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{ "a_id": [ "dgoi8ba" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The answer to this is quite complex. I'm on a mobile atm. This is therefore only from memory, but I'll try to give you a rough explanation.\n\nYou should understand that trench warfare was not an ideal. In 1914 the various armies facing each other on the western front all sought to envelop each others flanks, so as to be able to isolate and crush the enemy forces so caught. As the forces involved were huge, finding flanks and weakspots was no easy task. Commanders on all sides kept lengthening their lines, having their centers digging into defensive positions (trenches), so as to release more forces for offensive operations on the flanks. Within a few months this process resulted in continuous trench systems running from the channel coast to the Swiss border. The armies simply ran out of flanks to exploit. Thus, trench warfare in 1914 was not a result of a desire to go on the defensive. Rather it was an unintended consequence of the desire to maintain offensive freedom.\n\nHaving dug in by the autumn of 1914, both the Entente and the Central Powers then spent the next four years desperately trying to find ways to return the war to a more mobile phase such as had existed during the first weeks of 1914. The devises and stratagems proposed to achieve this are too numerous to list exhaustively. Some examples are amphibious operations and secondary theatres (to put pressure where there existed no or few trenches), and various weapons, equipment and tactics designed to neutralise or penetrate trench lines (so that reserve forces could be pushed into the enemy rear, enveloping them just like the goal had been in 1914).\n\nBy 1918 both sides had come a very long way towards this goal. The German, British and French (and eventually American) armies had all created equipment and tactics that allowed them to inflict local defeats on enemy trench systems. During 1918 these were then used in concerted efforts by both sides. During the spring offensive in April, German forces overran Entente trench systems on a large scale, capturing more territory than they had since 1914 before being contained. During the 100 days offensives in the autumn allied forces did the same in return, routing the German army along long lenths of the front. By early November allied cavalry, tanks and mobile infantry units were again operating with a similar degree of mobility as they had in 1914. Thus, the means by which trench warfare could be overcome had been both developed and put to practice by the time WWI ended.\n\nMany officers and military thinkers spent the decades after the end of the war trying to elaborate on the lessons learnt during the Great War. How could offensive freedom be achieved and maintained? Again - the results of the processes are complicated, but many focused on even greater use of what had worked in 1918: The use of aircraft tanks and other weapons to bring rapid pressure on enemy weakpoints. Aggressive small unit tactics to identify and exploit opportunities as they presented themselves. Combined arms to achieve greater mutual support for friendly forces.\n\nI'm not gonna go into detail about how the Germans were able to overrun France in 1940. WWII is not really my field of expertise anyway. My point here is simply to argue that when war broke out in 1939 noone wanted a return to trench warfare, and western armies had gotten very good at neutralising trenches anyway. That's not to say trenches were useless 1939-45 (they weren't), but armies had found ways in which they could be defeated. This is a somewhat simplistic explanation, but there is - in short - much greater continuity between warfighting in 1917-18 and 1939-45 than many people think.\n\nSources:\n* Beach, Jim; Haig's intelligence; ..., 2016\n* Howard, Michael; War in European History; Opus, 1976\n* Strachan, Hew; To Arms!; Oxford University Press, 2001\n\n\n\nI'll elaborate further, and add more sources, once I get back to my office in a few days.\n\nI also [answered](_URL_0_) a somewhat related question a couple of weeks ago. You might be interested in some of the sources listed there." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/635toy/comment/dfrq2ae?st=1Z141Z3&sh=a2cfd4a1" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ddedt95", "ddluytd" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "I find it interesting that you cite *both* Fukuyama and Ferguson in a search for 'neutral/objective' history books. Fukuyama, of course, is widely known for *The Death of History* which is one of the most well known treatises on neoliberal international relations theory, arguing against both post-modernist political thought and (to a large degree) IR realism. Ferguson is a well known *contrarian* who likes to argue against widely held beliefs. He also, somewhat controversially, is a proponent of a version of 'great man theory' in history that until Ferguson came along was widely dismissed in most academic circles (and still is, in fact). This offers a good chance to talk about schools of historical thought, and theory for a moment. \n\nThe study of anything in the social sciences generally breaks down into multiple schools, which at its core level are a way to explain, and predict with a certain level of reliability. In history this is important because the study of history is not a simple listing of dates and events in the past without context. It is also very much the study of why and how those events happened. Thus knowing that the March on Rome began on 22 October 1922 is less important than knowing *why* the Fascists did so. This is where schools of thought, and theory come into play. The easiest way to explain this is how if you asked 10 people on the street why the Falcons just lost the Super Bowl you would get roughly ten different answers. Within those answers though you would notice common thoughts and theories.\n\nPerhaps a few thought that it's because Tom Brady is just that good of a quarterback and all forces revolve around him. Perhaps a few thought it's because the systems that the Patriots have in place have produced just that much better of a team. A few may think that the shared set of values of the Falcons and Patriots opposing each other produced the outcome. ~~Perhaps a bearded one off to the side will comment it's because the system is rigged against the working team and they need to seize the means of production.~~ You may notice that it's next to impossible to decide which one of these was right or wrong, you can only make arguments if you accept of disagree with their conclusions. \n\nThose are historical schools of thought (the study of which is historiography). They are the ways in which historians interpret history. They are also heavily important to understand because they will then give weight to what the historian considers important, and what the historian *doesn't* consider important. In the American Consensus School importance is (broadly) given to structure, and a shared set of values and agreement. New Left historians, on the other hand, (broadly) emphasize the significance of conflict between different groups, and give more focus to those not in the mainstream of agreement. Fukuyama, mentioned above, can broadly be considered a liberal within international relations theory, which gives more autonomy and authority to the individual, at the expense of the power of the state. This is contrary to IR theory realism, on which the state is a unitary actor with ultimate power. Which is further contrary to dependency theory which states that the world structure (both states AND individuals) is dominated by capitalistic societies at the expense the underdeveloped.\n\nThis is a long way of saying that any decent book on history is going to be \"biased\" and not as \"neutral/objective\" as you may think. Which leads into your question on books on the rise of Fascist parties. I can only speak for Italian fascism but there is plenty of divide in historical schools of thought on the 'what,' 'how, and 'why' of fascism. Historians on Italian fascist history will, more or less, devolve into holy wars (broadly speaking) on if Fascism was a **reactive** movement, or if it was an **assertive** movement. This leads to no small amount of arguing, and massively different interpretations of different events. This leads to a natural question: was there unrest in Italy during and after World War One because of the outcome of the war, or was the outcome of the war the result of unrest in Italy? Depending on your school of thought and interpretation, both are correct answers.\n\nThe best book, that gets as close to the 'neutral/objective' account that I can offer is Denis Mack Smith's *Modern Italy: A Political History* which gives a fairly reliable accounting on the basics of the circumstances, politically speaking, which lead to fascism's rise. David Kertzer's Pulitzer Prize winning *The Pope and Mussolini* is a surprisingly useful accounting as well that gives heavy background into Mussolini's hand in the rise of the PNF. R.J.B. Bosworth goes through the historiography controversies in Italian fascism in *The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism* which both deconstructs and reassembles much of the schools of thought when it comes to studying the Mussolini years.", "For Spain, the foremost expert is Stanley Payne. His fundamental works:\n\nPayne, **The Franco Regime, 1936-1975**: an excellent discussion not just of the regime itself but of the construction of the political party structures and state apparatuses, both during and immediately following the Spanish Civil War. \n\nPayne, **Fascism in Spain, 1923-1977**: This book limits its analysis to discussion of the Falange, the \"true\" Spanish fascist party. Payne makes it a point to make a clear distinction between the Falangists as the \"real\" fascists in Spain in contrast to other factions within the Franco regime, which consisted of conservative monarchists (Alfonsine and Carlist), and later social Catholic technocrats. \n\nThat being said, there is a lot of debate among Spanish historians about whether it is appropriate to only consider the Falangists as the \"real\" exponents of Spanish fascism. Other historians have been more willing to accommodate Francoism's conservative and monarchical wings into broader analyses of the phenomenon of European fascism. One such historian who is comfortable situating Spanish militarist monarchism within an analysis of European fascism is Alejandro Quiroga, who looks at the Spanish state's attempt to nationalize the masses under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera in the 1920s (1923-1930). Quiroga argues a direct link between Primoriverista fascism in the 1920s and Francoism in the 1940s. Furthermore, Quiroga makes frequent comparisons between Primo de Rivera's regime and Mussolini's. It should also be pointed out that Primo de Rivera seized power in Spain in a coup in 1923 but a few months after Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922, and utilizing similar strategies. Mussolini traveled to Spain in the 1920s in a high-profile state visit and Primo confessed to be a big fan of Mussolini's ideas. Primo modeled many of his governmental and political party structures on the principles of Italian corporatism and vertical syndicalism.\n\nQuiroga's book:\nAlejandro Quiroga **Making Spaniards: Primo de Rivera and the Nationalization of the Spanish Masses, 1923-1930**\n\nTo conclude, a good analysis of Spanish fascism will take into account Spain's longer trajectory of praetorian and militarist politics, integrating both an analysis of Primo de Rivera's regime AND Franco's. Payne and Quiroga give you a good balance of the different sides of the debate. Payne is more precise and careful in his analysis, arguing that Spanish fascism never seriously took root in Spain, but was offered a platform as part of a coalition of mostly conservative monarchists who came to power in civil war. Franco dressed his regime up in fascist trappings but was mostly an authoritarian conservative. Quiroga, conversely, tilts more toward the argument that the Spanish right was more explicitly fascist than perhaps other historians will allow and that one can find evidence of such an identification by looking to the Primo de Rivera regime." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5a43v3" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Because the Jeffersonians gained political power shortly before this time period. There was a growing Baptist-Republican influence in Massachusetts to counter the Congregationalist-Federalist forces in the years after the revolution, and as different religions - Anglicans, Baptists, even some Catholics - vied to join the political field, the power of the Congregationalists became more and more marginalized until 1833 when the Republicans were able to disestablish the church. Also: Establishment clause.\n\nSource: _URL_0_" ] }

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[ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#Protestant_colonies" ]

[ [ "http://dc.library.okstate.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/theses/id/1844/rec/10" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c905u76" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Under post war Truman the elite could expect a high tax rate, but they were obviously very well off. Under Stalin they had near unlimited power, but there was a 50/50 or greater chance that Stalin might purge you if he thought you'd encroach on his power. So while Truman elite could exist free of threats on their lives and fortune (other than high tax rates) Stalin elite could gain more with their upwardly redistributed wealth whilst risking possible death or exile for little to no reason. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c89868j" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It is quite brief, but I found that Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen gives a general overview of how the Russian Revolution contributed to a \"Red Scare\" in the United States. I believe it's chapter 3.\n\nI'm aware there is some controversy around using this book as a single source, however Allen, as a journalist, did a good job in portraying popular attitudes of the time.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: Fixed Link" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.amazon.com/Only-Yesterday-Informal-History-1920s/dp/0060956658" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cezo2lg", "cezodkq" ], "score": [ 4, 26 ], "text": [ "I'm not a historian and am not prepared to give a comprehensive answer but I can recommend an excellent book that gives in depth look - Professor Lawrence Schiffman's [\"From Text to Tradition\"](_URL_0_). \nYou can also check out [his AMA](_URL_1_) on r/judaism from last month.", "Judaism was incredibly diverse in the first century. Judaea had been through two centuries of civil war and unrest over religion and politics, with more on the horizon. Their scriptural canon was still undefined, and there were numerous sects that we know of (and perhaps more we don't know of) with very different views.\n\nThe **Pharisees** were popular among the public and one of the two mains sects that vied for control of the priesthood. They adhered to both the Torah law and the prophets, and they had their own interpretations that differed from other groups. The believed in an afterlife (resurrection of the dead) and in a future messiah. This group survived the Roman wars and evolved into modern Rabbinic Judaism.\n\nThe **Sadducees** were more influential among the wealthy. They were associated with the priestly caste, they rejected all scriptures but the Torah, and they did not believe in an afterlife. They were generally opponents of the Pharisees in Judaean politics. They pretty much died out after 70 CE.\n\nThe **Essenes** were ascetics who rejected the temple establishment as corrupt. They kept strict purity and dietary laws, and some of them were celibate.\n\nThe **Yahad** were the group associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. They may have been a sect of Essenes. They had a diverse body of scripture which included creative reinterpretation of older prophetic texts, and they had an apocalyptic worldview with the expectation of one or more coming messiahs.\n\nThe **Zealots** emerged in the mid-first century. Originally the term just meant \"those who were zealous for God\", but they eventually sought to incite the Jews to rebel against Rome.\n\nThe **Therapeutae** were a monastic sect found in the diaspora, particularly in Alexandria. Little is known about their specific beliefs and practices.\n\nThe **Jewish Gnostics/Mystics** had more radical views of theology. They saw the world in more spiritual terms, may have practiced magic, and believed that salvation was obtained through secret knowledge. Some groups venerated Enoch, Melchizedek, and other figures from Jewish myth as divine or semi-divine.\n\nThe **Samaritans** were the result of a religious and ethnic schism between the Israelites of Judaea and northern Palestine. Their main area of contention with other Jews was whether the temple should be located in Jerusalem or at Mt. Gerizim. The destruction of their temple in the second century BCE by the Judaeans decided the matter, but the Samaritan sect still survives today. Their scriptures consist of the Torah and their own version of Joshua.\n\nWe might also add the God-fearers: Greeks and other Gentiles who attended Jewish synagogues and were full or partial Jewish converts. This may be the movement that evolved into Christianity." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.amazon.com/Tradition-History-Second-Rabbinic-Judaism/dp/0881253723", "http://www.reddit.com/r/Judaism/comments/1trkb6/lawrence_h_schiffman_ama/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cesn57t" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "It wasn't so much as in tribute as necessity. With so many men drafted into the war women were called on to do jobs they usually wouldn't, such as working in factories. Occasionally the long dresses that were fashionable at the time would catch in the machinery and draf the workers into the mechanism. Wearing trousers reduced the chance of this happening. \n\nAs with many things during the war, cotton was in short supply. So another reason for the change in fashion was simply that making a pair of trousers used less material than a dress. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d0tbz74" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The Romans weren't exactly the first to use trenchworks. Aeneas Tacticus mentions them a whole lot of times, including disguised trenches and fancy stuff like that, and they show up in lots of authors going way back--Homer has the Achaeans at Troy dig a trench in front of their fortifications! Caesar even says that what \"*Oppidum autem Britanni vocant, cum silvas impeditas vallo atque fossa munierunt*\"--the Britons call it a town when they have fortified the difficult (that is, hard to get through) forests with a wall and ditch (*fossa*). The Romans' enemies were perfectly aware of how to deal with trenches, as they used them themselves. Caesar mentions his trenchworks being filled at least twice:\n\n > alii vallum manu scindere, alii fossas complere inciperent\n\n > > Some began to tear open our wall, while others filled in our trenches\n\nAnd actually twice when speaking of Commius' force at Alesia, once during preparations for their night assault:\n\n > Itaque productis copiis ante oppidum considunt et proximam fossam cratibus integunt atque aggere explent seque ad eruptionem atque omnes casus comparant.\n\n > > And so with their troops arrayed they pitch camp in front of the town and they cover the nearest trench with wickerwork and they fill it with earth and they prepare themselves for the sally and for every possibility\n\nAnd again during the actual night assault itself, this time of Vercingetorix's force on the other side of the wall:\n\n > dum ea quae a Vercingetorige ad eruptionem praeparata erant proferunt, priores fossas explent, diutius in his rebus administrandis morati prius suos discessisse cognoverunt, quam munitionibus appropinquarent\n\n > > While they bring up the things which were prepared by Vercingetorix for the sally (i.e. various engines of war), first they fill up the trenches--being delayed for some time in overseeing these matters they learned that their earlier forces (i.e. Commius' men) had withdrawn, before they approached the fortifications" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ddfe6xj" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It was applied to tanks. The fact that sloping an armoured plate helped it deflect bullets better was known long before WWII. If you look at the French Renault FT tank, you see exactly what you just described: a rounded conical turret. The Americans tested their armour piercing bullets against 0 degree and 30 degree plates in the interbellum period, the Soviets were aware of the need to slope armour in 1930, before their domestic tank program really even took off. It wasn't really some kind of big secret even before tanks with highly sloped armour like the FCM-36 and T-34 were put into production.\n\nEven the tanks you mention have some amount of sloping, just not as drastically pronounced. The issue is the layout of the tank. The PzI set the classic German front transmission/rear engine trend, and wrapping that kind of tank in armour resulted in a no nonsense boxy look to optimize the size of the tank for what you had inside. You can see this with the PzII and PzIV as well, the armour of the tank bends around internal components (PzII engine deck, PzIV hull gunner position) rather than continue in straight lines in a way that would be easier to produce. \n\nSources:\n\nA Review of the V50 Ballistic Limit Requirement of MIL-A-46100, DTIC A274927\n\n[Minutes #9003188ss, Meeting between representatives of the NTK AU and NTK UMM on the issue of installing armament in Vickers tanks.](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2014/01/arming-vickers-tanks.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "czkpon3" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "hi! There's definitely more room for exploration on this one, but fyi, this question has come up a few times; here are a couple of the threads that specifically address Jupiter wrt its relative brightness\n\n* [What, exactly, did it mean for a planet to be called \"Jupiter\" in Roman times?](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Did ancient Greeks know that Olympos was the highest mountain in Greece when they placed their gods there? Did they know Jupiter is the largest planet when they named it after the king of gods, Zeus?](_URL_1_)\n\nBoth posts have been archived by now, so if you have follow-up questions for any of the users, just ask them here and tag their usernames to notify them" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3bhr3k/what_exactly_did_it_mean_for_a_planet_to_be/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1k9ok6/did_ancient_greeks_know_that_olympos_was_the/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dp2w8am" ], "score": [ 42 ], "text": [ "Imperial portraiture is an intensely studied phenomenon. Nothing about it seems arbitrary - imperial portraits can be dated and distinguished by the number and positioning of the curls along the forehead. For example, the tousled hair of Augustus was likely modeled on the famous portrait of Alexander by Lysippos, implicitly hitching Augustus' reputation to Alexander's horse.\n\nNero's portraiture gets a bit less attention than Augustus' but here are two suggestions: first, the most likely reason is that beards were a decidedly Greek thing. Philosophers have beards, Pericles had a beard (that's probably the comparison Hadrian was going for with his very full beard). Although our sources on Nero are very biased, there is still reason to think that he styled himself as a more cultured, more Hellenized emperor. Having himself portrayed with a beard encouraged this connection.\n\nSecond, slightly less likely, but perhaps more entertaining theory, Nero was trying to hide his weight. The Romans were big believers in physiognomy and just as prone to snap judgements about appearance as we are. Nero's beard starts to appear in imperial portraiture as the emperor starts getting fat. The chinstrap may have simply been a way to disguise the loss of the defined chin that had been part of his earlier portraiture." ] }

