term benefit from having extra, low-cost workers would pay off - and also for the social capital that came with joining the slave owning class in even a small way. But certainly most of these small slave holders would not have been living the 'gentlemanly', luxurious lives of the plantation elite either; they were arguably the middle class of the rural South, but depending on their particular circumstances and what we prioritise in class formation, we might think of them as being more or less well-off than that language implies when we talk about the modern world. Certainly, few of those slave owners were truly part of the elite that dominated Southern society at this time - and when the Confederacy was framing its conscription laws during the Civil War, small-scale slaveholders were not exempted whilst the plantation owners who dominated the Confederate polity explicitly were.\n\nSo this is one of the curiosities of slave-owning: even owning one slave implies a not insignificant measure of wealth, either on credit or by cash, and as an investment by the late antebellum period purchasing a slave is perhaps somewhat comparable to paying a substantial deposit on a house today in terms of the amount of capital one needs to have. Yet at the same time, despite this being a period in which wealth in general is scarcer and less broadly distributed, a sizeable minority of southern families were able to make that investment. The significant quantities of wealth tied up in slaves though would prove to be problematic in the long run - abolition essentially destroyed nearly all of that wealth over night by making it impossible to either claim compensation or to sell your formerly Human property for any kind of return. If you were a slave owner who had made that $800 investment in 1860 on a single slave, by 1866 your investment was gone forever. A mind-boggling amount of wealth disappeared from Southern society when slavery was abolished (Britain, for its part, abolished slavery with compensation in part to try and prevent this from happening in the Caribbean - with very mixed 'success').\n\nThis is also, incidentally, part of the reason why the Upper South was also so affluent even though it did not harvest intensely profitable crops like cotton. The Upper South had an abundance of slaves and a paranoid fear about what that meant for security and stability (especially Virginia, which is perhaps uniquely terrified of slave uprisings throughout the history of slavery); it was able to sell those surplus slaves onto the labour-hungry plantations of the Lower South to supplement its own more limited, though by no means meagre, agricultural profits." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cy8l5ps", "cy8ljdf", "cy8luhw", "cy8pf2p", "cy8qj5q", "cy8qp9l", "cy8udw6" ], "score": [ 2, 5, 19, 5, 3, 4, 17 ], "text": [ "Anthony Beevor sprinkles his books with amazing anecdotes that really drive it home when it comes to the chaos and horror of war. Read any of his books and you will see what I mean.", "This is a topic that is near and dear to me, because I love great literature as well as great history. Unfortunately, in my opinion, only two people managed to write great works of history which were also great works of literature: Edward Gibbon and Winston Churchill. In the modern era I agree with you about Peter Brown: he is a superb writer as well as a superb historian.\n\nI have two different methods I use in an attempt to improve my writing. First, I also write fiction. In fact, I try to alternate between fiction and nonfiction as I publish. I don’t think it is necessary to write fiction for publication, though: they could just be short stories for your own enjoyment.\n\nThe rules of fiction are different and allow more flexibility in the text. When you are used to it you can employ some of those same methods in nonfiction text. Even the structure of a history book can be influenced by the traditional plotting you see in novels, and your description of historical individuals can be improved by using some of the characterisation methods of novels.\n\nMy second method is that my main editor is actually a fiction editor. He has had a long career in fiction and really knows his stuff. His help has greatly improved my nonfiction prose as well as the structure of my nonfiction books. Under my main editor we use a nonfiction subeditor who is familiar with my field and is able to spot factual errors or problems with my arguments – the main thing historians seem to worry about in regards to which editors they choose.\n", "I write like I'm writing a speech: I imagine myself giving it as a lecture. That's why my AH answers are always filled with crazy amounts of parentheses and especially italics--it's me trying to capture the rhythms of how I would talk it.\n\nIn general, I just try to write really clearly and use good topic sentences for each paragraph. Seems to go over pretty well. I mostly get criticized for overusing italics. :)\n\nMy advisor, meanwhile, tends to adopt the writing style of whatever *primary* source he's working with at a given time, *in its original language*. This is especially hilarious when he's working with something in classical or humanist Latin. The ablative absolutes, they abound.", "The most entertaining writers tend to write for humerus but intelligent publications like the New Yorker, The Times, and so forth, so I read those and try to draw some inspiration from it. I have noticed that many historians read the New York Times in particular. \n\nMy normal writing style is rather plain and straightforward. Many people say they like my writing because I am able to explain complex subjects simply. I think that is the greatest compliment for an academic: Understanding. If I had to name the author I wish I wrote like the most, it would be Ernest Hemingway. Despite being a giant of literature, nearly every one of his published sentences was a Simple Sentence, and he almost always avoided commas. ", "I don't know if this is the same, but as a fan and consumer, I think Erik Larson is able to