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[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#/media/File:Nero_1.JPG" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "df0eq0s" ], "score": [ 292 ], "text": [ "Simply put, there really wasn't any need for them to do it.\n\nIn 1945, the Yalta Conference saw the Big Three (US, UK, and the USSR) agreeing, among other things, on allowing the countries of Europe to choose their own governments through free and fair elections. Poland in particular was singled out by the British and the Soviets for historical reasons. Stalin famously agreed to these terms, and Roosevelt and Churchil infamously believed him. \n\nHowever, following the end of WWII the Soviet Red Army was occupying all three of the countries you mentioned (as well as the rest of the states that will end up forming the Eastern Bloc, with the exceptions of Yugoslavia and Albania). While elections WERE held in all of those countries, they were not free or fair, as the Soviets had heavily favoured the Communist parties. Ironically, it seems that, the more likely the Communists were to win the elections fairly, the more likely was the resulting government then be at odds with Moscow's direction (though not always). \n\n\nNaturally, the Soviets claimed that the eventual triumph of Soviet-friendly parties *was* the expression of the free will of the peoples, as per the agreements made at Yalta. While originally denouncing this, the Western powers eventually came to grudgingly accept the Communist domination of those regions (this is sometimes referred to as the \"Second Western Betrayal\", with the first being the Western abandonment of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the run-up to the Second World War). \n\n\nBecause those DID retain a large degree of sovereignty (they were not, for most of their existence, outright puppet states), they still had some leeway in the construction of their policies, including, in some cases, foreign policy. Soviet Union ended up intervening militarily in several of these countries later on if they felt that they were deviating too far from the accepted course (like Hungary in 1956, and the Czechoslovakia in 1968 for example) - and the other satellite states often took part. In some cases there were even spats *between* the satellite states, something that didn't really happen between Soviet Republics at the time, though some scholars chalk it up to the internal conflicts between the elites, rather than between states.\n\n\nThis approach had several advantages over outright annexation. The Soviet Union did care about its appearances and it stressed its anti-imperialist stance, something that would have been much less effective had they actually annexed the Eastern and Central European states and made them into Soviet republics (they even rejected the calls from some of the governments of the satellite states to make them into SSRs). At the same time, however, it gave Moscow wide-ranging authority over the happenings in its new satellite states, though arguably not quite as much as they would have had if they made them into Soviet republics. Also, the fact that these countries remained independent, at least on paper, allowed them to gain representation in international organizations such as the UN, where they obviously tended to support the Soviet side (most of the Soviet republics, with the exceptions of Belarus and Ukraine, were not allowed in as individual members). \n\n\nThe Soviets then got (most of) what they wanted out of their satellite states without the hassle associated with making them into full Soviet Republics, which would also technically mean that they would be given a say in the policies of the Soviet Union proper, and their Communist parties be incorporated into the Soviet system of government, not an especially attractive proposition in and of itself, particularly if the country in question had a relatively independent Communist party (that is, it was popular and active on the political scene before the Soviet intervention) or an alliance of Socialist parties.\n\n\nThe difference with the Baltic cases is that the Baltic countries - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - were all occupied and incorporated into the USSR as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1940, before the war. Most Western states never recognized this as legitimate, so Stalin had some idea of what would happen if he attempted to do the same with the other European states. I imagine that if Stalin could have known of what would happen after the war, he'd have chosen to forego bringing the Baltics into the Soviet Union outright and would have opted for the same option as he did with the Eastern and Central European states, but it wasn't really possible without setting up a very dangerous precedent of a Soviet Republic seceding from the Soviet Union. \n\n\n\n\nSome good general reading on the subject: \n\n* \"Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945\" by Tony Judt, perhaps THE definitive book on the general developments in Europe after the war.\n\n* \"Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-56\" by Anne Applebaum, though I am not quite sure about her overall conclusion regarding the long-term odds of survival for totalitarian states\n\n* \"Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman: From World War to Cold War\" by Michael Dobbs\n\n* \"Yalta: The Price of Peace\" by Serhii Plokhii\n\n* \"Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The Establishment of the Communist Regime in Hungary, 1944-1948\" by Peter Kenez\n\n* \"Between Nazis and Soviets: A Case Study of Occupation: Politics in Poland, 1939-1947\" by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz\n\nEDITS: grammar, punctuation" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cjys0cf" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "I looked in the FAQ and [this section](_URL_0_) probably has more answers than you could ever want.\n\nThis is one of those questions where I just have to ask \"Who cares?\" Roman identity is something so schizophrenic and malleable that at one end you can have a pagan Augustus imagining himself to be the inheritor of Troy and at the other end you have Constantine XI dying a Greek-speaking Christian. " ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/darkages#wiki_heirs_to_the_roman_empire" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cvp2c4v", "cvp3o8e", "cvpcjjf", "cvpf29v", "cvpkt5p", "cvpne1y", "cvpu031", "cvpu1b1" ], "score": [ 105, 1278, 56, 163, 7, 20, 6, 4 ], "text": [ "As a follow-up question, was it generally assumed that the Cold War would eventually go hot, so to speak? Or was there more optimism about things being wrapped up or toned down more peacefully? ", "The CIA itself has a great deal of work on the subject of how well they predicted the downfall of the USSR. Since the 70's there were unclassified documents that showed the USSR's economy was struggling. These ppapers include the unclassified testimony from each of DCI Admiral Stansfield Turner's annual appearances before the JEC from 1977 through 1980 which described the economy as 'bleak' with an 'inevitable' downward trend. Other papers describe how much the USSR was suffering from over investment in defense and lacking in agricultural mechanization.\n\nThey did not predict Gorbachev's rise to power though that was because it was impossible to predict Chernyenko's death. When Gorbachev entered the CIA adjusted their predictions saying that his plans could delay the downward spiral but it was still coming because he could not cut defense spending without huge political controversy. In 1988 the CIA predicted Gorbachev would have to make a radical changes to consolidate power to make the changes to sustain the economy. \"Gorbachev's September Housecleaning\" was an intelligence paper describing the changes he would have to make. This also cited problems stemming from the 1970's and called the USSR less stable than any time since Stalin's rise to power. \n\nWhat the CIA did not predict was the collapse. They thought there was going to be civil unrest. \n\n**TLDR**: The economic and societal conditions made it inevitable that something would happen. That was clearly reported by the CIA. What actually did happen depended on people and decisions that were not inevitable.\n\nSources:\n\n_URL_0_", "My grandfather wrote a book called [\"no wonder we are losing\"](_URL_1_) I will post the Amazon description below. \n\n\n\nAs counsel for the US Senate's Internal Security Subcommittee and similar bodies investigating Communism in the United States during the last 17 years, Bob Morris has examined more than 500 witnesses under oath. He has interviewed hundreds of Communists and ex-Communists. No other American has interrogated so many informed persons on the subject of the Communist underground and its efforts, sometimes overt, sometimes covert, to undermine the foundations of moral and political authority in the United States. Here in NO WONDER WE ARE LOSING are Bob Morris' evaluations and conclusions - about use of the Fifth Amendment, America's security system, Communist influence in our schools and in the United Nations, the Yalta Agreement, recent Supreme Court decisions - and glimpses behind official Committee reports. Bob Morris believes that the nation is not awake to the lateness of the hour - nor to the proximity of the peril. NO WONDER WE ARE LOSING will provide an incisive understanding of the Soviet enemy.\n\nEdit. Here is another book he wrote. [Our Globe Under Siege](_URL_0_)", "Not a political scientist but Paul Samuelson was a dominant figure in postwar economics and his famous principles textbook which was used everywhere for decades had a famously wrong analysis of the Soviet economy overtaking the US (the dates varied and [were constantly pushed out](_URL_1_) as Soviet growth stalled). Brad Delong breaks down the economic analysis that led to this conclusion [here](_URL_0_), the tldr is that central planning could keep investment in capital high which implies higher growth. Whether that would have constituted winning the Cold War is another discussion but it's a claim along similar lines of thinking. ", "I once saw an interesting study which said most of the defense spending of the USSR was linked to what effectively amounted to US subsidies. Is there any merit to this theory?\n\nedit: It was a question, sheesh.", "You're right to question this and identify the possible bias of hindsight. For example, there was a time when North Korea looked like it would be the success on the peninsular, instead of the South (as hard as that is to believe now). Interesting question! ", "If you look at Dinesh D'souza's biography of Ronald Reagan, he cites a number of prominent political scientists who believed that Russia would win the cold war, and mentions that many gloss over how important Reagan's work was to end things.", "On a similar note, were there any well known Soviet political scientist counterparts who correctly predicted the west's \"win?\" Meaning, any who were able to get their views heard in the west and east before being silenced one way or another? Were there any political scientists or prominent journalists that had some relatively unhindered access to international media outlets? " ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/soviet.html" ], [ "http://www.amazon.com/Our-Globe-Under-Siege-III/dp/B001K96HEI", "http://www.amazon.com/No-Wonder-We-Are-Losing/dp/B00155H1P6#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1444078855071" ], [ "http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/01/the-russians-were-coming.html", "http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/soviet-growth-american-textbooks.html" ], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cov7s4b" ], "score": [ 26 ], "text": [ "The model suggested by the Roman scholar Adrian Goldsworthy is that combat would be broken up by long pauses as each side caught their breath and worked themselves up to enter combat again. \n\nThe 'hard' men of that side, be they centurions or huscarls or knights, would advance and drag the men alongside them as they covered the flanks - which would eventually pull the entire formation into close combat. The badasses would be actively fighting, trying to kill their opponents; the other less motivated or more terrified fighters would be fighting defensively, concentrating on not getting hit rather than inflicting wounds. \n\nAfter a few minutes of this both sides would tire out and if one side didn't break, they'd both pull back to a safe distance and catch their breath and psych themselves up for the next round. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cij7mql", "cijak3w" ], "score": [ 9, 2 ], "text": [ "The terms \"left and right wing\" actually originated during the French Revolution. The various legislative bodies were initially seated from right to left based on their social rank, and that slowly evolved into our modern political spectrum. So if anything, the factions of the French Revolution are easier than modern groups to pin down on the left/right scale because that's exactly how they identified themselves.", "**TL/DR**. If we look at leftists as being for greater equality and rightists as being in favor of inherited/traditional privilege than we can (sorta) use these terms pretty broadly. However, we should probably find better, more specific terms to use.\n\nI'm sorry if this doesn't answer your questions, but left vs. right is a very slippery concept, especially in modern politics.\n\nAs others have said the concept actually dates from the french revolutionary period. At that time people who were for greater equality and rationalism were called \"leftist\" and people who for inherited privilege, the aristocracy, tradition and social stratification were right-wing.\n\nWhile modern leftists are still are generally pro-equality and modern rightists still generally defend inherited privilege and tradition, things have gotten all messed up since then, both because the ideals of the jacobin leftists won (no significant group of people, even on the far right, wants to bring back the absolute monarchy) and because so much has changed. \n\nTake laissez-faire capitalism. Back in the 18th century Monarchs and aristocrats intervened in markets in a regressive way to keep peasants on the land and business people poor. Aristocrats were barely taxed at all, and the King lived off tax revenue from the poorest people. In this situation laissez faire capitalism challenged the powerful and gave hope to the powerless.\n\nThese days business people have roughly the same position as the aristocracy did, and socialist ideas have shown that it is (at least theoretically) possible to use market intervention to lower inequality rather than exacerbate it. Since laissez faire capitalism will (depending on who you ask) help rich people stay entrenched and leave the working class unprotected, leading to less equality and greater social stratification it is now considered right wing.\n\nAs far as your question about anarchists and fascists, this really underlines how useless terms like left and right wing are. Some anarchists consider themselves right wing, some consider themselves left wing and many opt out of those terms all together.\n\nLikewise, fascism isn't particularly right-wing (they believe in a massive reorganization of the social order, are generally populist and generally want to do away with traditional institutions) but they aren't really left-wing either (they believe in social stratification, racism and are generally anti-rational).\n\n**EDIT** I should mention that since the rise of classical/neo-liberal economics, and the rise of the capitalist/business class at the expense of the aristocracy, many right-wingers would say that they aren't pro-tradition/anti-equality, but rather pro-efficiency/anti-equality. Obviously this muddles the waters even further." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d21cea5" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "For Classical Greece, there's a couple of reasons. The main one is that the city-states had no professional army and no money to create one. Their military forces were literally the population in arms. Since most people could not afford to leave their farms and shops for very long, campaigns had to be short and decisive. Pitched battle was better suited to this purpose than skirmishing, raiding and siege.\n\nOf course the Greeks strained against these limitations, knowing that prolonged campaigns by mercenary or specialist expeditionary forces could entail less risk and bring more profit to them. Even so, the ideal of a quick (and cheap) decision remained attractive, not least because it was the most straightforward way of imposing one's will on the enemy. An army abroad would find more safety in a direct approach than in a slow and tentative campaign that allowed the enemy to take initiatives of his own. Meanwhile, an invader would win a moral victory if he got to ravage enemy land without encountering resistance; men who watched their farms burn from the safety of the city wall would generally be spoiling for a fight. For these reasons, even the forces despatched for longer campaigns often ended up fighting pitched battles too.\n\nThat said, the Greeks were very careful to avoid pitched battle if they felt that they would be fighting at any kind of a disadvantage. They wouldn't engage unless they were confident of their numbers and skill, and ideally they would look for some suitable ground and try to take the enemy by surprise. Even if there was a moral imperative to fight a pitched battle, everything was done to make sure that battle would not be fair.\n\nBecause of the risks involved, pitched battles were actually not common. Considering the fact that \"ancient history\" covers a period of several thousand years, and even the age called Classical Greece lasted a century and a half, we actually know very few pitched battles, and even less are actually widely known among a general audience. The ancients agreed that the bloodiest and most protracted conflicts of their past were the Peloponnesian War and the First Punic War; can you name a pitched battle from either?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ci5bsl2" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Cannon could be traversed slightly side to side when run out, but this was rather uncommon and usually only reserved for the guns at the front of the ship when coming into action (broadside guns, not chase guns pointed forward). For the most part, guns were aimed by moving the ship.\n\nAt least in the British navy, gunners were taught to prefer speed over aim in firing. British ships drilled to fire rapidly at short range, where shots couldn't miss the hull; the philosophy was \"kill the men and kill the ship.\" French doctrine was to attack sails and masts in hope of rendering the ship immobile. \n\nThe standards varied widely among captains, though; Philip Broke of the *HMS Shannon* trained his crews both in aiming and in a rapid rate of fire and had his decks carved with aiming marks, but he was very much an exception. The Admiralty provided only a small fixed amount of powder and shot for training; captains had to purchase extra themselves. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ejh92ji" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "My information comes mostly from the Napoleonic Wars, which I would place outside the Early Modern period. While they were all fought with the same weapons as earlier conflicts, there use on the battlefield was often quite different, so applying it to earlier periods should be done carefully. Just in terms of broad figures, the ratio of killed to wounded could vary a great deal; on the low end, one to ten would not be unheard of, while at the other extreme, one in three could also occur, especially under unfavorable circumstances. \n\nOne important aspect of casualties in Early Modern warfare is the nature of the wounds in question. When a body of men is engaged more by other infantry armed with muskets, artillery, or cavalry armed with cold steel, they suffer very different types of wounds, and this affects in part the proportion of killed and wounded. \n\nThe Spanish Army of Flanders produced excellent medical records from the latter 16th century through the 17th, and offers a wealth of information about Early Modern warfare. There, they rightly considered gunshot wounds by far the most serious, as they could inflict maladies contemporary medicine could not treat: internal bleeding, blood poisoning, and shattered bone meant a wounded soldier who suffered these specific problems would count himself lucky to simply lose the afflicted limb. When amputation was impossible, as in the case of torso wounds, operation was especially hazardous. \n\nAs bad as firearms were, artillery was even worse, as an iron cannonball flying at more than a thousand feet per second will obviously smash any living thing in its path; a man would count himself lucky if he was permanently maimed rather than killed outright by heavy guns. Even when roundshot appeared to slow down to roll across the ground, many soldiers would discover the hard way that it still had incredible angular momentum; if they stuck their foot out to stop it rolling, they could find the bones in their foot and shin crushed. Men could be killed by fragments of their comrades' bones flying from their bodies. In one engagement during the Seven Years War, French surgeons despaired of saving even 2% of the 1500 wounded, who had mostly suffered canister wounds.\n\nOn the other hand, cuts by swords and pike thrusts were relatively easily treated. Sabre cuts were probably the least serious wounds an Early Modern soldier could receive, except when they struck something vital like the eyes; many soldiers survived several such cuts and experienced quick healing after the bleeding was staunched and the cut sutured closed. Templehoff's history of the Seven Years War records the complaint of one artilleryman who witnessed a cavalry engagement.\n\n > You must pardon me if I venture the opinion that the shock of cavalry is not as decisive as it seems to be. In the campaign of 1762 I witnessed a shock [at Reichenbach] which was delivered by the greater part of the Prussian cavalry against a still larger force of Austrian cavalry. It resulted in a few hundred wounded and prisoners on the two sides. Not a single dead man lay on the field of battle. \n\nIn general, the different forms of combat individual units were exposed to often affected the ratio of killed to wounded. Every combat is of course unique; some cavalry combats were more deadly than others, while artillery bombardments with shells might produce a great many more wounded than dead, but there is evidence for general trends." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dwtjem0" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "This submission has been removed because it is [soapboxing](_URL_0_.) or [moralizing:](_URL_1_) 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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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_.22soapboxing.22_or_loaded_questions", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_no_political_agendas_or_moralising" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dv67o65", "dv6izm9" ], "score": [ 165, 436 ], "text": [ "Check out these threads on Medieval humour and what they found fun/funny. The first one will probably interest you the most:\n\n* [Medieval Jesters - What kind of jokes did they tell?](_URL_1_) by /u/texpeare\n\n* [Why are there so many medieval paintings of people battling large snails?](_URL_2_) by /u/sunagainstgold\n\n* [What did people do for fun in their free time in the medieval ages?](_URL_0_) by /u/Whoosier", "This is perhaps a more complex question than it might first seem. The vast majority of comic material from the Middle Ages is found in literary sources, which produces a sort of inherent selection bias toward certain kinds of humour intended for certain kinds of people. Medieval literary sources almost always record the tastes of people who had (at least!) the benefits of a basic education and a secure income, and who lived in an urban centre or had easy access to one. Literary sources offer us no guarantee on the mass appeal of a particular piece of humour.\n\nThe other problem with literary sources is that they are inevitably stylised. Authors never just “tell jokes”. They tell stories with narrative arcs, make moral and rhetorical points, play into or against cultural conventions and expectations. Sometimes this makes it hard to know whether something is even *meant* to be funny, particularly if the author doesn’t model a reaction for their reader. Literary humour almost always isn’t *just* meant to be funny, and that circumstance may condition the ways in which it finds articulation. Literary jokes come with additional intentions, and we have to treat them with care and no little suspicion. This goes for visual artworks too. Are the sometimes [sexual](_URL_6_), [scatological](_URL_7_) and [irreverent](_URL_0_) images rendered in the margins of medieval books meant to be funny at all, or *only* funny? (This is one of questions worked toward by Michael Camille’s much-lauded *Image on the Edge*.)\n\nBy contrast, moments of organic and off-the-cuff humour are rare, disjointed and often hard to fit into any kind of general historical narrative. But their meanings are no less opaque. [Not every doodle](_URL_2_) in a medieval manuscript is constructed with artful craft by illuminators and scribes, but that doesn’t necessarily make them easier to read. Are we looking at deliberate comedy, inexpert products of idle boredom, or rebellious acts of defacement of expensive books? [We might treat graffiti the same way.](_URL_4_) What about utterance? When Robert Staffertone invited a London alderman to [‘kiss his rearward’](_URL_5_) in 1388 or William Foucher referred to the previous lord mayor Nicholas Wotton as [‘Nicholas Wytteles’]( _URL_1_) (*witless*) in 1418, were they making merry or voicing genuine political anger? They both faced prosecution either way. Did the fifteenth-century scribe who wrote [kys my ars s*ir* Rafe](_URL_3_) (*Kiss my arse, Sir Rafe!*) at the top of a page do so in jest or in anger – and did they ever intend it to be seen by Sir Rafe? While we’re on scribbled notes, I was once shown a photo of a manuscript (although regrettably I don’t know its shelfmark) in which someone had written something like ‘turn the leef’ (*turn the page*) on one side and ‘fole thou lokest’ (*made you look, fool!*) on the reverse. The writer seems to have found that one funny – but did anyone else!? We have to resist the urge to find such instances funny just because they strike us as novel or incongruous and instead consider them carefully on their own terms.\n\nBut presumably you didn’t come here to hear me agonise about presentism. You came here for a good laugh! So, let’s get down to it. It’s certainly true that surprisingly (or not?) sexual, scatological, violent humour is well attested in literary works throughout the later Middle Ages in Europe. In *fabliaux* and more generically amorphous short tales (such as those in the *Canterbury Tales* and the *Decameron*), in beast fables and epics, in clerical and estates satire and in certain kinds of court poetry one finds humorous stories of all kinds. (Note that these forms/genres often interpenetrate and overlap.)\n\nTo try to account for all this material would be tedious and quite frankly beyond the limits of this post, but here’s a sweeping survey of the sort of things one can expect to find in the literary canon. The lupine anti-hero of the Latin *Ysengrimus* (*c*.1148, Ghent) has his greed repaid by being variously cheated, beaten, flayed and finally devoured by sixty-six pigs. Marie de France includes among her Anglo-Norman *Fables* (1160x1190) the story of a peasant who has a beetle crawl up his bottom while he sleeps lazily in the fields, and who convinces all and sundry (on the advice of a quack doctor) that he is pregnant. The French *Romance of Eustace the Monk* (1223x1235) chronicles the picaresque escapades of an outlaw-monk-wizard-pirate who variously swindles and outwits his nemesis the Count of Boulogne. The thirteenth-century French/Anglo-Norman *fabliau* and parody romance *Le chevaler qui fist les cons parler* (The Knight Who Could Make Cunts Speak) goes exactly as one might imagine. Boccaccio’s Italian *Decameron* (*c*.1353) includes a great many comic tales; the very first in the collection is of a wicked nobleman who deceives a friar with a cunning confession and is honoured as a saint after his death. Chaucer likewise includes several comic stories in the *Canterbury Tales* (1387x1400), most famously the *Miller’s Tale*; a husband is deceived, an affair committed, one bottom is kissed and another is scalded with a branding iron. Two fifteenth-century Scottish poets, Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, also wrote comic verse. Henryson’s fable *The Wolf and the Wether* features an uppity ram who pretends to be a sheepdog until the day an actual wolf appears; he defeats it through a fear-induced diarrhoeal torrent. Among Dunbar’s glut of bawdy verse is his *Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy*, a blisteringly filthy poetic slanging match.\n\n**Edit: I had a feeling I'd slightly mis-remembered the Henryson – and I had! It is the wolf who suffers the explosive diarrhoea, as he flees the ram dressed in a sheepdog's skin.** \n\nTrying to compare such a long and varied tradition of humorous literature won’t necessarily get one anywhere productive, but a couple of trends stand out. Perhaps the most obvious is the punishment of hypocrisy. This is a trope that plays into some of the literary influences on humour that I mentioned at the start of this post; it makes for a neat narrative arc and it facilitates all sorts of moral, political and rhetorical point-scoring. Jill Mann has discussed how a great deal of medieval beast literature operates on the idea of *luditor illusor*, the topsy-turvy world of *the deceiver deceived*. Almost all clerical satire is about bad clerics punished for their sinfulness and luxury; think of the thousands of friars whose mendicant greed damns them to inhabit the rectum of Satan in Chaucer’s *Summoner’s Prologue*, or the single money-hungry friar who reaches into a peasant’s breeches for silver in the *Summoner’s Tale* but finds only a fart. The narrative neatness of *fabliaux* often depends on the meting out of some sort of justice. Possessive spouses get cheated on; cheating spouses get found out. The rich are brought low; the poor are made ridiculous. So it goes.