make some really interesting page turners. I haven't looked into on how the majority of his profession thinks of him, but I read The Devil In The White City in 3 days and remember everything about it, bought a book on the history of the world's fair in San Francisco, and sub'd to this sub reddit because it reignited my love of history.", "T.S. Eliot for phrase, Marc Bloch for punch. If you want an audience interested in sources, write in the style of your sources—Bede (or Felix) for form. And if you choose to pursue an ethos of history (historia—Gk. \"inquiry\"), pose questions, not answers. A riddle asks more thought than a reason.", "The first step is to correctly identify the audience you are writing for. You are probably not writing for a \"general audience\" — there is no such thing, really (there are a multitude of different, fractured audiences), and you probably don't want to write for that broad a public anyway (writing for people without at least a high school education is _very_ hard, as is, if you have a PhD, writing for people without a college education, because grad school writing is generally about writing for people with PhDs). \n\nMy term for the audience I usually target is the \"NPR audience,\" which means \"educated (largely American, middle class) professionals.\" It includes the readers of the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, etc. It also includes many academics, which is a bonus, but it is not exclusive to academics. (Consider the difference between this audience and the audience that reads the New York Review of Books — the latter is generally much older and much more highly educated, and as a result a much smaller audience.) \n\nHaving done that, you have many models for writing. The key thing is that it is not about \"dumbing down\" — it is about being clear, avoiding discipline-specific jargon (unless you are willing to devote space to explaining it), and keeping things relatively short (if it is an article, it _needs_ to be under 2,000 words unless you are really doing something quite long-form and special — even then, you need to be _really_ good at your craft if you are going to be holding someone's attention that long, so you shouldn't _start_ by doing that). Books of course are longer but you really need to keep the chapters shorter than is standard in academic monographs. \n\nBecause space is so limited you need to make real decisions about whether you want to talk about other scholarship (in general you do less of this unless you really think it is important or that the audience in question will know or care about your \"intervention\"/\"engagement\" with exclusively academic concerns), whether you want to bother explaining jargon (or just write so you don't need it), or how many little asides and witty points you want to make. I have found my writing works best when I figure out, from the beginning, exactly what one or two points I want the reader to come away with, and tailor the entire piece around that point. \n\nYou also have to get very good at working with editors. A good editor will hack your piece up, remove huge parts that you think are important, rephrase a lot of things (sometimes incorrectly, and you have to be able to find a compromise), and generally make it _much better_. But academics (in my experience) generally hate strong editing and are not used to it and don't like being told they're a bad writer, that they're unclear, that their argument isn't compelling, etc. Hell, we don't even like genuine fact-checking (_how dare you question my knowledge and expertise!_), but some places require you to do it. All of this is in my experience _very good_ for the piece of writing but very different than the typical academic writing experience (in which \"editing\" means a tidying up of the language and a request for a few extra footnote nodding to the right literature). \n\nAnd, of course, you must read a lot of prose by the kinds of authors you want to emulate and you must pay attention to how they do what they do stylistically. The New Yorker usually has the best historical non-fiction writing of any publication at the moment, in my experience. The works of Jill Lepore and Elizabeth Kolbert are things I pay a lot of attention to. I am a big fan of the book reviews done by Steven Shapin (in the New Yorker and elsewhere). I have gotten much out of the writing of John McPhee though his style is not one I would generally try to adopt (more journalistic). Charles Mann's _1493_ is an excellent template for a book-length popular history that both engages with academic work and tells a good story. Eric Schlosser's _Command and Control_ is another recent book that I thought was excellent in terms of balancing the expert and the popular. \n\nLastly, if you want to write well, you need to write a lot. Writing is a skill, and like all skills it is improved through practice. One does not just sit down and have great writing flow from one's fingers. The more you write, the better you'll get at it. This is one of the many reasons I advocate academics giving blogs a shot — it is a relatively low-stakes place (especially if no one reads it!) to try out different styles and approaches to writing, to developing your own personal \"voice.\" I suspect most people will not develop much of a voice in a vacuum. Writing something relatively compact (i.e., under 2,000 words) on a regular basis (i.e., a couple times a month), with attention to the writing style, will give you good returns after not very long. That sort of regular writing schedule is very different than the standard academic approach.\n\nMy [article on the Nagasaki bombing on the New Yorker's website](_URL_1_) is my personal favorite piece of writing that I've done, in part because I really knew what I was trying to accomplish from the beginning and subverted the entire piece to that. My piece on the [Trinity test](_URL_0_) was more of a \"throw a lot of things at the wall and see what the editor thinks sticks\" sort of piece — I think it _does_ hold together and have a strong theme but that came out of later editing more than the initial work." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-first-light-of-the-trinity-atomic-test", "http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/nagasaki-the-last-bomb" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cf2fjnw" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Amin's behavior was *the* major cause of intervention - he killed Nur Mohammed Taraki and lied about it to Brezhnev. \n\nBrief recap:\n\n* [Nur Mohammed Taraki](_URL_0_), first leader of [Saur Revolution](_URL_2_), has close rapport with Brezhnev. Being a writer, he was rather hapless at ruling, made his own share of mistakes - like premature and half-baked land reform, personality cult, but at least he wasn't as repressive as Amin. He was hopelessly naive, telling Kryuchkov, that what USSR did in 60 years, Afghanistan will do in 5 years.\n\n* Amin called Taraki \"my father and teacher\", Taraki called Amin \"my son and best pupil\". Amin quickly rose to 2-nd-in-command under Taraki and became indispensable power broker between factions and tribes. Taraki completely trusted Amin in day-to-day operations.\n\n* When Amin took over in a coup at Sep 10th, Brezhnev promised to Taraki in face-to-face meeting (Taraki was stopping at Moscow on his way from Havana to Kabul), that USSR guarantees Taraki's personal safety. He also suggested to Taraki to stay in Moscow, but Taraki went back to Kabul.\n\n* Amin was getting increasingly brutal and nationalistic - he ordered Khazara bombing raid, alienated tajiks and uzbeks from North by imposing administration of ethnic pashtuns in the North etc. Also, many army officers, loyal to Taraki, were repressed. His attempt to diminish mullahs influence among peasantry was ham-fisted and backfired. Such policies were leading to wide discontent and would clearly end in popular uprising. \n\n* USSR leadership concluded, that Amin has to be removed or Afghanistan will blow up really soon. Not all operatives supported this assessment. Chief Military Advisor Lt. Gen. Lev Gorelov, who closely worked with Amin, claims that Amin could have been reigned in and it would have worked better - see [1]. Gorelov was reassigned away from Afghanistan in November, 1979.\n\n* Two covert attempts to remove Amin from power have failed. First - to poison Amin came in very close, but Amin was saved by soviet doctor, who wasn't informed about attempt on Amin's life. Second attempt was by PDPA members - [*\"Gang of Four\"*](_URL_5_), but Amin's secretary/bodyguard Taroon took the bullet.\n\n* Amin has ordered Taraki murder (who was smothered by pillow in the Pul-e-Charkhi prison) and tried to cover up by telling that Taraki \"is not feeling well\".\n\n* Some sources have claimed (see [3]), that it was Brezhnev ambiguous reply hastened Taraki's death (\"it's your choice what to do with Taraki\"), but it there's no confirmation in primary sources, that Brezhnev has ever communicated with Amin, moreover, there are many mentions that Brezhnev was carefully avoiding Amin and any signs of official endorsement.\n\n* In fact, USSR made an inquiry about Taraki's health and Amin promised to personally monitor Taraki's health and provide all necessary means for his recovery. At that moment Taraki was dead and Amin knew it.\n\n* When Brezhnev was told about Taraki's murder, he became really upset and later insisted on direct military intervention. Also, KGB leadership supported intervention against Ministry of Defense and General Staff recommendations, although by 1983 [Andropov](_URL_4_) (he was KGB Chairman in 1979) recognized it was a mistake. KGB preferred Babrak Karmal as more pliable vs both Taraki and Amin.\n\n[Acad. E. Chazov](_URL_6_), leading USSR cardiologist, served as a \"Kremlin's doctor\" at a time and was quite close to Brezhnev. By 1979 Brezhnev has very serious health issues and saw Chazov almost daily.\n\nHere's quote from Chazov's memoirs (Brezhnev very upset about Taraki's death, that his promise to Taraki about safety was broken and calls Amin 'scum') : \n\n---\n\n(russian)\n\nБрежнев, несмотря на снижение способности критического восприятия, бурно переживал это событие. Больше всего его возмущал тот факт, что только 10 сентября, незадолго до этих событий, он принимал Тараки, обещал ему помощь и поддержку, заверял, что Советский Союз полностью ему доверяет. «Какой же это подонок — Амин: задушить человека, с которым вместе участвовал в революции. Кто же стоит во главе афганской революции? — говорил он при встрече. — И что скажут в других странах? Разве можно верить слову Брежнева, если все его заверения в поддержке и защите остаются словами?» \n\n---\n\n\n**Sources**\n\n1. *[russian - Lev Gorelov. How it happened](_URL_7_)* - interview with Lev Gorelov by Artyom Sheinin.\n\n2. *[russian - Excerpt from Protocol 172 - Oct 31, 1979](_URL_1_)* - Detailed description of Amin's missteps. Politburo has decided to plan for Amin removal.\n\n3. *Misdaq, Nabi (2006). Afghanistan: Political Frailty and External Interference. Taylor & Francis. p. 125. ISBN 978-0415702058.* - oft-cited secondary source with many factual mistakes.\n\n4. *[russian - Е. Чазов. Здоровье и Власть : Мемуары \"Кремлёвского врача\" = E. Chazov. Health and Power: Memoirs of the 'Kremlin Doctor'. Moscow: Novosti, 1992](_URL_8_)* - Chazov's memoirs wasn't translated into English, AFAIK. \n\n5. *[English - The Origins of the Soviet-Afghan War - Revelations from the Soviet Archives](_URL_3_)* - some Politburo protocols about Afghanistan translated to English (not all, though)" ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nur_Muhammad_Taraki", "http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/pdfs/afgh/172-7910.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saur_Revolution", "http://www.alternativeinsight.com/Afghan_War.