\n\nIt’s worth noting here that while there is a good deal of punching-up in medieval comic literature (particular where the clergy is concerned) there’s no small amount of punching-down. Women in comic tales, whether they are the protagonists or not, are almost inevitably guilty of some kind of sexual promiscuity. The stereotypical poor of satirical literature desire to rise above their station and are punished for it; although Marie de France thinks poorly of the abuse of power by the rich, for instance, she consistently portrays peasants as almost mindlessly buffoonish and unable to take any responsibility for themselves. Rape and other forms of sexual violence (chiefly, although not exclusively, perpetrated against women) is often trivialised in comic narrative. In perhaps the most unsettling tale in the whole *Decameron* (Day 3, Story 6), Catella is deceived into having sex with Ricciardo disguised as her husband, is then blackmailed into continuing to do so, and eventually *does* fall in love with him. One of *Eustace the Monk*’s adventures involves seducing the Count’s servant in the guise of a prostitute, luring him into a ditch, then unveiling himself and threatening to go through with the act unless the servant gives him the Count’s best horse. \n\nThese various sources of humour, all of which can seem unsettling to us (and often hard to reconcile with the fact that writers like Chaucer are elsewhere more sympathetic to victims of the abuse of power), often owe something to the inherent privileges associated with a comedy that is not just *literary* but *literate*. The medieval written record belonged to the powerful, and this sometimes seems to predispose “humorous” narratives toward forms that would probably not have been palatable or funny to those that they ridiculed. This doesn’t mean that we don’t sometimes see people laughing at *themselves* (it’s been posited that the soldiers who make a botched job of putting together the cross in the *York Crucifixion Play* might have been played by local carpenters or other craftsmen, for instance), but this fits into a larger and not always wholesome tradition of comic literature. My apologies if that’s a slightly dark note on which to end, but I hope I’ve put in enough context there to justify the discussion. \n\n**Drat, I've just slightly overrun. Continued below.**" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hbf52/what_did_people_do_for_fun_in_their_free_time_in/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1p2n54/medieval_jesters_what_kind_of_jokes_did_they_tell/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3tva6h/why_are_there_so_many_medieval_paintings_of/" ], [ "http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yAdUICQZuA4/SA2QAj7XYxI/AAAAAAAAAMk/LKteQ8AOK9U/s400/breakdancing+salome1.jpg", "http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/memorials-london-life/pp660-669", "http://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/doodle-1.jpg", "https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CnUDjSOWcAAqpaW.jpg:large", "http://www.medieval-graffiti.co.uk/page32.html", "http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/memorials-london-life/pp500-509", "https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/web03/2012/9/27/23/enhanced-buzz-3235-1348801892-0.jpg?downsize=715:*&output-format=auto&output-quality=auto", "https://d3h6k4kfl8m9p0.cloudfront.net/uploads/2014/07/Gorleston-Psalter-f-82r.png" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dk4i8zf" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "The idea that Napoleon was merely aping the pre-1789 political order was one of the many attacks on Napoleon made both by the Jacobin left and the emigre Bourbons. Beethoven reportedly claimed Napoleon was reaching for the imperial crown the Revolution left in the gutter and the composer [scratched out](_URL_1_) the dedication to Napoleon in his Third Symphony. While there was some merit in these critiques about Napoleon's assumption of outsized executive power, they do miss some of the key aspects of Napoleonic rule and administration. Napoleon may have been Emperor, but he was acting very much in the spirit of a particular strain of French Revolutionary thought. \n\nNapoleon's proclamation of himself as Emperor did alienate him from Jacobins and other social levelers and ideologues, it was not as a retrograde step from the Revolution as it might appear at first. The attitude of various Revolutionaries towards executive power was always very unclear, but there were voices throughout the Revolution that called for strong central order. The experience of the Terror made many within the Directory leery of pure democracy (Cabanis said democracy was \"odious to all sensible and right-thinking men\" and \"kept all citizens in a constant state of agitation and anxiety\") and seek an ordered solution to political power. Although subsequent Napoleonic propaganda would emphasize him as the natural and inevitable choice for the Brumaire coup, there were several other French generals various factions were courting for a coup. Emmanel Sieyès, one of the key plotters in Brumaire, would famously quip, \"I need a sword,\" in other words, a man who could command the loyalty of one of the few powerful institutions that possessed a great deal of popular legitimacy within the Republic, the army. Bernadotte, a general and Minister of War, was the favorite of the Neo-Jacobin factions that wanted to reestablish the Revolution's leveling tendencies. Jean-Baptiste Jourdan toyed around with many different factions, but never made a firm commitment. Lazare Hoche, who enjoyed almost as much fame as Napoleon had unfortunately died of tuberculosis before Sieyès's initial soundings towards him could bear fruit. Jean Moreau, the youngest general in the army, refused to compromise himself with politics despite entreaties to do so.\n\nEven still, the initial impulses of Sieyès was to have the Consulate be a divided form of power with the other two consuls acting as a check against one gaining supremacy. The problem was Napoleon appreciated the latent tendencies to authoritarianism within the Consulate's [constitution](_URL_0_), which he helped draft, far better than his fellow plotters. Napoleon's workaholic habits also made him ideally suited to quickly become the indispensable Consul in running the state. Napoleon, as a systemizer and organizer *par excellance*, naturally rigged these day to day business of the Consulate government to favor his own input. Being elected Consul for fife and then proclaimed Emperor were the logical next steps. \n\nNapoleon's own elevation to Emperor carried with it several important facets that made quite different than his fellow imperial monarchs like Alexander I or Francis I. First off, Napoleon's title, Emperor of the French carried with it specific, secular connotations and that the title's legitimacy stemmed from the national principle. Second, although the Napoleonic regime borrowed many of the trappings of the *ancien regime*'s monarchical style, Napoleon used tradition to sanctify the new regime, not symbolize the return of the old one. Napoleon consciously chose the pageantry of monarchy as a stratagem to curry popular support and feed the notion that the Empire enjoyed true popular sovereignty. Although Napoleon's plebiscites and Senate decrees supporting the Empire were often manufactured, they do show how deeply concerned Napoleon was over the perception he enjoyed popular support. The Napoleonic Code also outlined that the imperial order was sanctioned by law, not divine right or some abstract tradition derived from history. Napoleon may have been Emperor, but that was sanctioned both by plebiscite (albeit one he rigged) and upheld by law. \n\nNapoleon's system of nobility shared a lot in common with the *ancien regime*'s tables of ranks and shared many of the same hierarchies, there were several key differences between Napoleon's nobility and that of the Bourbons. One, in order for a noble title to be inherited, a noble had to prove they possessed a large income and an estate in real property. From the standpoint of 2017, this emphasis upon wealth seems decidedly anti-democratic, but basing an individual's political legitimacy upon property was a stance common among European liberal moderates in the nineteenth century. In this formulation, titles and elite status have to be earned by each generation and was a departure from the pre-Revolutionary conceptualization that noble status was permanent. Secondly, the Napoleon's nobility was to be a description of rank, not caste. Noble titles were to be a sign of what an individual had accomplished instead of their family or ancestors. Heritability of titles and their privileges was limited in the First Empire. Moreover, Napoleon's nobility was a service nobility; titles were earned through service to France and thus opened up elite status to the masses. The Légion d'honneur carried with it a title and lump sum of a reward, but a Legionnaire could not expect any exemption from taxation or other unique caste privileges that were common for the decorations and neo-chivalric orders of the French *ancien regime*. \n\nIn practice, this meant that Napoleon's nobility overwhelmingly favored the military (some 59 % of this nobility came from the armed forces), but there still was a degree of social mobility that was not present under the Bourbons. The apex of the nobility were the Princes and Dukes, and the Napoleonic Marshals, who were either a Duke or Princes, tended to come from relatively modest backgrounds. Ney was the son of a cooper and Augereau son of a domestic servant, and those who came from *ancien regime* noble stock like Davout or Berthier, were from the middling nobility. Napoleon would justify this new nobility as a meritocratic system and that his government had enabled opening up careers to talent and rewarded them accordingly. The new Napoleonic nobility was only about one seventh as large as the nobility in 1789, and in this measure was quite different than its predecessor. \n\nThe Revolutionary notion of popular sovereignty trumping the interests of the monarch came to be Napoleon's undoing in 1814. After observing the abortive Malet conspiracy of the previous year, Talleyrand noticed that the Imperial Senate did have the power to legally depose of Napoleon. Napoleon's penchant for constitutions to be \"short and vague\" proved to be a double-edged sword in the hands of a empowered opposition. Although the Senate had often been a servile rubber stamp for Napoleon's autocracy, it always posesed the legal potential to declare a new state. Talleyrand, still a Senator, convened the legislative body after he had sounded out like-minded conspirators in his salon, and declared a provisional government. They deposed Napoleon for his violations of the constitution and then the Senate invited Louis XVIII to take the now vacant French executive provided he accept the Senate's [constitution](_URL_2_). The Bourbon did so reluctantly and clashes between the monarchy and Chamber over the constitution would be the main hallmarks of French political life for the coming decades after 1814/15. \n\nAlthough it is tempting to write off Napoleon as a self-serving reactionary, Napoleon really did implement and modify elements of Revolutionary government and political thought into the fabric of the First Empire. The ideal of an Enlightenment-inspired order and a rational and secular state administration had great currency during the Revolution and found fuller expression within the Empire. Even the Concordat with the Papacy fit within this search for order; French priests were to be servants of the secular state which in turn created a protracted struggle between church and the French state that continued throughout the nineteenth century. European left-wing politics in the nineteenth century would make much of Napoleon's alleged ending or betrayal of the Revolution after Brumaire, this breakage with the Revolutionary past was more apparent than real. The French Revolution was a multifaceted political animal and Napoleon was able to tap into certain elements of French political thought to justify his dictatorship. Yet, as his ignominious disposal in 1814 by the Senate and his appeals to the Revolutionary liberalism in the Hundred Days show, Napoleon could not operate above the various political ideals and concepts the Revolution unleashed in 1789 despite his pretenses of being a figure above politics. \n\n*Sources*\n\nBergeron, Louis. *France Under Napoleon*. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. \n\nBroers, Michael. *Napoleon. Volume 1, Soldier of Destiny*. London: Faber and Faber, 2015. \n\nDwyer, Philip G. *Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. \n\n_. *Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.\n\nWoloch, Isser. *Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship*. New York: London : W.W. Norton, 2002. \n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/legislation/c_constitution8.html", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Eroica_Beethoven_title.jpg", "http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/legislation/c_charter.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dh2t7w2" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "If anyone could clarify the details of the alliance between Russia and Austria I would appreciate it for background on the question! " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d1eh80b" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "I don't know of any such drugs being known or commonly used in Classical Greece, but they may well have existed. The most famous story of Greeks tripping balls is Xenophon's account of men of the Ten Thousand eating \"mad honey\" on their march to the Black Sea: \n\n > The soldiers who ate of the honey all went off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhoea, and not one of them could stand up, but those who had eaten a little were like people exceedingly drunk, while those who had eaten a great deal seemed like crazy, or even, in some cases, dying men. So they lay there in great numbers as though the army had suffered a defeat, and great despondency prevailed. On the next day, however, no one had died, and at approximately the same hour as they had eaten the honey they began to come to their senses; and on the third or fourth day they got up, as if from a drugging.\n\n-- Xen. *Anabasis* 4.8.20-21\n\nIn the introduction to his *The Long March* (2004), Robin Lane Fox theorised that the honey in question was made from the yellow-flowering *rhodondendron luteum* local to the region, and would have contained acetylandromedol. \n\nThe most common narcotic substance used by the Greeks was, of course, alcohol." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cc5moib", "cc5n4n5", "cc5nd58" ], "score": [ 4, 3, 6 ], "text": [ "Those of us who draw historic maps always have to be cognizant of such things. The biggest things we have to root out are manmade reservoirs, changes to river courses, and land accretion in river deltas.\n\nThe shrinking of the Aral Sea has been pretty dramatic, and big landfill operations that have altered the coastlines around Macau, New York and Boston harbors, Tokyo Bay, and the Chicago lakefront (not to mention reversing a couple of rivers!). The Panama and Suez canals, and creation of the Salton Sea are other alterations visible even at small scales.", "Very much so, the Earth's surface is constantly changing. Especially in places with a long recorded history we know a lot about these changes. That involves ancient riverine civilizations like Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus and China.\n\nSo in Egypt the course of the Nile delta is changing, there was the [Pelusiac arm](_URL_1_) of the Nile that has since dried up. It is thougt that it was the \"Brook of Egypt\" from the Bible. Next, the Nile delta is sinking, there are submerged Ancient Egyptian cities in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the sea in the Gulf of Suez is receding, the Red Sea once reached up to the Bitter Lakes (hence the ancient canal led from the Nile to what is today the Bitter Lakes).\n\nMesopotamia looked completely different in the time of Sumer than how it does today, the climate was less dry, there was steppe in the north, the Gulf reached up to Ur, which is now deep inland. In short, it looked like [this](_URL_0_). There was also no Shatt al-Arab, Eufrat and Tigris emptied to the Gulf separately.\n\nMeanwhile in China the Yellow river caused a lot of problems, there were often massive floods caused by accumulation of ice in the upper course. Consequently the river often changed its course despite human efforts to tame it, it emptied to the Bohai Bay above the Shantung Peninsula and then at times to Yellow Sea below the peninsula. [Here](_URL_2_) is a map showing the changes. Also the silt is causing the creation of new land, so Beijing for example was once on the sea shore.", "The Dutch coast line has been shifting dramatically since roman times:\n\n* [Roman times](_URL_4_): A marshy delta with a large, central lake (Flevo Lacus) and extensive tidal flats.\n\n* [Medieval about 1100](_URL_2_) More and more areas claimed by the sea, Holland is almost an archipelago. The Zuiderzee is a large inland salt water body.\n\n* [The Dutch Republic about 1650](_URL_1_) reclamation is gaining speed.\n\n* [The Netherlands 1920](_URL_5_). In 1933, the Zuiderzee became a lake again when the [afsluitdijk](_URL_3_) was finished. \n\n* [Present day Netherlands showing land reclamation 14th-20th century](_URL_6_).\n\nAnd [in another 30 years it will certainly look different again](_URL_0_).\n\nThe Yellow river's mouth has shifted as much as 480 km (300 mi), sometimes reaching the ocean to the north of Shandong Peninsula and sometimes to the south." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Karte_Mesopotamien.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelusium", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/HuangHeZmenyDolnihoToku.PNG" ], [ "http://www.seacityresearchnet.com/archives/category/existing-adaptations/artificial-island", "http://www.haagsetijden.nl/images/republiek_der_zeven_verenigde_nederlanden.jpg", "http://histoforum.net/ontstaan/images/ned1100.png", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsluitdijk", "http://www.harmen-visser.nl/kaart%20romeinen%20in%20nederland.jpg", "http://www.atlassen.info/atlassen/flemming/flegk01/picslarge/flegk04k020_k.jpg", "http://home.kpn.nl/keesbolle/afbeeldingen/Polder2.gif" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dynzuco", "dyo15ct", "dyo1z2d", "dyodd2g", "dyokabe", "dyoqpk2", "dypu1n1" ], "score": [ 13, 11, 14, 10, 2, 7, 3 ], "text": [ "Fantasy maps have a fascinating history, which we've talked about a bit in the past, but for me one of my favorite historical fantasy maps is Robert E. Howard's conception of [The Hyborian Age](_URL_0_), the setting for his Conan the Barbarian tales. Created before Tolkien's *The Hobbit* made such maps somewhat standard fare for fantasy works, it represents a lot of effort at worldbuilding by the Texas pulpster.", "I answered a question here awhile back about [portolan charts](_URL_1_), which are a specialized type of map people (navigators) use to find their way into a port or make a specific landfall. \n\nThese things could often be [quite elaborate and cover a large area](_URL_2_), and one of the interesting things you can see on that one is that the items to the top side of the chart -- further north -- are \"upside down.\" This probably reflects the fact that the chart would be used on a large chart table, and the people looking at it would move around the perimeter of the table to read them. The Bodleian library has [a ton of these things](_URL_0_) searchable for viewing. ", "The Greeks knew maps at least since the end of the Archaic period. When Aristagoras of Miletos went to Sparta to beg for aid against the Persians in 499 BC, he is said to have brought with him a bronze plaque on which was engraved a map of the Earth \"with the whole sea and all the rivers\" (Herodotos 5.49.1). The purpose of this display of scientific knowledge, however, was not to inform, but to deceive; by showing the Spartan king Kleomenes in a single glance all the lands he might conquer if he joined the war against Persia, Aristagoras meant to invoke Kleomenes' greed and lust for glory. What he did not say - until Kleomenes warily questioned him - was just how much ground the map covered. When Aristagoras confessed that it would take an army 3 months to march from the Aegean to the Persian capital at Susa, Kleomenes ordered him to leave Sparta immediately and stop wasting his time with his ludicrous proposals.\n\nThe story plays up the strange nature of maps: they represent reality, but a reality that is distorted beyond recognition by the process of its conversion to the map's limited dimensions. They need a key, a legend, to be properly understood. Greek authors saw the humorous potential of errors in translation, as shown in this splendid joke from Aristophanes' *Clouds*, written at the height of the Peloponnesian War:\n\n & nbsp;\n\n > **Disciple of Sokrates:** See, here's a map of the whole earth. Do you see? This is Athens.\n\n > **Strepsiades:** What's that? I don't believe you. I do not see the jurors sitting.^1\n\n > **Dis.:** Be assured that this is truly the Attic territory.\n\n > **Strep.:** Why, where are my fellow tribesmen of Kikynna?\n\n > **Dis.:** Here they are. And Euboia here, as you see, is stretched out a long way by the side of it to a great distance.\n\n > **Strep.:** I know that; for it was stretched by us and Perikles.^2 But where is Sparta?\n\n > **Dis.:** Where is it? Here it is.\n\n > **Strep.:** It's too close! Pay great attention to this: remove it very far from us.\n\n & nbsp;\n\n---\n\nHistorical notes:\n\n1) About 457 BC, Perikles introduced pay for jury service as a way to democratise justice and/or get the people on his side. After this, Athens came to be seen as an excessively litigious place, where people were only too happy to judge an endless parade of court cases, since it provided them with a nice bit of extra money from the state. Aristophanes frequently characterises Athenian democracy purely through its law courts - for instance in the *Birds*, where it is the noise of the courts in session that drives the main characters to leave town.\n\n2) In 447/6 BC, Euboia revolted from Athens, considerably worsening the already dire situation for Athens in the so-called First Peloponnesian War. Perikles responded by quickly making peace with Sparta and then leading the Athenian army over to Euboia to punish the rebels. The verb \"to stretch\" can be interpreted in various ways here, but is probably meant to suggest the metaphorical rape of the island.\n\n", " Arrr arrr! Did ye ever wonder what a *real* pirate treasure map looked like? \n\nWell I'm afraid we don't have a real pirate *treasure* map (although pirates [did bury treasure](_URL_1_)), but we do have maps drawn by actual pirates. \n\nBasil Ringrose was an English buccaneer in the late 17th century who left a very detailed journal of his piratical voyages against the Spanish on the Pacific coasts of the Americas during the early 1680s. His actual journal published in 1685 recounting his voyage of 1680-1682 can be read [here](_URL_8_). However, Ringrose also wrote a companion booklet to his journal which was a pilot book copied from a captured Spanish one containing many useful charts and maps of the Pacific coasts of the Americas, which at this point were completely under Spanish dominion and Ringrose was one of the first Englishmen to explore it since English privateers like Francis Drake a century earlier. It may have actually been in return for these invaluable charts that Charles II granted a royal pardon to Ringrose and his buccaneer companions when they returned to England in 1682 and stood trial on charges of piracy. So while these might not be *treasure maps* as in maps to treasure, they were a sort of treasure themselves since they allowed future English interlopers to better navigate the Pacific coasts and had to be captured from the Spanish just like any chest of gold or silver. \n\nAll of Ringrose's never before published maps and charts drawn in 1682 can be viewed [here](_URL_6_) but I've selected a few that I think are the best.\n\n[Ringrose's depiction of Lima and Callao in Peru](_URL_2_)\n\n[Ringrose's depiction of Rio de Simultan in Peru or Mexico](_URL_3_)\n\n[Ringrose's depiction of Acapulca in Mexico](_URL_10_) \n\n[Ringrose's depiction of El Viejo in Mexico](_URL_4_)\n\n[Ringrose's depiction of Sierra de Paneca](_URL_0_) \n\nLastly if anyone wants to see a pirate's real handwriting, [this](_URL_9_) is a title page written and signed by Basil Ringrose. \n\nAs one can kind of see in the above maps, they are more crudely drawn than fancier and more expensive maps of the time and they actually look quite a bit like the stereotypical pirate maps of popular culture. But Ringrose was certainly a real buccaneer. In fact, Ringrose was killed only a year after his journal was published on February 19, 1686, when he was ambushed and massacred along with a party of 50 buccaneers while plundering provisions in Mexico. Ringrose's friend, William Dampier, describes this in his own journal published in 1697:\n\n > The Spaniards observing their manner of marching, had laid an Ambush about a Mile from the Town, which they managed with great success, and falling on our body of Men, who were guarding the Corn to the Canoas, they killed them every one. Capt. Swan hearing the report of their Guns, ordered his Men, who were then in the Town with him, to march out to their assistance; but some opposed him, despising their Enemies, till two of the Spaniards Horses that had lost their Riders, came galloping into the Town in a great fright, both bridled and saddled, with each a pair of Holsters by their sides, and one had a Carbine newly discharged; which was an apparent token that our Men had been engaged, and that by Men better armed than they imagined they should meet with. Therefore Captain Swan immediately march'd out of the Town, and his Men followed him; and when he came to the place where the Engagement had been, he saw all his Men that went out in the Morning lying dead. They were stript, and so cut and mangled, that he scarce knew one Man. \n\n > **...We had about 50 Men killed, and among the rest, my ingenious Friend Mr. Ringrose was one, who wrote that Part of the *History of the Buccaneers*, which relates to Capt. Sharp. He was at this time Cape-Merchant, or Super-Cargo of Capt. Swan's Ship. He had no mind to this Voyage; but was necessitated to engage in it or starve.** (Dampier, 188-89)\n\nThe journal of William Dampier can be read [here](_URL_5_). \n\nAnother interesting map, although probably not drawn by a buccaneer himself, was published along with the book *The Buccaneers of America* published in Dutch in 1678 and translated into English in 1684 and written by the French buccaneer Alexandre Exquemelin. [This](_URL_7_) map depicts the Isthmus of Panama as it appeared in 1671 when Henry Morgan marched an army of 2,000 buccaneers across the peninsula and sacked the city of Panama before returning, which is recounted in detail in the book. ", "I'm not a historian, just someone who likes to read history blogs, but one interesting thing I stumbled across is [this post](_URL_1_) claiming that the Waldseemuller map made a surprisingly accurate depiction of the west coast of South America several years before any European is known to have gone there.