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Andropov", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four_%28Afghanistan%29", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeniy_Chazov", "http://artofwar.ru/s/shejnin_a/text_0165.shtml", "http://www.gumer.info/bibliotek_Buks/History/chazov/02.php" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c8odpv8", "c8ogb27" ], "score": [ 4, 3 ], "text": [ "I was just thinking about one aspect of this - about how the pontic steppe over a few decades became just that bit more interesting for hordes on the other side of the steppe ocean.", "I don't know how 'lesser-known' you are looking for. But, the Rise of the court Eunuch and transition from the 'Principate' to the 'Dominate' is pretty interesting. Also, relations with Persia became more common." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc71z7u" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "Stock phrases, including \"Once upon a time,\" were used by storytellers to let the audience know that they were about to hear a folktale, a matter of fiction. In general, western and northern Europeans told two types of stories - folktales and legends. Legends were to be believed, and folktales were the oral novels of the folk. Boundaries were often blurred so definitions are challenged by specifics, but the dichotomy is useful in classification.\n\nThe \"once upon a time\" open phrase indicated that there was no insistence that the story \"actually happened\" at any time. Similarly, these stories would end with a device to let people know the fictional story was at a close. \"And they lived happily every after\" is most familiar to modern audiences. I always liked the common Irish close: “Tá sé go máith, agus níl sé go dona” - \"It is good and it isn't bad.\"\n\nThe following is text I used for my folklore classes, excerpted from my teaching manual, [Introduction to Folklore](_URL_0_):\n\n > European folklorists, following the lead of the folk themselves, have long recognized two forms of oral tradition, Sagen and Märchen, legends and folktales. While there are many other forms of oral tradition, legends and folktales stand in opposition to one another, yet share a great deal. In reality, lines can blur.\n\n > Legends – or Sagen as the profession often prefers – are generally short, single-episodic stories told chiefly in the daytime. More importantly, the teller intended the listener to believe the story. Legends often have horrible ending to underscore the story’s important message. A large number of them are, after all, typically meant to be instructive, to serve as warnings in some way. These types of stories are not necessarily long-lived. Their point is to reinforce and prove the legitimacy of a particular belief. Nonetheless, some legends take on a traditional character, can become multi-episodic, and migrate over considerable spans of time and space.\n\n > Folktales – or Märchen, again using the German, technical term – are longer stories with more than one episode. They are restricted, in theory at least, to evening presentation. A folktale is not to be believed, taking place in a fantastic setting. The European folktale also requires a happy ending, the cliché of “happily ever after.” Any given folktale can be told with considerable variation, but they are traditional in basic form, and folklorists have spent decades tracing the history and distribution of these stories.\n\n > A word here about the term “fairytale” is appropriate. At the end of the eighteenth century, various writers, most prominently the Grimm brothers, began publishing children’s stories based on folktales. These collections became extremely popular, particularly among the urban and increasingly literate emerging middle class as it found itself removed from the peasant soil that served as home to the stories. Fairytales often cause misunderstandings. In a culture that knows more about fairytales than Märchen, people assume that the folktale was intended for children. This is certainly not the case since the stories were often violent or sexual in ways thought inappropriate for children. Indeed, the telling of a folktale was usually delayed until the children had gone to bed. While fairytales provide the modern reader with the easiest access to the many stories that were once told internationally, one should always realize that they are removed from the primary inspiration. The original stories and their content provided serious entertainment for adults and they were part of an oral tradition, not something that was fossilized in writing.\n\n > The evolution of published fairytales had a profound effect on the subject of fairies, elves, trolls, and similar entities. Because fairytales became the literary domain of children, many people – including later writers – assumed the same was true of the supernatural beings. In their original context, nothing could be further from the truth. These were not cute, diminutive creatures whose sole purpose was to delight children. They were powerful, dangerous, and capable of great harm. The European peasantry feared and respected them, and their stories underscore this, conveying in uncompromising terms the code of ethics and behavior that one must employ to survive an encounter with the dangerous world of magic and power.\n\n > The definition proposed here for “fairytale” does not necessarily coincide with how people – and even some folklorists – use the term. Some scholars regard “fairytale” as appropriate for the more fantastic expressions of folktales as they were told by the folk. The reason why the term is not used in that capacity here is because the folk did not refer to these stories as fairytales and because the term implies a degree of innocence that is inappropriate; again, “fairytale” is most suitably reserved for the published children stories that gave literary expression to the adult oral fictions of the folk.\n\n > Besides the legend and the folktale, there is also the folk ballad, a specialized form of oral tradition that, like the others, incorporated a wide range of beliefs. The ballad had roots in medieval Europe, combining narrative and song. The ballad usually focused on a single incident, and it almost always emphasizes action.