\n\nThe Waldseemuller map is famous for popularizing the name \"America\" for the two western hemisphere continents. [Here's](_URL_0_) an old AH post about it with discussion by u/Imperial_Affectation and others.", "Excellent topic! Exploration era is heavily interconnected to chartmaking and astronomy, and there are plenty of intriguing stories to tell! I'll focus to the ones relating to the Portuguese\n\n\nFirst is more about historiography I guess. In the fifteenth century there are several textual references to the Portuguese charts and charting. Yet there are only several known Portuguese maps dated to 15th century, all from the last quarter (I'll list them here: [Anonymous chart](_URL_2_) c1470s, [Pedro Reinel chart](_URL_3_) c1485, [Aguiar chart](_URL_0_) 1492). \n\nIn 1504 King Manuel forbid, on penalty of death, creation of charts showing lands past Congo in order to prevent it reaching other nations. Various 20th century historians have studied this event and dubbed it official policy of \"Secrecy\" (\"Sigilo\" i believe). The \"policy\", as some historians interpreted it, claimed that the Portuguese officials were actively suppressing cartographic information on the new discoveries. The theory soon evolved and claimed they didn't just censor geographical info, but all and any news from the new lands. Then the policy was then said to had actually started even before under King Joao II! No proper evidence of this exists because, theory goes, the policy enforcers were so efficient it also erased all evidence of the policy itself! Now it should be obvious how dangerous such line of thinking can be. If you introduce an action that erases all evidence, including that of erasure, you can claim pretty much anything. Which is what happens a lot in some Portuguese circles. And soon the theories of Pre-Columbus reaching of Americas abounded, thriving in their 'perfect' defense. \"Where's the evidence?\" \"Suppressed by the policy of secrecy!\" \n\nNeedless to say, most cold headed historians dismiss, or are highly skeptical, of this theory, especially of the flawless execution of the theory on which it kind of depends. \n\n---\n\nThe second item i want to talk about is about start of latitude measurements in navigation. Now for the most part, before the mid 15th century Europeans did not use celestial navigation, other then use north star for direction and some literally hand measurements of the height for some rough idea of latitude. The Arabs in the Indian ocean actually did measure North star's altitude (and had some really fascinating more complex methods to measure other stars when North star wasn't visible) but that doesn't seem to had reached Europeans. In the Mediterranean they were mostly using just compass-portolan chart combination coupled with coastal recognition. When the Portuguese started sailing the ocean, especially on [returning from Guinea](_URL_1_) they had to sail far into the ocean, away from land. To do so, celestial navigation was necessary. First evidence of use of astronomical tools for this is usually given to be use of quadrant for finding North Star in the 1460s (but this comes from an account given in the 1490s) and it describes how the man simply notched the latitudes of landmarks like Lisbon directly on his quadrant, so that he has it for return. But as Portuguese were sailing further and further south something more sophisticated had to be used.\n\nIn 1480s we finally come to the interesting part. In what is one of the rare examples of top-down, organized approach to identifying and solving a problem, King Joao II was determined to solve the issue of determining latitude at sea. He brought together various astronomers and men of science available to him (some jewish), and tasked them to solve the issue. They solved it by measuring the sun's altitude to calculate latitude. Now this technique was known to astronomers already from at least the times of ancient Greeks, so it wasn't something new, but Portuguese for the first time adapted it for navigating on ships. Besides the theoretical work like translating Abraham Zacuto (a spanish Jew) table of solar declinations, the scientific \"junta\" also simplified the overly complex astronomical instruments (quadrant and astrolabe). Also some of the top scientists themselves went on a survey to Guinea and Africa to compile measurements of latitudes of various places and check their theories and if the whole system actually works! \n\nWhen the work was completed, training to pilots was provided and the booklet with compiled information was given to Portuguese navigators. We have a 1509 printed edition surviving called \"Regimento do estrolabio e do quadrante de Munich\" Munich being the place where the book was found. You can view the fascimile [here](_URL_4_).\n\nThe latitudes of places were actually first given just as a list, and not on a map. Only since circa 1500 had latitudes been incorporated on portolan charts (here is an example of [Pedro Reinel chart](_URL_5_) from 1504 with latitude scale). But adding latitude's scale faced the early cartographers with a new problem: map projections. You can't just add a simple square grid of latitudes and longitudes to a portolan map made from compass directions, especially with magnetic declination. More so, it's a non-trivial issue to map the spherical earth into two dimensional chart. This problem would trouble European cartographers for quite some time.\n\n\n", " So I am a little late to the game with this post but I love maps and I wanted to share one of my favorite early modern books about maps and mapmaking. In Peter Apian’s *Cosmographicus liber* \\(1524\\) the author discusses the discipline of cosmography, which was rooted in the writings of Ptolemy and provided an overview of the regions of the earth and the larger cosmos as well as some instructions for reading and understanding \\(and even producing\\) maps! Apian’s book became one of the most popular books on the subject and was published in multiple languages for over sixty years. I am including [this image](_URL_0_), not because it is one of his most ornate or beautiful—you can find those by flipping through the pages—but because it highlights the genuine curiosity its readers must have had when learning the relative distances between places and the theories which comprised map\\-making. After all, Apian’s book was likely not for navigational specialists or scholars but an interested lay audience. With the discovery of the Americas only a few decades earlier, the idea of a map was an excellent way of illustrating one’s place in the world as well as its relationship to the larger whole. " ] }

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[ "https://imgur.com/a/NV4aHx3", "https://www.strava.com/heatmap#4.55/-107.24315/39.48120/blue/run" ]

[ [ "http://theblogthattimeforgot.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/hyborian-musings-mappa-mundi.html" ], [ "https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/Discover/Search/#/?p=c+1,t+portolan,rsrs+0,rsps+10,fa+,so+ox%3Asort%5Easc,scids+,pid+,vi+", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7sja6m/what_do_the_intersecting_lines_all_over_old_maps/", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Portolan_chart_by_Albino_de_Canepa_1489.jpg" ], [], [ "https://imgur.com/a/LGXujKr", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7xqjrb/thursday_reading_research_february_15_2018/duauqlf/", "https://imgur.com/a/KRQh1wx", "https://imgur.com/a/u11Gyum", "https://imgur.com/a/pnenFQb", "http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500461h.html", "https://books.google.com/books?id=Zi0G3nwOxNIC&q=published+#v=onepage&q&f=false", "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Buccaneers_of_America#/media/File:The_Buccaneers_of_America_27.jpg", "https://archive.org/stream/buccaneersofamer00exqu#page/n333/mode/2up", "https://imgur.com/a/s2GSBmb", "https://imgur.com/a/wGmzvpI" ], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3c8wa6/when_naming_america_why_do_they_use_amerigo/", "http://jimcofer.com/personal/2007/12/05/the-mystery-of-waldseemuller/" ], [ "https://imgur.com/quyha8k", "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Henrican_navigation_routes.gif/250px-Henrican_navigation_routes.gif", "https://imgur.com/lowAwut", "https://imgur.com/hpAgBlJ", "https://archive.org/details/regimentodoestro00bens", "https://imgur.com/XbTObyo" ], [ "http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/bsb00064968/image_70" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fgyh5xn" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "There is a thread about the temple-builders on Malta [here](_URL_0_) with a lot of discussion and source recommendations by myself and others." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e8vvfk/who_were_the_temple_builders_of_malta_and_what/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dkijwdu" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "It doesn't fully answer your question but it is slightly relevant so check out [this](_URL_0_) answer by u/Kiviimar" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5tlx1e/how_did_the_vikings_view_islam_as_compared_to/?st=j5do5t93&sh=becc87f7" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "duxurv3" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "The Zimmermann Telegram was a message sent from the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt. As it was a message from one German speaker to another, the original plaintext was in German. The message was sent in two different ways; directly to Mexico City, and as an appendix to a longer message to the German ambassador in Washington, for re-transmission on to Mexico. Each of these two messages was enciphered in a different code. The message to Washington was sent in the newer Code 0075 (7500 in Allied sources), while the message to Mexico was sent in the older Code 13040 - the Mexico City embassy had yet to receive the new codebooks. \n\nBoth of these worked in very similar ways. They were code books, containing a vocabulary with a 'code group' corresponding to each word - a code group is a string of random numbers. For example, in 0075, the code group 0979 translates to Mexico. The difference between the two codes came in how the code groups were assigned to words. In 13040, each code group was 4 or 5 digits long. The first two/three gave the page number, the rest gave the position on the page. The words were originally numbered in straight alphabetical order, before the pages were shuffled (and each group of ten words on those pages). In 0075, the groups were four digits long, and were assigned randomly to each word in the book. As a result, it didn't really matter what language the original message was written in - as long as you knew which word corresponded to which code group, you could decipher the message directly into English. The British codebreakers tended to work in the original German though.\n\nThe British intercepted the message sent to Washington in Code 0075 - it was sent through an American telegraph cable from the American Embassy in Berlin, but was intercepted as this cable passed through London. Code 0075 had been introduced in November 1916, and the main British decryption centre, the Admiralty's Room 40, had been working on it ever since. They had not been able to fully reconstruct the code book by January 1917, but could read enough of the message to understand its significance. Nigel De Gray, one of the British codebreakers working on the telegraph (the other was Dilly Knox), described the work:\n\n > The telegram was sorted first to Knox whose business it was to fill in\nany known groups. His knowledge of German was at that time too slender\nfor him to tackle any difficult passages in telegrams (and German\ndiplomatic telegrams can be very ponderous) so that the procedure was\nthat if the telegrams appeared from what could be read to have any interest\nhe brought them to me for further study.\n > We could at once read enough groups for Knox to see that the telegram\nwas important. Together he and I worked all morning upon it. With\nour crude methods and lack of staff no elaborate indexing of groups had\nbeen developed—only constantly recurring groups were noted in the working copies of the code as our fancy dictated. Work therefore was\nslow and laborious but by about mid-day we had got a skeleton version,\nsweating with excitement because neither of us doubted the importance\nof what we had in our hands.\n\nThis gives a clear indication of the way they worked: firstly, they would use their existing knowledge of Code 0075 to translate what groups they could. This was the easy part. They would then work to cross-correlate recurring groups, which would likely relate to the subject of the message. They were unable to completely decipher the message, but inferred the meaning of certain group - for example, they did not manage to work out that the group 0979 meant Mexico for certain, but suspected this was the case. The message was translated to English as they worked. \n\nThe deciphered 0075 message clearly indicated German plans. However, this information could not easily be disseminated to the USA, as to do so would give away Britain's ability to break 0075, and the fact that the British were reading American diplomatic cables. The information in the message could also not easily be verified. To get around these awkward facts, the British decided to obtain one of the copies sent to the embassy in Mexico. They managed to procure one of the messages sent to Mexico in 13040, from the Mexican telegraph office. Most of Code 13040 had been broken by Room 40 early in the war, and as such, it was easy for them to break this copy of the Telegram. This version of the telegram was passed to the USA. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cjwo4e4", "cjxcno1" ], "score": [ 39, 3 ], "text": [ "The answer is yes and no. Hiroyuki Agawa, a former IJN naval intelligence officer turned naval historian famously quipped \"the three greatest follies of the workd were the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids and the battleship *Yamato*.\" Despite the vast effort expended in their design and construction, the Yamato-class had a number of defects. Their main guns were inefficient, the armor belt had defects, and the all-or nothing armor scheme made them vulnerable to torpedo attacks. More critically, the design possessed insufficient range and speed for a transpacific war, which is why they sat out the Guadalcanal campaign- they would have used too much fuel and be exposed to Allied airpower on the return to Rabaul/Truk. In hindsight, the resources would have been better spent on other ships. \n\nHowever, the claim that Japan should have launched two-three *Shokaku*s for one *Yamato* is problematic. Japan had very limited industrial base that imposed enormous bottlenecks on its wartime industry. Although having another *Shokaku* around would have been useful in 1942, the slow pace of aviation production and the patchwork expansion of the IJN's training of aviators would have meant that such hypothetical carriers would have lacked the planes to put on them or the personnel to man and maintain them. \n\nThe dilemma of the IJN was that they had lost the war with the US as soon as they embarked upon it. Evans and Peattie have a shocking statistic that if the IJN had managed to sink *every* major USN vessel on 7 December (both Atlantic and Pacific), suffered no major losses in its campaigns, and completed its overly optimistic building plans, the IJN would still be an outnumbered force by mid-1943.\n\n*Sources*\n\nAgawa, Hiroyuki. *The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy*. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979. \n\nEvans, David C., and Mark R. Peattie. *Kaigun: Strategy, Tactics, and Technology in the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1887-1941*. Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, 1997. \n\nPeattie, Mark R. *Sunburst: The Rise of the Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941*. Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, 2001. ", "I need to dig into my sources but I did quite a lot of research into Naval Intelligence.\n\nA lot of people would raise the question (more generic than yours but still related) that why major naval powers kept producing large battleships when Naval Air Power advantage was proven rendering battleships almost obsolete. The US for instance kept developing and producing several units of the large Iowa Class.\n\nThere was 1 thing though in the thinking of the time -the 1 I need to research - but long story short is that there were few aircraft carriers in service and Midway proved that a significant part of them can be wiped out with successful air strikes, should this has happened and both sides got their carrier force reduced to levels too small to make an impact in the war, what are you left with to ensure naval superiority? Battleships.\n\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ed1vlbo" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "There is more to be said here, but you may get a partial answer from my previous response:\n\n[Why did the tunic fall out of favor in Europe?](_URL_0_)\n\nI'd be happy to answer any follow-up questions!" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/71pj5t/why_did_the_tunic_fall_out_of_favor_in_europe/dndgre6/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cl13xy1" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "The Prose and Poetic Eddas are really your only options when it comes to Norse Mythology. If you're looking for scholarly discussions of them, Terry Gunnel is always a good option - he just finished putting together a collection on apocalyptic themes called *The Nordic Apocalypse*. John Lindow's got his *Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs*, which is a kind of cheat-sheet, but shouldn't be a crutch.\n\nAlso, starting with Ragnarök isn't really the best idea, as it's the culmination of the Poetic Edda, and references things that happened earlier." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5qivpp", "c5qn0uf", "c5qn9qa" ], "score": [ 21, 5, 3 ], "text": [ "Despite the fact that War and Peace is fairly accurate, I would not rely on it as a source. It's still historical fiction, even though it's the best historical fiction ever. \n\nKutuzov served under Suvorov, who has an almost mythical status in Russian military history, and gained a lot from his time with him. Also, he was extremely popular, both with his soldiers and with the people. He was a seasoned commander and he was Russian unlike many other generals in the Russian army at the time. \n\nYou mentioned the episode as Austerlitz. It is very telling, actually. He was not in command, but he knew that he would be blamed for an inevitable defeat because he was the commander in name only. So, he pretended to sleep in order to avoid the blame for the defeat. \n\nAs far as his generalship, he was proven as a very capable commander in many engagements with the Ottoman Empire. Take a look at his campaigns in the Russo-Turkish War that took place between the War of the Third Coalition and the invasion of Russia. His forces performed well during Borodino as well, and he executed the campaign to tail and harass the French retreat very well. \n\nMy opinion is that he was and is loved for his leadership abilities more than for his skills as a general, but he was a very capable general and proved it many times. ", "Tolstoy, to put it mildly, equated Kutuzov as a complete hero as well as an equal to Napoleon as a tactician and a general. In reality, he was nowhere near Napoleon's skill and record on the battlefield, but he was still quite a skilled and charismatic commander nonetheless.\n\nHe proved himself as a pretty able commander in the Russo-Turkish War from 1806 to 1812, where he helped to encircle and destroy the Ottoman Army at the battle of the Danube. It was for this reason that the public of Russia demanded that he take command of the main Russian Army (1st and 2nd Armies) that were soon to face Napoleon, as a replacement to the highly unpopular (but still capable nonetheless) Barclay de Tolly, who insisted on retreating and preserving his army over fighting the French for key cities like Smolensk and Moscow (the former of which lost him his remaining credibility among his staff and army). Alexander I, Czar at the time, placed Kutuzov in command knowing that, should the general fail in battle against Napoleon, he would have been the choice of the people, and not the monarch, leaving him free reign to choose a new commander without blame being placed on him for the defeat.\n\nIn short, he was definitely a skilled general and was a very charismatic leader, despite his age, but he is sometimes falsely described as a \"superior\" to Napoleon. Even for his age, Kutuzov proved himself as one of Russia's best generals at Borodino. Despite losing the fight in the end, and suffering over 40,000 casualties, he kept his army together and managed to inflict a severe amount of casualties on the French by utilizing the pride the Russian soldiers had for making a stand and defending Moscow (which Napoleon could not draw upon, as his force was a mix of French, Dutch, German, Polish, and Italian soldiers), as well as ordering the Raevsky Redoubt and the Bagration fleches to be constructed which, despite being of poor quality, definitely made an effect during the battle.\n\nIf you want to read about the prelude to the invasion of Russia, including the battle of Borodino, the fall of Moscow, Napoleon's retreat, and all the way down the line two years later to Leipzig and the fall of Napoleon, read [Russia Against Napoleon](_URL_0_) by Prof. Dominic Lieven, which is a very good read and source for the war.\n\nEDIT: Also, to answer your last question, I believe he was. Bagration, though even more charismatic and inspiring than Kutuzov, did not have the record to back himself up, and likely would not have performed well as commander of the 1st and 2nd Armies (the 1st Army originally being under de Tolly, the 2nd under Bagration), despite his later sacrificial but effective command of the Russian left at Borodino. When de Tolly assumed overall command of the two armies after they both combined shortly after Napoleon's invasion began, as well as personal command of the first, he shared beliefs with Alexander I that the Russian Army had to avoid battle at all costs, and would draw Napoleon's supply and communication lines extremely thin. When he offered what most at the time considered a \"half-assed\" fight (for lack of a better term, sorry) at Smolensk, Alexander chose to relieve de Tolly and replace him with Kutuzov to avoid public embarrassment for himself (Later, at Borodino, de Tolly would command the Russian right flank and led from the front by inspiring his men to fight on, and he would later be vindicated by the Czar and the people).\n\nRussia definitely had skilled generals in 1812, but for command of the entire army, there was no better choice than Kutuzov.", "Sort of unrelated and I apologize for that, but which translation of War and Peace is considered the best? It's almost the next item on my reading list." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.amazon.com/Russia-Against-Napoleon-Story-Campaigns/dp/0670021571" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d9yzz9g" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "\"[Shooting an Elephant](_URL_0_)\" by George Orwell. He was a police officer during colonial days in British-run Burma (Myanmar). The story tells of a time when local people required him to shoot a mad elephant- he didn't want to do it, and in theory he was the authority figure. But he was trapped by his position.\n\nIt's not clear whether it's a historical event, or a parable about the relationship between colonists and the colonised. But it works either way." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cc2mhko" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "I'm not a professional historian, but I consider myself a student of modern China, and have read a reasonable amount on the subject.\n\nI think calling Mao \"the most evil man of all time\" is a strong exaggeration. I would in fact defend him from that. In my mind, Hitler remains the most evil person in modern history, as his genocides were often motivated along the lines of innate characteristics of people: ethnic background, etc. Stalin and Mao were generally more motivated by politics and political expediency.\n\nHowever, Mao was certainly a \"bad\" man. You can argue for or against communism in and of itself, but Mao's collectivization in the late 50s ended in disaster: in short, widespread famine. *Mao's Great Famine* by Frank Dikötter is a good source on this, and puts the resulting death toll at around 45 million Chinese. Mao was a military leader and politician, and a poor economist and planner, so he was motivated by struggle, perhaps viewed sacrifice as a real virtue, and made ridiculous assumptions about China's economy and resultant promises to internal and external stakeholders (promising grain to the Soviets, etc.), which caused a fairly epic collapse in the Chinese economy. This might be his greatest failure. As a result, collectivization was eventually canceled. \n\nThe other \"bad\" led by Mao was the Cultural Revolution, a period of great upheaval within China from '66 to '71. During this time, the intelligentsia and any other \"capitalist roaders\" (simplified as anyone who showed signs of being a capitalist or rightist - although that's not even entirely accurate) were purged from the party, universities and positions of power, often being forced to move to the countryside to work on farms or in factories, or even jailed or killed. There were regular periods of anarchy as competing interests fought for control of policy, right down to huge groups of students roaming the country destroying and pillaging (historical relics, people who weren't adequately devoted to Mao). During this time, Mao was infallible and his deputies fought for his favour. Deng Xiaoping, later effectively the leader of China after Mao's death, even had to go work in a factory. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who was particularly extreme, and her Gang of Four, I would say held Mao's ear until things came to a head in '71. At that time, Jiang Qing was imprisoned and Deng was rehabilitated. Mao escaped virtually all criticism, even though he abetted everything that occurred during the Cultural Revolution.\n\nTogether, the famine and the Cultural Revolution probably set China's progress back by decades. I'd say Mao's death was the best thing to happen to China, once the communist revolution occurred (whether that itself was a good or bad thing is another matter). Although Deng effectively presided over the Tiananmen Square massacre, otherwise he is basically responsible for the opening of China and China's rise into a superpower. And I'd say he was fairly pragmatic. Mao was not.\n\nAs for the history of the communist revolution, I have a book on my shelf that focuses on this topic from the Chinese perspective (it's a translation), but I haven't read it. In short, you had something of a power vacuum following WW1. Various warlords ruled pieces of China until Chiang Kai-shek and Mao ended up fighting each other and the Japanese during WW2, and Mao ended up winning that fight, forcing Kai-shek over to Taiwan, which remains separate from the mainland even today, although Beijing certainly wants it back.\n\nI am in the midst of reading *A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China* by Tyler, which is a bit older but a very interesting record of how various US administrations approached the Chinese communists. \n\nI'll add that I don't think China is communist, in any real sense of the word, and really never was. A better description is a kleptocratic totalitarian state ruled by a political elite that spends their entire life in backroom dealings to gain allies and work their way up in the administration. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cnxwjx3", "cny2k2d", "cny3gy2", "cny4czo", "cny4r6t", "cny6mu6", "cnyc71d" ], "score": [ 447, 62, 2, 17, 7, 5, 4 ], "text": [ "You have to understand that even in an absolute monarchy, Kings and Queens who were underage nearly always had a regent, that is, someone who would run the Kingdom until they were an adult (Whatever age that may be in the culture/society they were in). \n\nI have never heard of a single underaged King/Queen who've had an actual effect on the day-to-day running of a country, and to be fair, it's somewhat of a silly idea. People in the past were not unreasonable or fundamentally different from us now, if they had seen something like this, they probably would've had the same thoughts as us; that is, that it'd be unreasonable. Can you imagine someone taking a 6-year old heir to the throne who says 'make me ice cream for every meal' and being forced to do such a thing?", "Hobbes did, in [Chapter 19 of Leviathan](_URL_0_). He didn't so much call it absurd, as discuss how the potential for an infant to succeed a monarch distributes the genuine power of sovereignty to the regent and/or advisors. \n\nKeep in mind the context of his writing, also. In 1651, his native England had just been through a series of civil wars between Parliament and the monarchy. Hobbes was writing in France, since his association with royalists (one of his patrons was a staunchly royalist earl) came with significant danger.", "Weren't there cases of this in China? I recall there was a child emperor during the Mongol invasion however I don't know if they had any authority over their appointed ministers or not.", "Not sure I understand what you mean by \"madness\" or \"appointing\". Monarchs succeeded, they were normally not appointed. This was not considered mad or sane; it was simply the law of the land.\n\nVery young heirs could be a problem though. Ecclesiastes 10:16 says: \"Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child\". This was often quoted by medieval commentators. The reason why this was problematic, was that it would often lead to infighting within the political elite over who would control government, i.e. act as regent(s).\n\nFurthermore, the regents were only expected to act as caretakers, and not pursue active political agendas the way a ruler would. This could lead to stagnation in both domestic and international affairs.\n\nA prime example of this would be Henry VI of England. Henry became king at nine months, and his long nonage has often been blamed for England's turn of fortune in the Hundred Years' War.\n\nThe real problem with Henry VI, however, was that his childhood never really ended, though he grew to be 49. But that's another story...", "/u/Skyicewolf 's answer is correct - that when an underage monarch ascended to the throne, a regent or regency council would generally rule in their name. More generally, in the Middle Ages a country *per se* without a king was more or less conceptually impossible - kingship was thought to be the natural state of affairs, and kingless \"nations\" (in the Latin sense of the term) were considered sort of a logical paradox (eg, the case of \"Commonwealth\"-era Iceland.) Medieval corporatist theory (or assumptions, really, as thinkers didn't tend much towards introspection in this aspect of political thought) held that society was innately hierarchical, and that a king as \"lex animata\" (the animate law) was more or less a prerequisite for its functioning. So in response to your question, a medieval observer would likely have asked \"How could we *not* have a king?\"\n\n(Certainly there were kingless societies - much of Italy, the later medieval Hanseatic free states - and to be honest I'm not really sure how their existence was justified. It's not something I've studied much.)", "In Britain from 1751 to 1937, whenever a child was heir to the throne there was specific pre-emptive legislation outlining who would be regent in the particular circumstances. From 1937 general, rather than specific, rules deal with such cases.\n\nThe first act solely concerning arrangements for regency during a child's rule was the *Minority of Successor to Crown Act 1751*, which dealt with the 12-year-old Prince George (later George III), whose father Frederick (King George II's eldest son) had died while George II was still alive.\n\nOnce King George III had children, there was another act concerning what would happen if he were to die while they were still young: the *Minority of Heir to the Crown Act 1765*.\n\n(The first acts solely about the regency of minority rulers concerned George III - before and during his reign - so it's interesting to note that he endured the only period of regency in modern British history at the end of his reign (1811 - 1820).)\n\nThe next potential child-ruler was Queen Victoria, and a Regency Act was passed in 1830 in anticipation. However, she turned 18 on 24 May 1837, one month she became queen on 20 June 1837, and regency was avoided.\n\nThe final case-specific Regency Act was passed in 1910 and concerned the possibility of George V being succeeded by the then 16-year-old Edward (later Edward VIII). George V died in 1936; thus regency was well avoided.\n\nThe *Regency Act 1937* (passed in anticipation of the accession of the then under-aged Elizabeth) laid down general rules. This act (amended in 1943 and 1953) forms the basis of what would happen today if Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Charles (her eldest child), and Prince William (his eldest child) all lost their place in the line of succession before Prince George (William's son) came of age.", "Thomas Paine gave a great breakdown of the arguments in favor of and opposing monarchy in *Common Sense.* The frequency of children inheriting the throne comes up. In fact it's one of his arguments for why a monarchical government is less likely to produce capable leaders than an elected one:\n\n*\"Another evil which attends hereditary succession is, that the throne is subject to be possessed by a minor at any age; all which time the regency acting under the cover of a king have every opportunity and inducement to betray their trust. The same national misfortune happens when a king worn out with age and infirmity enters the last stage of human weakness. In both these cases the public becomes a prey to every miscreant who can tamper successfully with the follies either of age or infancy.*\n\n*The most plausible plea which hath ever been offered in favor of hereditary succession is, that it preserves a nation from civil wars; and were this true, it would be weighty; whereas it is the most bare-faced falsity ever imposed upon mankind. The whole history of England disowns the fact. Thirty kings and two minors have reigned in that distracted kingdom since the conquest, in which time there has been (including the revolution) no less than eight civil wars and nineteen Rebellions. Wherefore instead of making for peace, it makes against it, and destroys the very foundation it seems to stand upon.\"*\n\nGiven the popularity of *Common Sense* at the time of its publication, it's fair to assume that Americans by this time held similar views." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-d.html#CHAPTERXIX" ], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e5y7vxr" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The US at the start of WW2 was the largest oil producers at 1940. In this graph [here](_URL_0_) the US produces 182 million of metric tons of oil each year. It was out producing almost every other top oil producing countries on the list combined. \n\nThe US didn’t really rely on Dutch East Indies too much aside from one resource: rubber. Most of the rubber in the world came from the East Indies. Rubber is mostly used for tires and tank treads. For a country to commit to this new mobile warfare where you need trucks and other vehicles to keep with the tanks, it’s really important to have rubber to keep your vehicles working properly. The US would solve this shortage with synthetic rubber and it would be fine during the rest of the war.\n\nThe US didn’t really rely too much from SE Asia aside from rubber and maybe a few other resources. But the US made more than enough oil for itself and didn’t really have anyone undercutting them yet. " ] }

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[ [ "http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/league/le0280ah.pdf" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c9eck7j" ], "score": [ 166 ], "text": [ "When Thatcher became Prime Minister, Great-Britain (GB later on) was referred to as \"the sick man in Europe\". In the previous 2 decades, there was an average GDP growth of about 0.8%. The inflation rate was incredibly high, in the 1970's the lowest inflation rate was 7.7%. \n\nThatcher became Prime Minister under these circumstances, and she had a neoliberal ideology: to achieve economic growth and a stabile inflation rate, government companies would need to be privatized, new taxes should be implemented, and government spending would need to decrease. She increased the interest rate to reduce inflation. Expenditures on social services and housing were diminished.\n\nIn her view, the British workers were paid too much/weren't flexible enough, and as you are probably aware, unions never want to see the wages of the workers drop. In that time the union stance collided with Thatcher's policies. There were numerous strikes in that age and Thatcher argued that this harmed the economy (which makes sense of course).\n\nHer policies of austerity and general anti-union stance lead to her introducing several pieces of legislation to curb their power. \n\nAfter she curbed the unions' power through legislation, an even bigger confrontation happened: she wanted to close 20 of the 174 state-owned mines, since they weren't making a profit. Closing those mines would lead to a job loss of 20 000 out of 187 000 miners. \n\nNaturally the miners' union (the National Union of Mineworkers) wasn't happy about this, and lead by Arthur Scargill, they announced a strike. Scargill announced the strike without letting union members vote on it, and not everyone was in favour of striking (for instance in the Nottinghamshire branch 20 000 out of 27 000 voted against it, see \"Miners on Strike: Class Solidarity and Division in Britain\" by Andrew Richards). The strike wasn't even [supported](_URL_0_ by all the miners. Other unions didn't fully support the stike by the miners either.\n\nThatcher on the other hand, made her intentions clear:\n\n > We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.\n\nShe wouldn't give in to the demands of the NUM. The strike later ended without Thatcher giving in.\n\nAs for the accusations of corruption, contemporary media accused the NUM leaders of working with the [Libyan government](_URL_1_), and some media even claiming they had received payments from Libyan government agents. Those accusations were later proven to be false.\n\nIn 2007, the Daily Mail published an [article](_URL_2_) how Scargill (leader of the NUM) sought funds from the Soviets at the peek of the miners' strike. You *could* interpret that as corruption, but personally I don't. As for \"paid to do nothing\", this is pretty common in strikes I believe. When a union here in Belgium announces a strike, the strikers receive a compensation from the union funds. They do lose their wage because they're not working afer all, so I don't see anything wrong with that.\n\nAs for \"breaking up the unions\": when Thatcher assumed office the trade unions in Britain were powerful, and opposed reforms Thatcher thought were necessary for an economic recovery. This lead to a stand-off in the miners' strike. Thatcher emerged victorious, the strike ended after one year without Thatcher giving any concessions whatsoever, and the miners losing popular support. When the strike began, it was supported by 33% of the population, when it ended 88% of the population opposed the strike.\n\nEDIT: About the role of the unions, and this is **my personal opinion** (so feel fee to remove this mods): unions always want to protect the working lower class. This is absolutely a good thing. They seek to keep the wages of the working class as high as possible, also a good thing. Sometimes the problem with unions is, they only speak in name of the people they represent (can't blame them), instead of looking at the economy of the country. They represent the working class, not the unemployed.\n\nI do believe this to be the case in Belgium (where I live), where there has been a long-term tradition of making the wages automatically adjust to the inflation rate. \nThis has lead to our country having a competitive gap with neighboring countries when it comes to salaries paid by companies and this gap is still growing. Yet the unions refuse to talk about halting the indexation of the salaries. Again, this is exactly their job to look out for the wages of the people they represent, but that isn't necessarily good for the rest of the country. When GB was in crisis, the unions refused to talk about possible economic reforms since they thought those would make the wages drop, leading to a lot of social unrest. Unions are definitely necessary in my opinion, but giving them too much power would harm the economy. " ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984-1985#Variation_in_observing_the_strike)", "http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,926945,00.html", "http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-448602/How-Scargill-begged-Kremlin-fund-miners-fight-Thatcher.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "daqy1id" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "Prior to Peter I and Catherine II, Russian court language was a kind of Church Slavonic, and showed a mix of East Slavic features that we find in modern Russian along with a large proportion of South Slavic loanwords. To illustrate, a noble at court might have remarked that the weather was *x****la****dnaja* 'cold', using a form you'd find in Church Slavonic, which was fundamentally South Slavic, (cf Slovene *hladen*), while a peasant in the countryside would have said instead that it was *x****olo****dnaja*, using an East Slavic form.\n\nSo, that left Russian nobles in a sort of double-bind: on the one hand, they had their court language, which was heavily associated with the Orthodox Church--not exactly an institution Russian monarchs liked during the Enlightenment--and thus associated with 'backwardness'; on the other hand, there was vernacular Russian, which just didn't have a vocabulary that would allow it to be easily used in a court setting, and was also associated with 'backwardness', 'roughness', and other negative stereotypes of peasants or serfs.\n\nFrench's place in the Russian court grew out of modernizing efforts begun by Peter the Great. He and later monarchs encouraged Russian nobles to learn foreign languages, and French was the lingua franca of diplomacy at the time and thus *de rigueur* for anyone at court. French had a lot of social prestige and cachet for other reasons as well: France and French speakers were a center of the Enlightenment, something with which both Peter I and Catherine II were pretty pre-occupied with. France produced a lot of the educational texts used in Russia, and Russian itself was not thought to be capable of handling diplomatic, scientific, or philosophical transactions--it was viewed as vulgar and coarse.\n\nTo be perfectly clear, this was merely a perception, and was not in any sense true--the language of peasants and workers wasn't used in court, obviously, and so lacked words that you might need or want in court, but intellectuals and writers like Lomonosov, Karamzin, and Pushkin did a lot of work in the late 18th and early 19th centuries synthesizing Church Slavic, vernacular Russian, and French, German, Greek, Polish, and Neo-Latin borrowings into what we might call Early Modern Russian." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc0vae7" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to pitch this to the rest of the mod team as a possible Monday Methods topic. :)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "efv1ems" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "/u/itsallfolklore answered a similar question just recently [here](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/anb7qt/origin_of_orcs_elves_and_dwarves/?utm_source=reddit-android" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ej2k963" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "In short, because they founded the state.\n\nThe Mormon domination of Utah came to be as they were the first whites to permanently settle in the territory, known as the “Mormon Exodus”, many thousands of them fled persecution which included a brief war, the 1838 Mormon War.\n\nAfter the assassination of the Church of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS) founder, Joseph Smith, Mormons faced increasing hostility in Nauvoo, Illinois where they presently resided. Mormons were blamed for the failure of banks and seen as having all the wealth and power in society due to their insular nature, I suppose you could say it is comparable to the belief modern anti-semites hold about Jews controlling the media\n\nThe new LDS leader, Brigham Young, led the community 1,300 miles from Illinois to present day Utah to settle the Great Salt Basin, to form a new community where they would be free from persecution. Known as the Mormon Pioneers, after a long trek, and including European converts in their number, totalling approximately 70,000, they arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley on July 22, 1847. This settlement would become the present-day Salt Lake City. \n\nThe community struggled at first and almost led to famine, \n\n“meager gardens planted in such haste in late July-potatoes, buckwheat, and turnips, with some corn in tassel-lasted only \"until the first company \\[of immigrants\\] came in and turned their catde loose; they devoured crops that would have been ready to harvest in a few days,\" anguished\n\nJohn Steele.” (Schindler, p. 32)\n\nHowever, grain recovered and a “miracle” of insects and birds came which helped the crops flourish, and the settlement expanded rapidly. An influx of converts and continued prosperity increased calls for statehood, yet this proved to be more difficult for Utah than for other Western territories.\n\nCampaigns for Statehood began shortly after the arrival in the Great Salt Basin. The settlers organised the state as “Deseret” and requested its admission to the Union. Yet, the federal government did not want to give Mormons their own state, and be held to ransom by them, so they made “The Compromise of 1850”, relegating the settled area to a territory named Utah. The main obstacle to a Mormon state was polygamy, taboo to other Christian denominations.\n\nRequests for statehood continued, yet both Democrats and Republicans were fearful of Mormon political influence in Congress, as they would negate the influence of Democrats and Republicans in Congress with elected officials from their own parties joining the electoral ranks. Indeed, perceived Mormon influence in the political sphere one such thing they had been persecuted for in Nauvoo, leading to the initial exodus. Utah was finally admitted to the Union in 1896, after a compromise on marriage had been reached and local Mormon politics had been aligned with the major national parties. Mormon politics became secularised, Utah joined the Union. \n\nHowever, as your question states, heavy religious influence continues to pervade many aspects of Utah’s state laws. One good example is the strict alcohol laws in bars and restaurants, with “Zion curtains” separating bartenders preparing drinks containing alcohol from customers who order them. These laws were reformed in 2017 however, and this is no longer required.\n\nWhether laws should be secular or the extent to which religion can influence legislation is probably a question for a political scientist, but it can be argued that many laws around the world have a basis in religion, whatever it may be, and thus it can seek to regulate the morality of a society.\n\n & #x200B;\n\n**Bibliography:**\n\nWilliam Mulder, \"Mormonism's \"Gathering\": An American Doctrine with a Difference, *Church History,* Vol. 23, No. 3 (Sep., 1954), pp. 248-264)\n\nKlaus J. Hansen \"Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood Leonard J. Arrington by Edward Leo Lyman\" \n*The American Historical Review,* Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct 1988)\n\nHarold Schindler \"Great Salt Lake Valley, “The Place”: First Few Years in “Deseret” Test Pioneers’ Mettle, 1847–1850\" from *In Another Time* (University Press of Colorado, Utah State University Press. 1998) \n Melvyn Hammarberg, \"A Sampling Design for Mormon Utah, 1880\" \n*The Journal of Interdisciplinary History,* Vol. 7, No. 3 (Winter, 1977), pp. 453-476\n\nDavid R. Jr. Williams, *In Defense of the Secular Purpose Status Quo*, 102 Va. L. Rev. 2075 (2016)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctcswk3" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I was able to read *The Emperor Domitian* by B.W. Jones last year that was all about what a relentless micro-manager Domitian was, especially with regards to economic manipulation of not only the Roman economy as a whole, but careful provincial management.\n\nDomitian was not a skilled military commander, and I think he was such a micromanager of the administration as way to merely...play to his strengths. He even went so far as to name himself *censor perpertuus* in 85 CE (censor for life), which was an unprecedented act at the time.\n\nI would recommend looking into that book if you're interested in a more in depth look at his economic manipulation. I don't want to get too far out of my comfort zone by talking about currency valuation, et cetera." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c8zki7m" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I wrote my thesis on court interpretations of tariffs in the late 19th century, solely because I found [this case, Nix v. Hedden,](_URL_0_) to be rather humorous. I had originally wanted to write on the case in a U.S. Legal History course, but I knew that particular professor would have torn me a new one for the topic. \n\nI expected to abandon the topic, but I ended up finding it incredibly interesting. I found dozens of books written from the time in favor of and against treaties. Of course, I was aware of the general feeling toward protectionism in the United States during this period, but it was interesting to take it out of the context of Congress and see whether or not protectionism was a driving force behind Supreme Court decision making. " ] }

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[ [ "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8906408028119690393&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cakylc0" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "Hi! This question is awfully similar to one answered earlier [today](_URL_0_), and Celebreth gives a really good answer. Hope that helps!" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1gj5qh/after_the_enormous_successes_of_the_roman_army/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cl37dxc" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "This is complex. \n\nMachiavelli's writing indicates that he was fiercely loyal to the Republic of Florence. This made him somewhat inconvenient to the Medici, who were at the time trying to dismantle the republic and declare themselves Grand Dukes (recall that at the time, the Republic of Florence ruled over an area roughly corresponding to the entire Italian Region of Tuscany). I do not know of any evidence indicating that he was actively applying for a job elsewhere by writing The Prince, I always thought it reads like a \"You Need Me, Take Me Back,\" message to Lorenzo de Medici. \n\nThat being said said, the administration of the large republics at the time; Venice, Genoa and Florence, normally only appointed positions of responsibility to citizens of their own nobility. On the other hand, the Princely States, such as Milan, Mantua, Parma and Urbino, appointed people based on skill, not nationality. You make the analogy of a democratically elected minister applying for a job at another government, and yes, in that case it might seem odd. But the case here is much different; unless there is a violent uprising, political appointments are made by a single person: The ruler; a *Prince*, and that is to whom ministers are accountable to, not the people. The most famous example? When Duke Lodovico needed someone to head the construction of the fortifications around Milan as well as redesign the city's canals, he hired the best engineer in Italy at the time: Leonardo da Vinci, a Tuscan (Yes, Milan had canals. Proper canals, not the three mosquito infested cesspools the city has now, you can read more about them and da Vinci in D. Arasse's biography of him, but I digress). A more typical example from later in the same century: Baldassare Castiglione was born to a family in the minor nobility in the Duchy of Mantua. He first served in the administration of the Duke of Mantua, but later found better pay in employment with the Duke of Urbino, who soon made him his ambassador to the Papal Court. In Rome, he had a sort of spiritual awakening after his wife's death, and some seven years later, he took a job as the Papal representative in the court of Madrid, in Spain. The life of Baldassare Castiglione is very interesting, however I can't find a proper text in English to suggest to you. What will probably be in your local library is *The Four lawgivers: Savonarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Aretino* by R. Roeder. The mods will probably complain that it's outdated. However, I think it's a good starting point. \n\nThe practice of appointing outsiders to political positions has a precedent in the way the Italian cities were run since the communal era. Many cities (usually smaller ones) selected a *Podestà*, or chief executive, who was a leading citizen of *another* city, for the simple reason that they could be expected to be free from conflicts of interests. As the Italian cities were eventually absorbed in the half-dozen or so Italian states of the renaissance, these individuals were replaced by appointees decided by the suzerain (be it the Republic of Venice appointing a Podestà to the city of Vicenza, or the Duke of Milan appointing a *Podestà* in Pavia). However, the idea that a person could hold public office because of skill continued to thrive. (if you'd like to learn more about this part of Italian history, I would suggest *Lombard Communes: A History of the Republics of North Italy* by W. F. T. Butler. Yes it's also outdated, but it's still a good starting point). \n\nThe practice is not uniquely Italian. Sometimes, even rulers of small states became key administrators of larger ones: Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, was the governor of the Spanish Netherlands in the late 16th century, and commanded infantry that was to disembark in England, carried by the Spanish Armada. As late as the 18th century, you can find characters like General Von Steuben, who was a Prussian officer looking for employ with the Franch army, and eventually found his way to the United States, where he was employed in the American Revolution.