\n\n > Something also needs to be said here about myth. People use this term awkwardly. In a European context, myths tend to be the artificial constructs of ancient and Classical-era priests or literate people who sought to weave folk traditions into a comprehensive whole. The exercise often had political purposes, designed to provide diverse people with a single set of beliefs and stories. By reconciling similar traditions, the shared culture of these groups could be seen as more important than the differences, justifying the central rule of the king and his priests. Myth is also a way of organizing and reconciling folk traditions, which by their nature can be contradictory and highly localized. Myth tends, however, to make gods of supernatural beings, giving those powerful entities a status – for modern readers – similar to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, even when this comparison is not justified. Of course, it is also important to point out that myths were stories that were told – and then written down – and they were different from religion itself. Many myths were simply the shared cultural inheritance of a group of people. \n\n > In general, the word myth is best set aside when discussing more recent folk traditions, recognizing its proper status as a literary genre. Nonetheless, ancient documents recording myths can assist in understanding the history of various stories and beliefs. The authors of these texts were, after all, the first folklorists, and they were the only ones coming close to practicing the craft at the time.\n\n > Some folklorists carelessly use the term myth to denote those legends that deal with a fantastic, remote time. This primal era saw the creation of many familiar things such as day and night, fire, animals, people, mountains, and all other aspects of the present world. Folklorists properly refer to these stories as etiological legends explaining the origin of things. Sometimes, however, people interchange etiological legends with the word myth. The problem with this is that “myth” can imply something that is inherently wrong, linked to “primitive” superstitious beliefs. When the term “myth” is used for the folklore of existing cultures or for the traditions that were viable only a generation or more ago, it can take on an insulting, derogatory tone. It is best to reserve the word “myth” for ancient and Classical-era texts.\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Folklore-Traditional-Studies-Elsewhere-ebook/dp/B00N65B0BY/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1480525114&amp;sr=1-10&amp;keywords=Ronald+M.+James" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "czaaxek", "czagm8l", "czai25l", "czayw9y" ], "score": [ 127, 154, 12, 5 ], "text": [ "While I can not answer this question, I believe [this thread](_URL_0_) has information pertaining to what you are asking.", "This is an interesting topic. No expert, but my source is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's autobiographical book *Cross Creek*, which talks about using a smoky fire to keep mosquitoes away. I know we did the same at beach parties and cookouts in New England. \n\nPerhaps a better historian can address this: in preparing my lecture on the history of sexual norms and coming across information about colonial indentured servants, I read that due to factors such as mosquitoes and malaria (not to mention snakes, bears, panthers, and, I imagine, other criminals), the average life expectancy of an indentured servant in the Gulf region of the southeastern US was roughly two years.\n\nI'll be interested to see what more expert sources have to say.", "I just happened upon an old post that mentioned it:\n\n_URL_0_", "Just jumping in to recommend J.R. McNeill's \"Mosquito Empires\" which explores the disease ecology of the 19th century Caribbean. Really good book." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1etwym/how_did_early_americans_deal_with_mosquitoes_and/" ], [], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3r7j2z/did_early_modern_and_early_modern_womens_clothing/cwlryx4" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cqeukdn" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Lenin's Testament was a profoundly embarrassing document in which Lenin insulted not only Stalin, but all of Stalin's rivals. Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Trotsky were all criticized with varying degrees of venom. Publicizing the document wasn't in anyone's interest." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d0epja9", "d0fovik" ], "score": [ 166, 2 ], "text": [ "Judging whether a action in the past, and one that involved millions of people no less, is virtuous or not is probably not the best way to see it. Ideas of virtue change, people have various and variable motivations for their actions, and motivations often overlap and change as we look at actions from different perspectives. So, the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 cannot really be seen as a \"selfless act of virtue,\" but to suggest that there were implicitly vicious \"ulterior motives\" isn't really accurate either.\n\nTo begin with, no, people in Britain did not suddenly decide that slavery was bad. Rather, there were always people who deeply opposed slavery, and virtually everyone agreed that it was a bad thing. Sure, there were people who said that it was great and beneficial for the slaves, but those voices were pretty small (we don't see the really heavy \"civilizing mission\" justifications for slavery and colonial exploitation until the 19th century--we're a little early for that here). Overall though, the real issue is that people saw slavery as a bad thing that just *was*, that it had been there for a long time, that it was inevitable, that it reflected the inherently corrupt nature of people not under proper moral guidance. In retrospect, racialized slavery in the Atlantic world was very obviously a murderous exploitation of human beings not merely for profit, but as part of a burgeoning capitalist system that relied on commodified land and labor, and that prioritized profit above human welfare. It was the result of changing institutions that enabled and encouraged widespread and systematic exploitation, so that there were real incentives to British merchants to engage in the slave trade and its ultimate foundation, the plantation sugar complex. Plus, many Britons could and did say that slavery was a terrible thing, but they also were under tremendous social and cultural pressure to situate themselves within a class-based society that made extensive use of the products of slavery--sugar. (See, for example, Sidney Mintz's classic history of sugar, with a particular emphasis on the 18th century, *Sweetness and Power*.) To many contemporaries, these broader forces driving slavery were difficult to discern; they instead saw it as the result of bad people doing bad thing, perhaps lacking proper moral guidance.