\n\nMilitary matters, of course, are unique, in the sense that as early as the 13th-14th centuries, the Italian cities were employing generals based on the amount of men loyal to them and their skill in battle, regardless of their provenience. Flipping through J. J. Norwich's *A History of Venice*, some wars were even won by buying out their opponent's mercenaries. In military matters, defection was indeed a big issue, however, I don't know of any record where changing allegiance in state administration caused more problems than a senior manager changing companies today. \n\nI haven't answered your question though! Forgive me for going into so much detail. I'll answer your question very briefly here.\n\n- What kind of background, duties, and compensation did they have? \nNormally they would be members of the Minor Nobility; people who would have to work for a living, but still be well educated, probably either in Florence or Padua. Their duties would depend on the individual structure of each state and the ability of individual rulers, but for our purposes we can assume they were more or less analogous to modern governments, using the term more or less very generously. What was their compensation? Blast it, I have no idea. Down-vote me if you must. \n\n- How could they be trusted with state policy and administration if they might defect to a higher paying city-state?\nMoney, dear boy. Also, most policy secrets were decided by the sovereign and shared in its entirety only with his family members. This is only a real threat for a Prince who is not prudent, or a republic, where the administration knows everything. Which is why the Republics only hired their own (again, check out J. J. Norwich's *A History of Venice*)\n\n- Were they the main source of political theory essays like The Prince?\nThe Prince was influential. Castiglione's *Book of the Courtier* was also pretty influential, and worth reading to know the kind of person that these \"Politicians for Hire\" aspired to be, although it does deal with rather banal topics. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cyinulz", "cyitx4m", "cyiuc6e" ], "score": [ 3, 8, 2 ], "text": [ "Question for the Historians: do Historians include genetics in their area of studies? Would Anthropologists be better equipped to answer?", "To truly answer the question you're asking, we'd have to have samples of ancient Israelite DNA. Unfortunately, we don't have much of that. (This is not as obvious as it sounds -- there are lots more samples of ancient European DNA, and even Neanderthal DNA.) In their absence, we need to do a bit of guesswork, and a bit of conventional history.\n\nYou may have heard of a group called the Samaritans. According to the group's own history, they represent a group of Jews who stayed in the Levant, while most other Jews were exiled in Babylon. They claim that Judaism changed in two major ways after the separation of these two communities:\n\n1. The ancient Proto-Hebrew alphabet was replaced with a new one derived from square-form Aramaic.\n2. The Oral Torah, also known as the Mishnah (half of the Talmud), was introduced, and became as important to the religion as the written Torah.\n\nDue to the latter development, this new form of Judaism was known as \"Rabbinic Judaism\". This is the form practiced by virtually all Modern Jews. Samaritans, however, were left behind. To this day, they continue to use an alphabet based on Proto-Hebrew, and they reject the authority of the Oral Torah.\n\nSamaritans are today a tiny, endogamous community. That, combined with their claims about their group origin, makes them an appealing target for genetic studies. And, in fact, studies suggest that Samaritans form a very tight genetic cluster, and are closely related to Kohanim, another group of Jews (the former Temple priests) who claim uninterrupted Levantine lineage. [1]\n\nIt's not quite what you asked, but I want to point out that modern-day Jews resemble the Samaritans a lot more closely than you'd think. Y-DNA analysis suggests that the male progenitors of most living Jews were from the same pool of Middle Eastern men.\n\nAside from sharing many Y-DNA lineages, autosomal admixture studies also suggest that most Jewish subgroups have anywhere from 40-70% Levantine/West Asian contribution to their DNA. Yemenite Jews may actually have more Levantine DNA than Samaritans. Druze, Maronites, and Palestinians are in the same ballpark as Samaritans. Other Jewish communities tend to have a bit more admixture, especially Ashkenazi Jews, but we're talking about a difference of maybe 15% -- one or two great-grandparents out of 8. Pretty much every Jewish person alive (barring converts) has the equivalent of one ancient Israelite grandparent out of 4. [2]\n\nBut again -- until we find more ancient Israelite DNA samples, it's hard to be absolutely certain about any of this. There have been major population migrations in the past. The only thing we can say for certain is that all of today's Jewish subgroups, including Samaritans, are closely related to each other, and to Palestinians and Druze and Maronites too.\n\n[1] _URL_1_\n\n[2] _URL_0_", "The best resource I've found for this is [Dionekes's blog](_URL_0_) where the author reports on genetic studies. For a more nuanced, complex answer to your question, you most likely want to search that blog for \"Jew\".\n\nTo sum things up, your question is very complicated. The first problem is genetic testing. Depending on what is being measured, you can have misleading results. A simple example would be a hypothetical individual whose mother's mother was Maori, and whose father's father was Japanese, and the other two grandparents were English. If we test his mtDNA (mitocondrial DNA - which comes from the mother), we'd reveal the person being Maori. If we test his YDNA (Y chromosome, which comes from his father), we'd find that he was Japanese. If we did a more wide ranging DNA test on other chromosomes, we may detect the mixture of Japanese, Maori, and English DNA. In history, it's not unthinkable to imagine a scenario where mostly women or mostly men would be the ones to pass DNA down to a descendant population.\n\nThis leads us into the second problem: It's possible that some Jewish groups went through a narrow founder effect, where the founder's DNA pool was different than the DNA pool at large. Imagine there are four variants of one gene in a population - spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts. The entire population has a 25% chance of having any of those genes (we'll say this is on the Y chromosome to keep it simple). But just like drawing four cards from a deck, it's possible to come up with just two spades, a heart and a club. Or any other possibility. If those individuals are the ones who survive and reproduce, carrying on those genes, while the population that remains gets wiped out, then trying to determine the founding population's gene pool is difficult. Even in a large population, the gene pool can drift over time, as various genes are less likely to be reproduced due to chance.\n\nMost of what we can hypothesize about what the ancient Hebrew DNA pool looked like comes from testing modern Jews and trying to figure out what they share in common (hence problems with founder effects and genetic drift). There are some genetic testing of ancient remains, but as far as I know, they are of a few individuals, which may be misleading due to the nature of the sampling and the small number of individuals tested.\n\nWith all those caveats in mind when it comes to determining what the ancient Hebrew gene pool looked like, I'll state that the DNA studies we have now are mostly consistent with a large part of the Palestinian population being genetically similar to what the Hebrew DNA pool may look like (with varying degrees of admixture with other groups for Palestinians). In addition, the DNA studies are consistent with the ancient Hebrews being related to other Semitic people in the region, people whose descendants still live in the region.\n\nSo most likely, the answer is \"yes\". More specifically, modern Jews tend to show a shared genetics with Palestinians. But this can be a politically loaded question, especially when it comes from who are the descendants of the ancient Jewish population in what is now Israel/Palestine. Scientifically, it's also a question without a concrete answer - we can say the DNA evidence is consistent with a hypothesis, and that it's the most likely scenario and supported by historical evidence, but we can't say exactly what happened." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://bga101.blogspot.com/2013/10/eurogenes-k15-now-at-gedmatch.html", "http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25079122" ], [ "http://dienekes.blogspot.com/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cudbn4d" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "You can find some good answers related to your question in the FAQ:\n\n* [Trading](_URL_0_) across North Amerca\n\n* [Trading](_URL_1_) between Mesoamerica and the Andes\n\n* [Trading](_URL_3_) between North America (US/Canada) and Mesoamerica.\n\nTo paraphrase an idea frequently brought up in those topics, there's strong evidence that most of the Americas were connected to each other by trade- though with varying degrees of separation. Technically trade routes did connect North America (which would include folks like the Aztec) with South America: the eastern Woodlands traded with the Mississippians who traded with Mesoamerica who traded with northern South/southern Central America who traded with the Andes. *BUT* that doesn't mean something from Michigan could make it down to Peru. There's minimal evidence for singles objects that traverse so many middlemen.\n\nTo address your secondary question: probably not. We do see Michigan copper in [Louisiana](_URL_0_), but the bayou has never been known for its mineral reserves. Mexico, though, does have such resources. Hosle and Macfarlane have [analyzed](_URL_2_) nearly 200 copper artifacts from 17 different sites in Mexico and Belize to compare their chemical makeup with samples from ore deposits in Western Mexico. They confirmed that mines in [Michoacán](_URL_4_) and Jalisco were the primary source of copper for the sites in question, including a late classic Maya site in Belize and several Aztec towns. It is particularly interesting that Aztecs continued to use this copper because the mines would have been in the territory of the Tarascans, an opponent of the Aztec state." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1o734s/how_extensive_were_the_north_american_trade/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1b058m/was_there_communication_between_andean/", "http://www.jstor.org.proxy.library.vanderbilt.edu/stable/2891092?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bwtz8/did_any_native_american_current_us_border/", "https://www.google.com/maps/place/Michoac%C3%A1n,+Mexico/@23.13236,-98.4766926,6.22z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x842a5f3e1eb35cb7:0x3bc7650cf34be0d4" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cb75fqu" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "We have reliable historical evidence of submersibles being constructed from the 1620s and on. The [Van Drebbel design](_URL_1_) was powered by oars and was reported to be successfully tested in its day (1620-1624) and shown in recent reconstructions to be a feasible design. Other pre-Great War examples include:\n\n- the American [*Turtle*](_URL_3_) (1775)\n\n- a variety of submarines developed and used by both sides of the American Civil War, including the ill-fated C.S.S. *H.L. Hunley*\n\n- the French [*Plongeur*] (_URL_2_) (1863), notable for being the first sub powered by something other than human muscle\n\n- the Chilean/German [*Flach*](_URL_0_ ) (1866) \n\nSubmarine development accelerated around the late 19th century, fueled in part by increasing interest in their military applications by many of the world's navies. Human power was supplanted by steam and eventually various forms of combustion and electrical power plants, and the size and complexity (as well as diving abilities and endurance) of subs continued to increase quite healthily into the next century.\n\nIn the decade or so leading up to the outbreak of the Great War the American, British, Russian, Japanese, German, Italian, and Greek navies had either experimented with subs or pressed them into military service. The Italians and Greeks actually used them in combat against the Ottomans a few years prior to the start of the war.\n\nMilitary usage of subs was still pretty limited as far as numbers go (most navies kept only a handful around since the technology had not quite matured enough to be reliably effective in combat) until the Germans put their rather sizable sub force to work against Allied shipping in the Great War. By the time World War II rolled around, submarines had become effective enough to be included in significant numbers in any large navy worth its salt." ] }

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[ [ "http://fotos.subefotos.com/a44ba10bec687fc16e7836383471aef4o.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Drebbel.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_submarine_Plongeur", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Turtle" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d5uvcwc" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "You have kind of answered your own question here, American rhetoric of a \"bomber gap\" in the mid-1950s were reacting to a grossly inflated threat. Although manned bombers were the only truly reliable delivery platform for the early years of the Cold War, the Soviet bomber program was plagued by numerous problems and hurdles that degraded the potential of its Long-Range Aviation forces. \n\nPart of the problem for the Soviets was technical. Although the Stalinist aviation industry had poured enormous resources into the development of large aircraft in the 1930s like the Tupolev TB-3, these aircraft were more suited to propaganda parades than frontline aircraft. Soviet manufacturers had enormous difficulty in making these large aircraft globally competitive compared to their Anglo-American rivals. Aircraft like the TB-3 were large and impressive, but seldom had the performance to match the image. Barbarossa forced Soviet industry to focus on tactical airpower rather than resolving the problems of its four-engined bombers and the end of the war forced Soviet industry to play catch-up in this regard. Reverse engineering the Tu-4 helped Soviet industry adjust, as did access during the war to Allied industrial plant, but reverse-engineering exposed some of the deficiencies of Soviet industry. Soviet Plexiglas manufacturing, for example, could not match American quality control standards, and the other problems with Soviet manufacturing led to the Tu-4 being much heavier and less maneuverable than the original. The appearance of the Tu-4 in Soviet skies did encourage fears in the West of one-way atomic missions, but doing so would have been difficult. Although the Tu-4 experience did impart to Soviet industry a number of important lessons for the manufacture of large aircraft, there were still technical hurdles in place. Research at Tupolev's OKB-156 in 1950 hypothesized that the current generation of Soviet jet engines would be unable to meet the needs of an intercontinental bomber. Despite these findings, Myasishchev went forwards with the M-4, which began under 1948's Aircraft 80 program for an intercontinental bomber, which was overweight and unable to meet the range requirements. Concurrent with Myasishchev's development of a jet-bomber, the Tupolev bureau acted on the OKB-156 research to develop a turboprop-powered bomber. \n\nAlthough both Tupolev and Myasishchev eventually produced aircraft with the range to theoretically bomb the US from Soviet bases, the early-generation Tu-95 and 3M bombers were still beset by technical problems that degraded their effectiveness. The Tu-95's engines proved to be quite temperamental initially and required airbases to complicated warm-up equipment. The 3M resolved some of the earlier issues of the M-4, but it was a costly program and its VD-7 engines were also quite maintenance intensive. These performance factors hindered the deployment of these bombers as advanced bases seldom had the infrastructure to support them. \n\nPlans for the use of these bombers often had to adjust for their shortcomings. Plans in the 1940s called for seizing Alaskan airbases to use as forward airbases for the Tu-4 using amphibious assaults from specialized submarines (Project 621/626). Other plans called for one-way missions, which to be fair, SAC also envisioned for short-ranged aircraft like the B-47. When Khrushchev visited the Myasishchev bureau to see development of the M-4, the bureau showed him an attack profile in which the Eastern seaboard -bound bomber landed in Mexico, which was assumed to be neutral. The Soviet Premier rightly chided the Myasishchev engineers for using such an unsound grasp of geopolitics to cover up the program's failures to meet its range targets. Much more so than SAC, the intercontinental missions for Long-Range Aviation increasingly assumed the character of one-way missions.\n \nThe problem Long-Range Aviation had on exercises with both the Tu-95 and M-4 in the mid-1950s speaks not only to the technical problems of the Soviet bomber arm, but also to the Soviet's deficit in both human and infrastructure assets. Unlike the US, a good many of Soviet officers and aircrew of the early Cold War did not have experience flying a long-range bombing campaign. Wartime experience had imparted to the Americans experience that underscored the importance of training, satellite fields, navigational beacons, and a whole host of sundry details that made it possible for SAC to swiftly create a program of nuclear patrols around the USSR. In contrast, Long-Range Aviation practically had to create a program from scratch and had to discover much of the lessons the Americans had already learned. The ergonomics of the early generation bombers left much to be desired. Cabins were painted black, making long-flights difficult, the crew lacked both galley and toilet facilities, another problem for an intercontinental bomber. The Soviets experimented with ice-fields as a form of improvised airstrip, but were never really able to overcome the problems inherent to this system. Long-Range Aviation had more success with experiments in air-to-air refueling and it allowed for the Tu-4 and M-4 aircraft to retain some utility as tankers, but Soviet air-to-air refueling never developed the same level of proficiency as SAC. \n\nThere were also significant institutional barriers that hindered the development of Long-Range Aviation. The Red Army had gained a significant amount of prestige and clout because of its victory over the Germans and as such, it sought to claim responsibility over nuclear weapons. Since Soviet development of missiles fell under the Army's GAU (Main Artillery Directorate), the rockets as an alternative delivery system found itself a very powerful patron within the Soviet system. Additionally, the initial Soviets were extremely concerned during the Stalinist period of a rogue launch of nuclear weapons by a disaffected officer against the state, so they enacted a cumbersome serious of negative controls for nuclear weapons. Until 1959, Long-Range Aviation bomb storage had their bombs controlled by KGB troops and the process for getting the bombs from their bunkers to the bombers was laborious. Thus nuclear alert meant a very different experience for a Soviet crew than their American counterpart. While SAC's planes flew with operational bombs, their Soviet analogues seldom did. Soviet training was seldom with actual bombs, and alert usually meant sitting on the tarmac. Thus Long-Range Aviation was nowhere near as flexible a force as SAC in the 1950s. \n\nThe irony was that Khrushchev's own \"New Look\" for the Soviet military siphoned off considerable resources from Long-Range Aviation in the early 1960s just as Soviet designers had resolved some of the technical bugs that plagued the force in the 1950s. But the reorientation of Soviet strategic forces towards rockets was in many ways a much sounder strategic choice. All of the problems of Long-Range Aviation had rendered it a *reactive* force, which ceded initiative to NATO and the Americans and provided little in the way of a second-strike capability. Negative controls for rockets did not degrade their performance as much as manned bombers and likewise did not require a massive base infrastructure for operations against the US. The scare of the bomber-gap had also fostered a beefing up of North American defenses that made the possibility that the bombers could reach their targets a much more distant possibility. \n\nCruise missiles seemed to offer a way out of this impasse, but the advent of cruise missiles pulled Long-Range Aviation into many different directions. Attacking NATO convoys and surface task forces at sea became one of the emerging *raison d'être* of the bomber fleet. The emergence of NATO nuclear powers as well as the Sino-Soviet split also fostered a reorientation of the Soviet bomber forces into a continental asset with the Tu-22M emerging as the main platform for these duties. Plans to use bombers against the mainland US atrophied and planned replacement programs for the intercontinental Tu-95 suffered from a pattern of fits and starts during the Brezhnev years. Of the Soviet strategic triad, the manned bomber remained the weakest in the latter Cold War period as the Soviet bomber force began to be pulled into many different strategic directions from the mid-1960s onwards. \n\nThe alarmism of the Bomber Gap rhetoric in hindsight comes across as very over-blown and hyperbolic. However, in defense of US commentators, the problems the Long-Range Aviation faced in the 1950s were not insurmountable and both Soviet industry and Long-Range Aviation were aware of them and tried to implement solutions. The problem was one of timing and by the time resolving these technical and infrastructural problems appeared to be in sight, rockets were merging as a viable alternative to the manned bomber. Unlike SAC, Long-Range Aviation lacked the political and institutional clout to keep its position within Soviet nuclear forces and became a nuclear auxiliary rather than a vital component for Soviet nuclear strategy. \n\n*Sources*\n\nPodvig, P. L., and Oleg Bukharin. *Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces*. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001. \n\nZaloga, Steve. *The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword: The Rise and Fall of Russia's Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945-2000*. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cst4jc9" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "You can find a bit on the topic of miscegenation in colonial Peru [here](_URL_0_). " ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20gdxx/how_were_antimiscegenation_laws_justified_during/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cy570t9" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Charles de Lorme, who popularized the full costume, lived to be 94. This was not however, actually indicative of the mask actually working. [Most people at the time](_URL_0_) even believed that the plague doctors were useless. \n\nAt the time, germ theory wasn't completely understood and the Miasma theory was popular. The general belief was that using herbs could counter the \"miasma\" that one would breathe in. We now know that transmission doesn't actually work as such. It is also believed that most plague doctors did more harm than good. Travelling from town to town and having contact with mostly plague victim, they played some part in help to transport and spreading the plague with them. There's no indication of plague doctors having a lower mortality rate\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/content/XX/3/276.extract" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e399317" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Fantasy fiction as a distinct genre involved in different markets based on a variety of influences - it's not a case of any one particular nationality having an oversized influence on the market as much as it is certain key works get more popular attention.\n\nAround the turn of the century there were several more-or-less simultaneous developments in fantasy in various nations. In the United Kingdom, you had writers and works like Arthur Machen's *The Great God Pan* (1894), William Morris' *The Well at the World's End* (1896), M. R. James' *Ghost Stories of an Antiquary* (1904), and Lord Dunsany's *The Gods of Pegāna* (1905); in the United States writers like Robert W. Chambers' *The King in Yellow* (1895), L. Frank Baum's *The Wonderful Wizard of Oz* (1900), and Edgar Rice Burroughs' *A Princess of Mars* and *Tarzan of the Apes* (1912); in France you had Guy de Maupassant's \"Le Horla\" & \"L'Homme de Mars\" (1887), many scientific romances by Jules Verne, Gaston Leroux' *Le Fantome de l'opera* (1910); in German literature Franz Kafka, Gustave Meyrink - especially *Der Golem* (1910), and Hanns Heinz Ewers, etc. - and these were just a handful of the most prominent writers that were working in fantasy or fantasy-adjacent fiction. Some found book publication, others had more success with magazines - in the United States, especially, the 1910s saw the beginning of pulp magazines, which became the main market for a very American breed of fantasy fiction, spearheaded by writers like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith in the 1920s and 30s.\n\nBut none of these writers were creating in a bubble, so to speak. English works by Dunsany, Machen, William Hope Hodgson, etc. were being consumed by American audiences, and are cited in the fiction and letters of Lovecraft & other American writers, and to a degree this is true on the reverse - American stories and pulps were repackaged and published for UK, Canadian, Australian, etc. audiences. The American pulp *Weird Tales*, for example, had both British and Canadian versions during the 1930s and 40s, and many American fantasy stories from *Weird Tales* were packaged in the *Not at Night* anthologies and sold in Great Britain - there was an interruption in this kind of trade during the World Wars, due to embargoes and paper shortages, but it picked up again immediately thereafter.\n\nSo too, translations of fantasy and related works from English to other languages and other languages into English were fairly commonplace. If we look at H. P. Lovecraft's seminal essay [Supernatural Horror in Literature](_URL_0_) (1927 version) for example, devotes Chapter VI to \"Spectral Literature on the Continent\" and wrote:\n\n > On the Continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and novels of Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776–1822) are a byword for mellowness of background and maturity of form, though they incline to levity and extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of stark, breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer might have achieved. Generally they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic of all the Continental weird tales is the German classic Undine (1811), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouqué. [...] But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass’s Skin, Séraphîta, and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and daemonic intensity which characterises the born artist in shadows. It is in Théophile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mastery which, though not continuously used, is recognisable at once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like “Avatar”, “The Foot of the Mummy”, and “Clarimonde” display glimpses of forbidden visits that allure, tantalise, and sometimes horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in “One of Cleopatra’s Nights” are of the keenest and most expressive potency. \n\nSo the germination and development of fantasy literature was really an international affair, with many different influences contributing to the development of fantasy in different markets. However, not all writers receive the lasting fame and impact on literature as others. The impact of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian stories and H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos is not to be understated as an influence on fantasy, but their impact was largely limited before the boom in paperback fiction in the 1960s and 70s brought them to print in a wider market. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis scored success with *The Hobbit* (1937) and *The Lord of the Rings* (1954-1955), and *The Chronicles of Narnia*(1950-1956) respectively, which overshadowed other important but less widely-read authors like American author Poul Anderson, whose novels *Three Hearts and Three Lions* (1953) and *The Broken Sword* (1954) proved so influential on designer of *Dungeons & Dragons* Gary Gygax and British writer Michael Moorcock, whose Elric series owes much more to Anderson than Tolkien. Gygax' own \"Appendix N\" in the *Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide* (1979) gives a good idea of the kind of influences at work on what we today consider contemporary fantasy:\n\n > Inspiration for all the fantasy work I have done stems directly from the love my father showed when I was a tad, for he spent many hours telling me stories he made up as he went along, tales of cloaked old men who could grant wishes, of magic rings and enchanted swords, or wicked sorcerors and dauntless swordsmen. Then too, countless hundreds of comic books went down, and the long-gone EC ones certainly had their effect. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror movies were a big influence. In fact, all of us tend to get ample helpings of fantasy when we are very young from fairy tales such as those written by the Brothers Grimm and Andrew Lang. This often leads to reading books of mythology, paging through bestiaries, and consultation of compilations of the myths of various lands and peoples. Upon such a base I built my interest in fantasy, being an avid reader of all science fiction and fantasy literature since 1950. The following authors were of particular inspiration to me. In some cases I cite specific works, in others, I simply recommend all of their fantasy writing to you. From such sources, as well as any other imaginative writing or screenplay, you will be able to pluck kernels from which will grow the fruits of exciting campaigns. Good reading!\n\n- Anderson, Poul: THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS; THE HIGH CRUSADE; THE BROKEN SWORD\n\n- Bellairs, John: THE FACE IN THE FROST\n\n- Brackett, Leigh\n\n- Brown, Fredric\n\n- Burroughs, Edgar Rice: “Pellucidar” series; Mars series; Venus series\n\n- Carter, Lin: “World’s End” series\n\n- de Camp, L. Sprague: LEST DARKNESS FALL; THE FALLIBLE FIEND; et al\n\n- de Camp & Pratt: “Harold Shea” series; THE CARNELIAN CUBE\n\n- Derleth, August\n\n- Dunsany, Lord\n\n- Farmer, P. J.: “The World of the Tiers” series; et al\n\n- Fox, Gardner: “Kothar” series; “Kyrik” series; et al\n\n- Howard, R. E.: “Conan” series\n\n- Lanier, Sterling: HIERO’S JOURNEY\n\n- Leiber, Fritz: “Fafhrd & Gray Mouser” series; et al\n\n- Lovecraft, H. P.\n\n- Merritt, A.: CREEP, SHADOW, CREEP; MOON POOL; DWELLERS IN THE MIRAGE; et al\n\n- Moorcock, Michael: STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS; “Hawkmoon” series (esp. the first three books)\n\n- Norton, Andre\n\n- Offutt, Andrew J.: editor of SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS III\n\n- Pratt, Fletcher: BLUE STAR; et al\n\n- Saberhagen, Fred: CHANGELING EARTH; et al\n\n- St. Clair, Margaret: THE SHADOW PEOPLE; SIGN OF THE LABRYS\n\n- Tolkien, J. R. R.: THE HOBBIT; “Ring trilogy”\n\n- Vance, Jack: THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al\n\n- Weinbaum, Stanley\n\n- Wellman, Manley Wade\n\n- Williamson, Jack\n\n- Zelazny, Roger: JACK OF SHADOWS; “Amber” series; et al\n\n > The most immediate influences upon AD & D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game. For this reason, and for the hours of reading enjoyment, I heartily recommend the works of these fine authors to you.\n\n– E. Gary Gygax, *AD & D Dungeon Masters Guide* (1979) 224\n\nGygax' list is light on non-English-language sources, but there is a fair amount of non-English writers influencing the above.\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cg0tmqj", "cg0x0nv", "cg119qj", "cg12o5c", "cg1a5qr", "cg1hp05", "cg26avc" ], "score": [ 230, 11, 35, 13, 17, 6, 3 ], "text": [ "As a student of American history, I'm inclined to accept the verdicts of James Oakes, Manisha Sinha, and Eric Foner (especially Eric Foner) when it comes to just about anything related to the American slave system. They are three of the top scholars in the field. Foner is probably *the* top scholar. You're talking about the guy who wrote [the book](_URL_2_) on Reconstruction. But in any case, I'll confront the problem of compensated emancipation.\n\nNow, Lincoln floated [buying the slaves](_URL_0_) in the border states, starting with Delaware. Nothing came of it; the Delaware House of Representatives rejected his plan in 1862. But the debate focused on whether Lincoln could have averted war by buying *all* of the slaves in the US. \n\nLincoln did float the idea of buying up all the slaves as a means toward peaceful emancipation. But as Dr. Foner pointed out, there simply wasn't enough money. A massive spike in cotton prices during the 1850s left the combined value of all slaves in the US close to 3 billion dollars, which outstripped available federal budget outlays by hundreds of millions. Further, even if there had been enough money, those slaves were not for sale. For slaveowners to sell off all their slaves to the government would have meant a wholesale rejection of their way of life.\n\nThroughout much of the 1700s, most Americans considered slavery something of an unfortunate inheritance. Thomas Jefferson famously remarked that slavery was \"like holding a wolf by the ears. You didn't like it, but you daren't let go.\" Many Southerners spoke of some form of gradual emancipation, especially as the slave system began to die out towards the turn of the 19th century (it was becoming unprofitable). But over the first half of the 1800s, Southerners began to embrace and defend slavery. There were several reasons for this shift:\n\n1. Money. The cotton gin allowed slaves to process much more cotton than they could by hand, which played a huge role in making the slave system profitable again. As Dr. Foner pointed out in the debate, slavery was thriving in 1860, not dying out.\n\n2. Slave revolts. The Haitian Revolution, which started as a massive slave revolt and lasted from 1791 through 1804, was extremely violent. Escaped slaves slaughtered many whites, and the prospect of a similar uprising in the South frightened slaveowners. Africans had always been considered subhuman, and the prospect of slave revolts had always been frightening, but as slaveowners grew more and more afraid of such revolts, they cracked down harder on their slaves.\n\n3. Slavery as a positive good. Whereas previous slaveowners occasionally grappled with the morality of slavery, from about the 1830s forward slaveowners justified the institution as a good thing. Their reasoning was that since Africans were subhuman, slavery was their natural position in life. Many also used religion to justify slavery, arguing that God had chosen to punish blacks for the sin of Ham against Noah.\n\n4. Maintaining the Southern way of life. When we talk about the antebellum South, it's important to remember that your relationship to slavery largely defined your societal position, in that you were either a slave, a slaveowner, or a non-slaveowner. To be sure, there were plenty of other societal markings (yeoman farmer versus itinerant worker versus plantation owner, for instance), but slavery played a huge role in defining Southern socioeconomic status. Planters were at the top of the heap in the South by 1860. Some of the richest people in the world were Southern slaveowners. When you're at the top, you want to stay there. Further, most whites, including those who owned no slaves (about 75% of all Southern whites) still wanted to defend slavery, for two reasons. First, just because they didn't own slaves doesn't mean they didn't want to. Second, slavery gave them someone to look down on. No matter how poor a white Southerner was, he could take comfort in knowing that slaves had it worse. All in all, compensated emancipation wasn't in the cards. \n\nSources:\n\nGavin Wright, *The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century* (WW Norton, 1978) \n\nSteven Hahn, *The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and The Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890* (Oxford, 1985)\n\nJames Oakes, *Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South* (WW Norton, 1998)\n\nJames McPherson, *Battle Cry Of Freedom: The Civil War Era* (Oxford, 1988)\n\nJames McPherson, *Drawn With The Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War* (Oxford, 1997)\n\nCharles B. Dew, *Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War* (University of Virginia, 2002)\n\nRoger Ransom, \"The Economics of the Civil War\" EHnet Encyclopedia, ed. Robert Whaples. August 24, 2001. Available online at _URL_1_", "Strong replies on the claim about slave purchases. All of the claims are of interest so if anyone has the goods on arming the slaves, etc., I'd be eager to see them.\n\nJon", "God help me, I hate Napolitano with all my being, but he may be correct on the \"passage deaths\" number.\n\nAccording to Herbert S. Klein's new edition of *The Atlantic Slave Trade* (Cambridge University Press, 2010), the rough estimate of deaths on the Middle Passage is 12.4%, drawn from the figures available [on the database program he was involved with](_URL_0_). Assuming a high estimate of 12 million people shipped into the Atlantic economy between 1500 and 1900 (also in Klein), the numbers would indeed produce a little more than 1.5 million deaths. That said, this would just be documented, port to port losses; it does not include deaths due to the slave trade from point of capture to port, in holding on the coast(s), or later from diseases or injuries sustained on shipboard. [edit: And of course that's all Atlantic traffic, not just that headed for the US or future US coast, which was only about a half million or so at most.] \n\nThis is still an area of significant disagreement and study, but it's worth pointing out that the various Companies seemed to consider 20% losses their \"assumed loss\" point, so 12.4% average mortality would explain the profitability of the trade. I will note that others disagree with Klein, but few if any have quite the wealth of data he does. If there's a well sourced viewpoint that raises a higher number, I'd love to have it. But the question is still a very open one.\n\nWhether 1.5 million or 5 million, it's a heinous cost in lives to serve a trade that provoked outrage even in its day. The lower figure does not diminish the horror of the trade by any means.", "Napolitano really sneaks in the \"Lincoln tried to arm the slaves\" line in the interview without much context. I was hoping to tackle this, but I'm not sure where he is coming from. \n\nCan we speak to what position he might be making this claim from?\n\nLincoln dispels any notion of support for John Brown in his famous [Cooper Union Speech](_URL_1_) on Feb. 27, 1860. There were some prominent Northern supporters and funders of Brown's (a few of whom fled to Canada after the raid on Harper's Ferry), but attempting to tie their ambitions of an armed slave uprising to Lincoln would be tenuous at best. \n\nMy reading and research into Brown hasn't shown any other connection there aside from the strange linkage of Lincoln's love of \"Battle Hymn of the Republic,\" which was written to the tune of \"John Brown's Body,\" which was written by Julia Ward Howe after visiting Lincoln in Washington. Howe was wife of Samuel Gridley Howe, who himself was one of the \"Secret Six\" funders of Brown's raid. [This New York Times post](_URL_4_) recognizes this connection as fairly ironic given Lincoln's previous attempts to distance himself from Brown and concedes that Lincoln appears ignorant to the tune's origin. It's more of an interesting factoid than anything else.\n\nMore information of the Howes and Brown's supporters: \n > [Nora Titone, *My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry That Led to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln* (New York: Free Press, 2011).](_URL_5_)\n\nAs an aside, there does appear to be well-researched documentation for the ***Confederacy's*** attempts to arm slaves. Near the end of the war as the military situation worsened for the South, [there was support for allowing slaves to earn their freedom by fighting for the Confederacy](_URL_6_). The first all-black company was formed in Richmond in late-March of 1865, then the capital city [fell to the Union a week later](_URL_2_).\n\nBruce Levine has written about this in \"[Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War](_URL_3_).\" A quick journal review of his work is [here](_URL_0_) for those interested.", " > Before the Civil War, federal judges and marshals enforced the Fugitive Slave Act in northern states.\n\n\n\nThere is no question that this was true prior to the Civil War. Federal Courts and marshals enforced the act in [Pennsylvania](_URL_5_), [Massachutesetts](_URL_3_), [Ohio](_URL_7_), [Illinois](_URL_6_), [Wisconsin](_URL_2_, and [Indiana](_URL_8_).\n\n\n\nAlthough there were many popular abolitionist movements to \"nullify\" the Fugitive Slave Act through various liberty laws, it was enforced steadfastly by the Federal government, particularly in the border states:\n\n\n\n > Despite the popular view that the personal liberty laws rendered the fugitive slave law a dead letter, the law was enforced once claims were initiated by the slaveholders and fugitive slave tribunals. The fugitive slave law was not a dead letter in the border states. \n\n\n\n > In the border states, the federal government had its greatest success enforcing the fugitive slave law. The law could be enforced in these states, not because they have no personal liberty laws, but because the slave owners could afford to file claims with the fugitive slave tribunals.\n\n\n\nCampbell, Stanley W. *Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law 1850-1860*\n\nIn 1859 the Supreme Court put to rest the argument that Northern states could \"nullify\" the Fugitive Slave Act, thus confirming the Federal courts and marshals would continue to enforce the law even in the face of fervent local abolitionist opposition. See [Abelman v. Booth, 62 U.S. 506 (1859)](_URL_12_\n\nDuring Lincoln's campaign for the Presidency, he vowed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, because in his words [\"the constitution demands it.\"](_URL_10_) At his inaugural address in 1861, Lincoln [again vowed as President to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act](_URL_9_).\n\nIn the first two years of the Civil War, the Fugitive Slave Act still applied but it was not enforced with respect to the seceding slave states pursuant to the First Confiscation Act. However, Lincoln continued to enforce the “property rights\" of slave owners in loyal states, particularly Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland. Preserving the loyalty of these Union slave states was Lincoln’s paramount objective, as stated in his [letter to Orville H. Browning, Sunday, September 22, 1861](_URL_0_) (explaining why Lincoln reversed General Fremont's Proclamation freeing all slaves belonging to secessionists in Missouri)\n\n > The Kentucky Legislature would not budge till that proclamation was modified; and Gen. Anderson telegraphed me that on the news of Gen. Fremont having actually issued deeds of manumission, a whole company of our volunteers threw down their arms and disbanded. I was so assured as to think it probable that the very arms we had furnished Kentucky, would be turned against us. **I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor as I think, Maryland.** These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol.\n\nThus, for example, in Lincoln’s message to Congress regarding the Second Confiscation act in July 1862, he remarked approvingly that the bill [\"touches neither person or property, of any loyal citizen; in which particulars, it is just and proper.”](_URL_4_\n\nHowever, just a few days after his message to Congress, Lincoln surprised his cabinet with a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. Thereafter, Lincoln expressed little of his prior commitment to enforcing the property rights of loyalist slave owners. But even after he committed to emancipation, Lincoln was not ready to say that Kentucky loyalists had no “property rights” in their slaves. When a slave owned by Kentucky judge and Lincoln friend George Robertson, ran away and hid with Union troops in Kentucky, [Col. William Utley refused to return the slave in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act](_URL_11_). Robertson obtained an indictment against Utley, which Utley ignored. Robertson then wrote to Lincoln, urging him to order Utley to return the slave. In an [unsent draft letter](_URL_13_) to Robertson, Lincoln scoffed at the idea of ordering the return of fugitive slaves - even those in loyalist Kentucky:\n\n > Do you not know that I may as well surrender this contest, directly, as to make any order, the obvious purpose of which would be to return fugitive slaves?\n\nInterestingly, Lincoln never sent this letter. He did not want to lose Kentucky’s loyalty, but by this time, he had no interest in returning any fugitive slaves to even loyalist owners. Rather than take sides in this dispute, [Lincoln instead offered to buy the slave’s freedom with $500 of his own money](_URL_1_). Robertson ultimately refused the offer and pursued the matter in Federal Court. The 13th amendment, enacted in 1865, put an end to the federal criminal complaint against Utley, but Robertson still sought restitution for his stolen \"property.\" Eventually the U.S. District Court in Wisconsin entered judgment against Utley in the amount of $908.06. See Giles and Guelzo, [Colonel Utley's Empancipation--or, How Lincoln Offered to Buy a Slave](_URL_11_) Marquette Law Review (2010).\n\n", " > Lincoln tried to arm the slaves.\n\nEarly in the Civil War, slaves would flee to the Union Army for freedom. But, technically, they were still the lawful property of slave owners in the south, and their owners would actually approach the Union Army and demand their slaves to be returned. This put the army commander in a bit of a bind - the Civil War was ostensibly about enforcing the laws of the land back upon the south, and the army could not be seen to be violating the laws just because the south was in revolt.\n\nSo the commander (Butler) did something rather clever - he declared the slaves \"contraband of war\". Since they were the 'property' of enemy combatants, you see, that were useful for the Confederacy's war efforts, they could be seized, just like a steel mill or railroad junction. This was later [formalized by Congress](_URL_1_).\n\nBy the end of the war, over 10,000 slaves escaped to the Union Army's lines, and became \"contrabands of war\". They were paid $10 a month, and did a lot of manual labor for the army. \n\nWhen Lincoln opened the army to colored troops in 1863, many of the contraband enlisted in the army.\n\nSo, technically, he did arm slaves to fight.\n\n_URL_0_", "I only have a bachelor's in history, but there's a good article by Roger L. Ransom called [\"The Economics of the Civil War\"](_URL_0_) that touches specifically the question of Lincoln buying the slaves to avoid war. Mainly in this part:\n\n > With so much to lose on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, economic logic suggests that a peaceful solution to the slave issue would have made far more sense than a bloody war. Yet no solution emerged. One “economic” solution to the slave problem would be for those who objected to slavery to “buy out” the economic interest of Southern slaveholders. Under such a scheme, the federal government would purchase slaves. A major problem here was that the costs of such a scheme would have been enormous. Claudia Goldin estimates that the cost of having the government buy all the slaves in the United States in 1860, would be about $2.7 billion (1973: 85, Table 1). Obviously, such a large sum could not be paid all at once. Yet even if the payments were spread over 25 years, the annual costs of such a scheme would involve a tripling of federal government outlays (Ransom and Sutch 1990: 39-42)! The costs could be reduced substantially if instead of freeing all the slaves at once, children were left in bondage until the age of 18 or 21 (Goldin 1973:85). Yet there would remain the problem of how even those reduced costs could be distributed among various groups in the population. The cost of any “compensated” emancipation scheme was so high that even those who wished to eliminate slavery were unwilling to pay for a “buyout” of those who owned slaves.\n\nI'm not an expert here, but from what I've read--the consensus of modern American historians appears to be that no, it was not economically or politically feasible for Lincoln to \"buy the slaves\" in an effort to avert the Civil War. It was too big and too integral of a sector of the American economy at the time, and most slaveowners were probably unwilling to participate in any such program.\n\n" ] }

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[ "http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/18/andrew-napolitano/napolitano-lincoln-tried-arm-slaves/", "http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/18/jon-stewart/jon-stewart-lincoln-tried-buy-slaves-free-them/", "http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/article/2014/mar/19/napolitano-stewart-debate-civil-war/", "http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-march-11-2014/andrew-napolitano?xrs=share_copy", "http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/18/jon-stewart/jon-stewart-slave-trade-caused-5-million-deaths/", "http://www.punditfact.com", "http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/18/andrew-napolitano/napolitano-lincoln-enforced-fugitive-slave-act/" ]

[ [ "http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/abraham-lincolns-audacious-plan/", "http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/", "http://www.amazon.com/Reconstruction-Americas-Unfinished-Revolution-1863-1877/dp/0060937165" ], [], [ "http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces" ], [ "http://www.jstor.org/stable/27650272", "http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2012/12/abraham-lincoln-on-john-brown-february-27-1860.html", "https://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/1105.html", "http://amzn.com/0195315863", "http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/the-battle-hymn-of-john-brown/", "http://www.amazon.com/My-Thoughts-Be-Bloody-Assassination/dp/B005Q5P2CK", "http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/primarysources/patrick-r-cleburne-et-al.html" ], [ "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mal:@field(DOCID+@lit(d1192200))", "http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln5/1:1119?rgn=div1;view=fulltext", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=Ableman+v.+Booth,+62+U.S.+506+(1859&hl=en&as_sdt=2006&case=5155054279368574623&scilh=0)", "http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Burns_Anthony_The_Trial_of_1854#start_entry", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mal:@field(DOCID+@lit(d1715400))", "https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=qA8QAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA154", "http://dig.lib.niu.edu/civilwar/race.html", "http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Oberlin-Wellington_Rescue_Case", "http://www.in.gov/history/3117.htm", "http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=mal&fileName=mal1/077/0773800/malpage.db&recNum=2", "http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/abraham-lincoln-papers/history3.html", "http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5018&context=mulr", "http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=5155054279368574623&q=Ableman+v.+Booth,+62+U.S.+506+(1859)", "http://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/40#.UyEKd-ddUVo" ], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraband_%28American_Civil_War%29", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confiscation_Act_of_1861" ], [ "http://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economics-of-the-civil-war/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cfgi79g" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "As usual, it does depend somewhat on when and where, but generally: Arabic. Once the invasion occurred, Muslims in Iberia were closely connected to the rest of the Muslim world by trade and politics, making Arabic the lingua franca there as elsewhere. Berber was also common, though, due to the strong presence of Berbers in both the initial invading force and subsequent waves of settlement. However, as the Reconquista gathered steam and more and more Muslims found themselves living under Christian rule, it became advantageous for those Muslims (called *mudéjares*) to have at least a working knowledge of Iberian Romance, i.e. Old Spanish--which was itself strongly influenced by Arabic. Nonetheless, Arabic remained common, especially for academic and administrative discourse (much as Latin in the Christian realm)." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c6cqxw4", "c6cwylh" ], "score": [ 14, 3 ], "text": [ "Several reasons, the Liberators, armed with weapons and surrounding Caesar were an intimidating sight. And if they were willing the kill the most powerful man in Rome, why would they stop at killing a few more shocked, fearful Senators? \n\nSecond, after the attack was initiated it was quite obvious that Caesar was dead. Were you willing to risk your nice new career by supporting a man who was already dead?\n\nThirdly, even if he gave them their job, most believed Caesar was trying to make himself king, and Romans didnt like kings a little bit. It was for most to pause at the idea of saving a man and letting him become king and take Rome back 500 years. Romans, after all, were a very conservative people. \n\nBut from what Ive read nobody speaks up for why they didnt try to save Caesar in those moments. But that is understandable, because in those tense days after the assassination either you were a Liberator or a Caesarian. There wasnt much room for a middle ground, so a lot of those hesitant supports piled in behind Marc Antony, or jumped ship and picked the Liberators side. But not many would ever say \"I didnt want Caesar to be king, but he was a great guy and I wish he were still leading us\". Youd piss off every side, and this is when men were being killed in the streets for sharing the *same name* as a believed Liberator. ", "Here's a good indicator of the other senators' state of mind just after the assassination:\n\n > So Caesar was done to death and, when it was over, Brutus stepped forward with the intention of making a speech to explain what had been done. The senators, however, would not wait to hear him. They rushed out through the doors of the building and fled to their homes, thus producing a state of confusion, terror, and bewilderment, amongst the people. Some bolted their doors; others left their counters and shops and could be observed either running to see the place where Caesar had been killed or, once they had seen it, running back again. Antony and Lepidus, who were Caesar's chief friends, stole away and hid in houses belonging to other people. \n\n(From Plutarch's 'Life of Caesar'.)