\n\nThere are some useful parallels here with contemporary issues like climate change: we may worry about the fate of polar bears or the dangers of sea level rise, but many of us are practically compelled to burn fossil fuels and contribute to this problem every day. And, it's easy for us to blame oil companies or corrupt politicians and say that they're just bad people who won't \"do the right thing,\" but climate change is probably better seen as the long-term outgrowth of our transformations of the biosphere through human labor. It is so difficult for us to get a coherent response together precisely because it is so deeply embedded in our economy, culture, and politics. Jason Moore's *Capitalism in the Web of Life* is a brilliant look at this phenomenon as both an economic one and a cultural one over the past five centuries. \n\nBack to the slave trade: what changed was that people began to see the slave trade as something that they *could* and *should* change through collective political action. Christopher Leslie Brown's book *Moral Capital* argues that this shift came about as a result of the American War for Independence. For both Britons and their settler colonies, the ideas and traditions of English freedom, fought for and won in the seventeenth century, were central to their identity. These were people who spoke about and cared deeply for freedom, though it might not always be clear precisely what that meant: the right to own property, to engage in business, to write or speak freely, to be subject to laws that were responsible and fair, and so on. Certainly *not being a slave* was a major element in the definition of freedom, though one rarely articulated literally. We can see this deep valuation of freedom in the American and British discourse about the colonial crisis and resulting war. Americans charged King George with \"enslaving them,\" denying them their \"independence,\" their ability to determine their own fate by expressing themselves in political determination. One way to read something like the Declaration of Independence is to say that the Americans were accusing the English of *not being English enough*, of rejecting their own ancient traditions of English freedom. This stung Britons pretty deeply; they did, after all, believe in the value of parliamentary representation and it was pretty obvious that it was being denied to the American colonies. They responded by charging the Americans with being *actual* slave-holders, as many of them were. Slavery had been difficult in the Archipelago (Britain, Ireland, and nearby islands), if not technically illegal, since the Somerset case in 1772. That case said that enslaved Africans could not be sent back to the colonies against their will once they had come to Britain and at the very least it meant that the unrestricted chattel slavery practiced in the Americas could not be done in Britain. So, Britons could respond to American claims that George was enslaving them by calling light to their hypocrisy: how could Americans go on and on about how bad it was to be enslaved when they were literally enslaving thousands and thousands of Africans?\n\nFollowing the Treaty of Paris in 1783, there was a bit of soul-searching in Britain. The American colonies had been valuable possessions, sure, but they were also *Englishmen* who had rebelled. Setting aside economics, it was a profound blow that the great English-speaking realm spanning the Atlantic had been torn asunder. Britons, not surprisingly, responded with a sort of cultural retrenchment: they needed to figure out what it meant to be British, and one way was to reassert their commitment to freedom. And, how better to do that than to attack the opposite of freedom, slavery. Unfortunately, at that point, slavery itself was so widespread and so deeply entrenched that a direct attack on it was impossible. Slaves were property, after all, and outright abolition would (and eventually did) mean actually buying the freedom of many people. Simply emancipating all the slaves in the empire would mean either violating the property rights of slaveowners or an enormous outlay of funds. As such, in the late 18th century, it was a bit too far.\n\nThe slave *trade*, on the other hand, offered a real thing that could actually be stopped. It would require enforcement, but that could be done and would likely have beneficial effects in that the Royal Navy was interdicting French and Spanish shipping in the late 18th and early 19th century as a result of war, so stopping the slave trade would hurt Britain's enemies economically. Most important, though, is that attacking the slave trade gave Britons a chance to reassert their identity as free people and as people who sought the freedom of others. This spoke, Brown argues, directly to the crisis of British imperial identity after 1783, and arguably also to the claims of Revolutionary France as a true light of freedom. Beginning in the 1780s, and gaining strength through the 1790s and early 1800s, Britons carried out one of the earliest social movements in their campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. There were boycotts of slave-grown sugar, massive letter-writing campaigns, anti-slavery societies, and so on. And while the actual voting population of Britain was fairly small (say, 10%), they did exert enough political and cultural pressure that Parliament responded by banning the slave trade in 1807. The abolition of slavery itself had to wait for the rise of classical Liberalism, greater growth of the industrial North, and the expansion of the franchise in the Reform Bill of 1832; immediately following that, Parliament ~~abolished slavery in the British empire in 1833.~~ see /u/sowser's excellent corrections and elaborations below, they are important follow-ups to this answer.\n\nSo, as you can see, there are various and multi-layered motivations here. Britons certainly saw it as the right thing to do, so it was virtuous in that sense. But it also benefitted them because it gave them a way to assert their identity as free people, and that's a powerful thing. Does it count as an \"ulterior motive\"? I'd say not, because I suspect most Britons involved the abolition movement both before 1807 and after were genuine. But it's also important to recognize where our cultural ideas come from, and how they have political salience. \n\n", "In the book listed below, James Epstein argues that a famous and sensationalist trial in 1806 London of a the rogue colonial leader of Trinidad who tortures a free mulatto girl led to the abolishing of the slave trade (note: not slavery just slave trade) in 1807. \n\nThe trial was all over the papers and played to gothic themes that were popular at the times of a poor helpless girl kept in a dungeon and tortured. The trial brought a lot of attention to how the colonies were run and the brutalities that occured.\n\nThe trial was \n\nSource: The Scandal of Colonial Rule, James Epstein\n\nCan't recommend this book enough. It reads almost like a novel but with sources. It covers one of the most sensational trials of early 19th century England (where the trial took place) and played an important part in ending slavery in the British Empire. Here is a synopsis.\n\nIn 1806 General Thomas Picton, Britain's first governor of Trinidad, was brought to trial for the torture of a free mulatto named Louisa Calderon and for overseeing a regime of terror over the island's slave population. James Epstein offers a fascinating account of the unfolding of this colonial drama. He shows the ways in which the trial and its investigation brought empire 'home' and exposed the disjuncture between a national self-image of humane governance and the brutal realities of colonial rule. He uses the trial to open up a range of issues, including colonial violence and norms of justice, the status of the British subject, imperial careering, visions of development after slavery, slave conspiracy and the colonial archive. He reveals how Britain's imperial regime became more authoritarian, hierarchical and militarised but also how unease about abuses of power and of the rights of colonial subjects began to grow.\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c8e0vhe" ], "score": [ 16 ], "text": [ "[\"Shortly after his death, Lady Hope addressed a gathering of young men and women at the educational establishment founded by the evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody at Northfield, Massachusetts. She had, she maintained, visited Darwin on his deathbed. He had been reading the Epistle to the Hebrews, had asked for the local Sunday school to sing in a summerhouse on the grounds, and had confessed: \"How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done.\" He went on, she said, to say that he would like her to gather a congregation since he \"would like to speak to them of Christ Jesus and His salvation, being in a state where he was eagerly savouring the heavenly anticipation of bliss.\" \nWith Moody's encouragement, Lady Hope's story was printed in the Boston Watchman Examiner. The story spread, and the claims were republished as late as October 1955 in the Reformation Review and in the Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland in February 1957. These attempts to fudge Darwin's story had already been exposed for what they were, first by his daughter Henrietta after they had been revived in 1922. \"I was present at his deathbed,\" she wrote in the Christian for February 23, 1922. \"Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. . . . The whole story has no foundation whatever.\" (Ellipsis is in the book)\"](_URL_0_)\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hope.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dne6b2g" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Not a death sentence, and often a coveted honour. Our notion of the lethality of these engagements is mostly derived from movies sensationalising what happens in pitched battle. I wrote about this in more detail [here](_URL_0_)." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/48pumt/did_the_people_in_the_front_lines_of_ancient/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cwbm0bz" ], "score": [ 15 ], "text": [ "All depends on who you are and what mode of philosophy you follow, really! But that would be a cruel answer, so let's go ahead and look into some of it. I've been reading quite a bit of Seneca lately, and he offers some wonderful opinions on the matter.\n\nSome quick background on Seneca before we start - if you want to get straight through to the actual \"thoughts on death thing,\" feel free to skip this paragraph! He was a Stoic philosopher who's moderately well known today (I've seen some cherry picked quotes of his on Facebook and such) due to his letters - many of which we still have today. In these letters to his friend (Lucilius), he grouches a lot, but has some really fantastic discussions that give a glimpse into daily life and thought in the Roman world. Seneca himself was pretty high on the Roman food chain - he was Nero's tutor, and helped govern the Empire while Nero was still young. Nero eventually killed him, though, so there's that. Anywho - on to Stoic philosophical thought about death.\n\nA couple of letters that essentially encapsulate this entire question are his 21st letter to Lucilius - on \"creating a lasting monument\" - and his 24th- on \"despising death.\" In the former letter, he writes about how people are so easily forgotten after their deaths. In the latter, he discusses not only the wider view of death, but also his own and why he thinks that the wider view of death is bullshit. [I'll start with letter 21,](_URL_0_) particularly this passage (Note - these translations are not quite beautiful, but they get the point across pretty nicely): \n\n > Allow me to mention the case of Epicurus. He was writing to Idomeneus and trying to recall him from a showy existence to sure and steadfast renown. Idomeneus was at that time a minister of state who exercised a rigorous authority and had important affairs in hand. \"If,\" said Epicurus, \"you are attracted by fame, my letters will make you more renowned than all the things which you cherish and which make you cherished.\" Did Epicurus speak falsely? Who would have known of Idomeneus, had not the philosopher thus engraved his name in those letters of his? All the grandees and satraps, even the king himself, who was petitioned for the title which Idomeneus sought, are sunk in deep oblivion. Cicero's letters keep the name of Atticus from perishing. It would have profited Atticus nothing to have an Agrippa for a son-in-law, a Tiberius for the husband of his grand-daughter, and a Drusus Caesar for a great-grandson; amid these mighty names his name would never be spoken, had not Cicero bound him to himself. The deep flood of time will roll over us; some few great men will raise their heads above it, and, though destined at the last to depart into the same realms of silence, will battle against oblivion and maintain their ground for long. \n\nAgain, while this one doesn't directly address death, I thought it fit in rather nicely with the wider idea of \"being remembered.\" Essentially, as he notes, there are many people who would be utterly forgotten by the sands of time if not for some few being saved by being included in letters. He uses the example of Atticus; another easy example is that of Lucilius himself, of whom we know only what Seneca wrote. In the letter, however, he notes one of the most truly notable things about death: Those things which each man leaves behind, and how men who are remembered are essentially immortal.\n\nAnywho, next letter, which addresses things a bit more directly! I can't quote this one, because it's just that long (it's slightly over the 10k character limit in itself, which is a pain in the rear - if you want me to quote it in a later comment, I'll be happy to), but I really encourage you to read the whole thing. It's incredibly beautiful and I won't be able to do it justice through my writing here, but hey, I'll give you a vague idea. [Letter 24, same disclaimer on the translation.](_URL_1_)\n\nThere are varying degrees on which a person may consider death, which hold true to the modern day as much as they did 2000 years ago. Then, as now, most people feared death - yet, in a truly Roman fashion, they looked up to those who embraced death, rather than allow themselves to be dishonoured. Embracing death isn't necessarily about a person being suicidal - it was about a man who had the option to live in disgrace, but rather chose the path of death. Seneca lived in the First Century CE - these letters were written during his retirement, between 62-65 CE. One of his favourite notes describing this is described in this passage from the aforementioned letter: \n\n > \"Oh,\" say you, \"those stories have been droned to death in all the schools; pretty soon, when you reach the topic 'On Despising Death,' you will be telling me about Cato.\" But why should I not tell you about Cato, how he read Plato's book on that last glorious night, with a sword laid at his pillow? He had provided these two requisites for his last moments, - the first, that he might have the will to die, and the second, that be might have the means. So he put his affairs in order, - as well as one could put in order that which was ruined and near its end, - and thought that he ought to see to it that no one should have the power to slay or the good fortune to save/c Cato. Drawing the sword, - which he had kept unstained from all bloodshed against the final day, he cried: \"Fortune, you have accomplished nothing by resisting all my endeavours. I have fought, till \nnow, for my country's freedom, and not for my own, I did not strive so doggedly to be free, but only to live among the free. Now, since the affairs of mankind are beyond hope, let Cato be withdrawn to safety.\" So saying, he inflicted a mortal wound upon his body. After the physicians had bound it up, Cato had less blood and less strength, but no less courage; angered now not only at Caesar but also at himself, he rallied his unarmed hands against his wound, and expelled, rather than dismissed, that noble soul which had been so defiant of all worldly power. \n\nYeah, he was plenty snarky :D That's the kind of thing that the Romans admired, though, when it came to despising death. Seneca straight out says that, although a man shouldn't fear death...\n\n > The grave and wise man should not beat a hasty retreat from life; he should make a becoming exit. And above all, he should avoid the weakness which has taken possession of so many, - the lust for death. For just as there is an unreflecting tendency of the mind towards other things, so, my dear Lucilius, there is an unreflecting tendency towards death; this often seizes upon the noblest and most spirited men, as well as upon the craven and the abject. The former despise life; the latter find it irksome. \n\nSelf explanatory :) Hope that answered your question! Feel free to read through the letters themselves - not only are they super quotable, but they're absolutely *fascinating* reads. Feel free to ask if you have any more!" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#‘XXI1", "http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#‘XXIV1" ] ]