\n\nOr, there's Suetonius' version:\n\n > The entire Senate then retired in confusion.\n\nThat doesn't sound like a group of people who were going to go to Caesar's aid during his assassination.\n\nBut, we don't know *why* the other senators didn't help Caesar. We can only guess, and BeondTheGrave [has provided some reasonable hypotheses](_URL_0_) as to the motives of the other senators." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10e9ap/rome_ive_been_recently_pondering_why_did_the/c6cqxw4" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dlphfbl", "dlpydjx", "dlqb13a" ], "score": [ 2258, 11, 11 ], "text": [ "Banking in the Soviet Union was provided by a state run and owned bank, Gosbank. (Literally, The State Bank.) Gosbank was an interesting entity that evolved from the Tsarist Russia’s State Bank in that it was a central bank owned and operated by the government, so the transition to Soviet control was not as jarring as you might think. Tsarist Russian had private banks as well, but the State Bank was used in a manner to improve the Russian economy by loaning money at low rates to industrialists and facilitating foreign investment in Russia, as well as providing support to the landed class and industrialists by providing modern banking practices and facilities. The concept of a bank was part and parcel of many Russian revolutionaries thinking, Lenin himself was in favor of a single banking entity. For them a singe banking entity was to be fully integrated into the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union by becoming part of the government apparatus and assisting in controlling the economy in providing a stable currency and foreign exchange. The bank would be essential to help keep an accounting of production and distribution of goods, providing the infrastructure needed to create a socialist society. With a central bank, you could determine someones ability/contribution, and pay out to their need, as it were. Now, after the Revolution and Civil War, the existing state bank collapsed and the modern Gosbank did not arise until the beginings of the 1930’s. It was then joined by Sperbank (\"Savings Bank\"), the sole bank for household savings deposits, which earned a positive but very low rate of interest, Stroibank (\"Investment Bank\"), was responsible for disbursing funds to enterprises for long-term investment, according to the dictates of the central plan and the Vneshtorgbank (\"Foreign Trade Bank\") which handled all transactions involving imports and exports.\nGosbank operated on what can be called a “bookkeeping system”. Whenever one state enterprise shipped its goods to another state enterprise, the Gosbank account of the \"output-enterprise\" would be credited, while that of the \"input-enterprise\" would be debited.For ordinary workers, there was cash, which was used for only two purposes. First, the state industries paid their workers with cash provided by Gosbank (the account of the state enterprise would be debited), then workers purchased goods with cash, which was then turned over to Gosbank (the account of the store would be credited). Here is an example by Marc Liberman to show how this would work in practice: *When farm delivered its milk output, it would obtain a document from the cheese factory verifying that the latter had received its milk input. The document was then turned over to Gosbank, which credited the farm's account according to the value of the milk delivered, and debited the cheese factory's account by the same value. Likewise, after the cheese was produced and shipped to the State food store, the cheese factory obtained a document verifying its delivery of cheese. Again, the document was turned over to Gosbank, which this time credited the cheese factory's account and debited the store's account. Finally, when households purchased the cheese with cash, the State store deposited its cash receipts with Gosbank and was given a credit of equal value.* \n\nAs you can see, banking was an important part of keeping track of the production and consumption of a planned economy, every transfer of physical output from one location to another was mirrored by an associated financial transfer through Gosbank. If less than the planned amount was delivered on any given day, Gosbank would know. If delivery were late, Gosbank would know. If inputs or outputs were stolen and diverted to the black market, Gosbank would know . (Well, maybe Gosbank would know…) This type of control was needed for a planned economy, as a result inter-enterprise credit was simply not allowed; one enterprise could not \"lend\" bookkeeping money to another by permitting late payment for goods received. Also, enterprise accounts with Gosbank could only be used to pay for **the type and quantities of inputs that were specified in the plan**. Otherwise, Gosbank would refuse to release the credits. This control was designed to prevent deviations from the central production plan. But since the plan itself was often inconsistent, providing an enterprise with too little of one input and too much of another, managers in order to meet their output requirements were forced to develop sources of supply that could bypass Gosbank, sources that required neither bookkeeping money nor cash. Hence, the extraordinary adaptive and enterprising Soviet productions managers engaged in an immense amount of interfirm bartering. An enterprise with excess coal might be lucky enough to trade it for some desperately needed steel. More likely, it would trade its excess coal for some rubber that it didn't need, and would then go about finding an enterprise that had excess steel but needed rubber. Or, worse still: it would trade coal for rubber, then trade rubber for steel knives, and finally melt down the knives to obtain raw steel.\n\nAs a side note as to cash, state enterprises were forbidden to hold it for any purpose other than payment of wages, the cash receipts collected by State stores had to be deposited with Gosbank, and then withdrawn again to pay the wages of the store workers. The whole process of banking basically worked like this: State Bank – payments to State enterprises – payment to workers – payment for retail sales and services – State Bank. \n\nAs for imports and exports, all goods produced for export were \"sold\" to Vneshtorgbank, which credited the producer's account with bookkeeping money. Vneshtorgbank would then sell the goods abroad for foreign currency. In turn, the foreign currency was used to pay for imports into the Soviet Union, which were then sold to a Soviet enterprise whose bookkeeping monies would be debited. The authorities could as a result carefully monitor foreign currency exchange, and ensure that scarce \"hard currency\" (i.e., freely convertible currency like U.S. dollars or German marks) was used only for \"desired purposes.\"\n\nNow, Stroibank the state bank for financing the capital investments made by enterprises and organizations, basically any industry or state enterprise for construction outlays, expansion, etc. Stroibank grants these credits/loans/money to state enterprises, within in central planning limits, for the reserving of material assets and for outlays on construction. State enterprises and new construction projects are authorized to place orders on these credits allowing them to increase their allotment and outlay of equipment and materials. Storibank did loan money to individuals for residential construction. So basically as a borrower you would be debited for the new equipment/work beyond your normally allowed allotment and the State enterprise doing the work would be credited. So you would have to go to the bank with list of all the things you needed to expand or build your project, the bank would review, and if approved you would not be given money, but would be given the opportunity to requisistion the apporpirate goods and servces needed. Individuals generally could not get a loan, some were allowed in the early days of the first Five Year Plans to acquire farming equipment, seed, maybe housing and such through Selkhozbank (Agricultural Bank) which was basically a Storibank for farming. However, the State Bank would at times issue things similar to loans in order to reduce the rate of savings and to increase production or reduce surplus goods, for example flat out subsidies for durable goods or long term repayment of credits awarded.\n\n*The Development of the Soviet Economic System*, Alexander Baykov\n\n*The Process of Investment in the Soviet Union*, David A. Dyker\n\n*Banking in the Former Soviet Union*, Marc Lieberman \n\n*The Origins and Evolution of the Soviet Banking System: An Historical Perspective*, George Garvy\n\n*History of Socialism: An Historical Comparative Study of Socialism*, Harry W. Laidler\n\n", "As a Follow-up, how did inflation affect this process? I presume prices were fixed centrally?", "How exactly did labor markets (or whatever was in their place) function in the USSR? \n\nHow did planners determine what was being paid (if this is a fair way to characterize it)? Did wages differ by trade/region/labor supply, and if so, how was this decided?\n\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ceiaoi5" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "I'm not really sure what exactly inspired your question, so I could probably get more specific if you follow up, but basically the south of modern Germany has long been a papal power base. The term for the papalist faction during the middle ages was the *Guelphs*, a term which has its origins with the dukes of Bavaria. \n\nThe second part of the answer is that the resolution of the Reformation at the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 is summarized neatly by the Latin phrase *Cuius regio, eius religio*- who[ever]'s realm, that one's religion. The ruler of a principality, in effect, decided its affiliation, and the southern princes decided for the papacy." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "chygbnk" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Headdresses in the Maya area also were made of cotton, or cloth, like those found by Saturno at the site of Xultun or the quintessential round heardress for the lineage of Copan, or the Aztec Xiuhuitzolli. In Calakmul there is evidence of some made out of palm and hold together by wooden structures with incrustations of jade and conch (Garia Moreno 2003). In other areas, particular in the northern frontiers of Mesoamerica, there is evidence of antler being used as a headwear for particular ceremonies or rituals, like in the modern danza del venado, but who knows if these extent as far back as in pre-Columbian times.\nHowever, I do not think anyone has made a systematic database of the plethora of headwears in Mesoamerica ascribing them to particular regions. I think it is taken for granted that intricate headdresses are social differential markers, like the xiuhuitzolli, or identity markers like the round headdress from Copan. \n" ] }

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[ "http://imgur.com/a/He0lZ" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "cycehsy" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "This is a rather vague question? Do you mean Turkish people, the ottomans, first encounter with the city or preparing for conquest or what? " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cmoda9q" ], "score": [ 28 ], "text": [ "Modern milling techniques, sophisticated prospecting methods, and fertile ground for prospects - the location of one of the world's greatest gold discoveries - all point to the idea that there could be profitable gold mining in California. California environmental laws combined with a large urban population in much of the old California Gold Country are enough to mean that gold mining there in the near future is not likely. The industry generally regards the state environmental laws and large residential populations in the area as too much of an obstacle to oppose. There are exceptions, and there are efforts to revive gold mining. See [this article](_URL_0_) for example." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/business/energy-environment/a-clash-of-gold-and-water-in-the-california-pines.html?_r=0" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "djs6qtw" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "Well I can't really answer the second part but as for why few ancient Mesopotamian cities survived into the common era there is no one answer that fits all cities. (Note: I'll talk mainly about the Sumerian cities.) \n\nFirst and foremost though environmental factors were central to the decline of Sumerian cities. During the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium southern Mesopotamia saw an increasing salinity in their land due to increasingly heavy use leading to declining agricultural returns which in turn led to a significant decline in population. Cities such as Eridu towards the end of their final occupational phases saw the encroachment of dunes and a higher salinity in the water table which made further occupation untenable. Further, the shifting of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers along with the receding of the Persian Gulf played a major role in the decline of cities such as Ur and Uruk. For example when Ur was founded (4000-3800 BCE) it was in the rich marsh lands near the Persian Gulf. By the time of its abandonment (600-500 BCE) the level of the Gulf had fallen by nearly 2.5 meters leaving Ur far from both its position on the coast which had made it economically relevant and the fertile lands that had supported its large population. \n\nThis decline in southern Mesopotamia's population was compounded by increasing instability and Ur, the greatest Sumerian city, was sacked by the Elamites in around 2000 BCE (commemorated in the [Lament for Ur](_URL_0_)) an event the city never recovered from. Indeed after the fall of the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (2112-2004 BCE) the Sumerian cities were never again ruled by a native dynasty and increasingly lost political and cultural relevance as their populations continued to decline under the rule of successive foreign powers such as the First Dynasty of Babylon (1830-1531 BCE), the Kissites (1600-1155 BCE), the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911-609 BCE) and so on. New cities founded by these conquerors in more advantages positions contributed to the decline of the remaining Sumerian cities which towards the 1st millennium BCE found themselves in increasingly geographically irrelevant positions due to the shifting of the two great rivers. \n\nContinuing on the political instability train of thought many of the Sumerian cites over the millennia were damaged or outright destroyed by war. As mentioned above Ur was one of them but also Kuara, destroyed by Sargon II in 709 BCE, Mari (a Mesopotamian but not Sumerian city) was nearly completely annihilated by the Babylonians and continued to exist as only a small settlement after 1759 BCE and Babylon herself was marred by constant conflict till its final abandonment in 141 BCE in favor of Seleucia founded by Seleucus I Nicator in 305 BCE.\n\nOf course some of the great Sumerian cities like Shuruppak were destroyed by fire and others like Akkad we have very little idea of what happened other than they disappeared.\n\nI think it important to remember though that many of these Sumerian and Mesopotamian cities lasted through many millennia. At the time of its final abandonment Ur was nearly 3300 years old and Uruk was perhaps over 5000 years old. These cities weathered geographic and environmental shifts, wars, massive political upheaval, fires and plagues. That some of them lasted as long as they did is pretty damn impressive.\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.2.2.2&charenc=j#" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fbwonrk" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "This answer will focus on the RN's wargames of the 1920s and 30s. These generally had two components; a strategic game, carried out on paper, and a tactical game, carried out either with models, or with actual ships. The strategic game attempted to replicate a situation with which the RN felt it might be faced, and was used to set up the condition for the tactical game. While the strategic games were relatively free-form, tactical exercises were governed by a set of rules, laid down in Admiralty publications. The most studied ruleset is CB 3011, titled ‘War Game Rules, 1929’. This provided rules for estimating the effects of gunfire, torpedoes and anti-aircraft fire.\n\nCB 3011 divided hits on ships up into three categories. 'Vital hits' were hits to magazines or turrets, which might blow the ship up. 'Speed hits' represented hits to engine or boiler rooms, and reduced the ship's speed. All other hits were ‘Non-\nVital Hits', which had a cumulative effect on the ship. These non-vital hits were used as the basis for determining the survivability of ships, with ships given an appropriate number of these hits needed to sink them (or render them useless in battle). 15in gunfire was used as the typical yardstick for this. A modern battleship, like *Nelson*, was expected to sink after 18 hits from these guns, while an older one like *Iron Duke* or a battlecruiser would take 15 to sink. Cruisers would survive just three or four hits, and a destroyer would be sunk after just one. Lighter gunfire was calculated in terms of their 15in equivalent, with the precise value depending on the target. Against heavily armoured targets, a 15in hit was seen as the equivalent of six 8in or twelve 6in hits, but against cruisers and smaller, it equalled three 8in or six 6in. As a result, a cruiser that took four 15in hits to sink would sink after 24 6in hits. However, serious damage would be caused by fewer hits. A modern battleship would be 60% effective after nine hits from a 15in gun, while two hits from this gun on a heavy cruiser would halve its effectiveness.\n\nThe chance of hitting and doing damage was based on exercises carried out in 1922-26, with an estimated reduction of 30% to reflect the stresses and problems introduced by the reality of battle. The calculation was simplified by ignoring the possible effects of near-misses, especially splinter damage to upperworks. The resulting percentages are shown in the table below:\n\n | Modern Battleships or Battlecruisers | Old Battleships | Heavy Cruiser | Light Cruiser | Destroyer\n---|---|----|----|----|----\n12in gun and above | 1.2 | 1.0 | 0.8 | 0.6 | 0.3\n6-8in | - | 1.2 | 1.0 | 0.8 | 0.5\n4-4.7in | -| -| 2 | 1.6 | 1.0\n\nIt should be clear that larger guns were seen as being less effective against smaller targets, due to their greater manoeuvrability. Similarly, smaller guns were ineffective against larger ships due to their armour, though they were more likely to score hits. Variations on this table were used to take into account the effects of weather, aircraft spotting, and other factors. The values in this table were then weighted by the range of fire and the fire rate of the gun to give a 'hits per gun per minute' table. This gave the expected number of hits each gun would score in a minute. Typically, this gave a lower hit probability than in the table above, as it was used for the early stages of an engagement, when firing solutions were still being calculated. It was multiplied by the number of guns firing and by the number of minutes before the range was found (3 minutes at 20,000+ yards, two between 10-20,000 and one below 10,000) to work out the total number of hits scored. After the time was up, the accuracy reverted to that in the table. Each hit had a 1/30th chance of scoring a 'vital hit', and an umpire-decided chance of causing a 'speed hit'.\n\nSimilar tables were used for anti-aircraft gunnery. These were generally optimistic, assuming that more hits would be scored than actual experience would show. An octuple mount for the 2pdr 'pom-pom' was expected to score four hits every minute, with a 50% chance of scoring a hit in the first minute, before full accuracy was achieved. Real experience showed that the real value was more like 5%. Torpedo tables were equally optimistic for the battleship. These tables showed the percentage of full speed that a ship would be capable of making after a hit, depending on the warhead of the torpedo. A modern *Nelson*-class ship would be slowed by 50% after six hits, while a *Queen Elizabeth* or 'R' class would take four or five hits to reach the same state. In reality, the *Barham*, a *Queen Elizabeth* class ship, would sink after just three hits. In general, there was no need to go through the steps of actually 'firing' the guns. Gunnery training was done against real targets, usually large scaffolds towed behind tugs. Anti-aircraft gunnery was done against radio-controlled drone aircraft. Real torpedoes with dud warheads were, however, more common.\n\nAs an example of a game played under this ruleset, we can look at Exercise MZ, carried out in March 1929. This was intended to simulate a possible British war with Japan, with a weaker force ('Blue') attempting to draw out and defeat a portion of a larger enemy battlefleet ('Red'). The strategic part of the game was played out at the Naval Staff College in Greenwich, setting up the starting conditions of the tactical exercise. The Red Fleet had eight battleships, three battlecruisers, two carriers and supporting elements available, but had to cover two important convoys. Blue had a smaller fleet in the strategic game, but maintenance requirements of Red ships had given them temporary equality; this, combined with political pressure from above, led to the need to attack the convoys, or the enemy battlefleet, if encountered. \n\nThe two convoys would sail on the 17th-18th March 1929, each covered by a division of Red battleships. The rest of the Red force was kept at anchor, but on short notice to sail. Air reconnaissance soon spotted Blue ships approaching. The convoys were dispersed, and the rest of the fleet set sail, hoping to combine with the battleships at sea. Blue's aerial forces sighted the convoys and the covering forces, but did not initially sight the rest of Red's fleet. As a result, a short engagement ensued, with Blue's battlecruisers and aircraft attacking the Red battleships at long range. One Red and one Blue capital ship were damaged, mainly by air attacks, as Red attempted to draw Blue away from its main bases. Shortly afterwards, though, Blue aircraft sighted the main Red fleet. Realising that achieving their main goals would soon be impossible, Blue disengaged. \n\nA more exciting exercise would come in 1934, during the main Naval Manoeuvres. The Home Fleet, operating as Blue, was tasked with 'establishing' a base for commerce raiding on the Iberian coast, while the Mediterranean Fleet, Red, had to stop them. The two fleets had five battleships each, but Blue had one carrier and two battlecruisers, while Red had two carriers and no battlecruisers. Admiral W. W. Fisher, commanding Blue, correctly reasoned that Red was likely intending to set up their base in Spain's Arosa Bay. He set up his fleet in a position to intercept them at close range in a night engagement, taking advantage of bad weather that grounded both sides' reconnaissance aircraft. Splitting the Red fleet into two pieces, Blue was able to fight a brief, successful action. \n\nSources:\n\n*Royal Navy Strategy in the Far East,\n1919–1939: Planning for War against Japan*,\nAndrew Field, Frank Cass, 2004\n\n*The Battle of the River Plate: A Tactical Analysis*, Alan D Zimm, in *Warship 2018*, John Jordan, ed., Osprey, 2018" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cebepqp" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "In *The Fatal Shore* Robert Hughes talks at length about the prevalence of buggery (huh, awkward. Hope no one's offended by that word) among prisoners in the Australian penal colonies, especially on Norfolk Island. Apparently it was very common among the English prisoners, but almost non-existent among the Irish." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "do34ah9" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Orabi, Arizona, is a Hopi Native American village founded sometime before the year 1100 CE. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the United States. The Acoma Pueblo and Taos Pueblo are also some of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the United States. Both were founded more than 1000 years ago by Tiwa speaking peoples. The Zuni Pueblo is another example of a Native American settlement, founded and still inhabited by Native Americans. Zuni is mostly inhabited by the Zuni people, and has a 2010 population of 6,302.\n\n\nThe prevalent trend is that the very little continuously inhabited Native American settlements today are mainly found in New Mexico, and the rest of the American southwest. Although areas like: Detroit, New York City, San Francisco, have always been inhabited by Native Americans, none of these cities retain their Native American aspect to them; neither in name, architecture, or culture. Most modern day cities in the United States today are built on what was previously Native American tribal land. \n\n\nThe Pueblo culture in Southwestern United States is very unique in the broader North American Native American culture. The various peoples in the southwest built these Pueblos out of material that could last a long time. The arid landscape molded these people into a urban population, out of necessity and lack of resources. Scarcity highly influenced the development of the Pueblo. Many Native Americans were not city builders, and any permanent settlements they founded were not cities in the way we think of a city today. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, such as Cahokia in Illinois, and several mound building societies around that area. For the most part, the Native Americans of North America were not an urban peoples.\n\n\nI hope this answered your question. A good book for this would by \"The City: A World History\" by Andrew Lees. In specific, chapter 1, 2 and 3, would help out.\n\n\nAnd of course, the story is much different when you get south of the United States. There, the peoples living central Mexico were an incredibly urban and cosmopolitan peoples." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fnp2zjq", "fnp6xqe", "fnpi40b", "fnpngip" ], "score": [ 38, 22, 10, 16 ], "text": [ "This is a history that I have long been fascinated by, but finally wrote up only a few years ago. It looks at the ways in what ideas about we might loosely term \"witchcraft\" helped shape politics and society in Chiloé, an island in southern Chile largely populated by the indigenous Mapuche – and at what happened when these ideas came into conflict with those of the Europeanised rulers of Chile in the 1880s.\n\nThe outcome can pretty accurately be termed the last of the great witchcraft trials...\n\n\\-------------------------\n\nThere is a place in South America that was once the end of the earth. It lies close to the 35th parallel, where the [Maule River](_URL_6_) empties into the Pacific Ocean, and in the first years of the 16th century it marked the spot at which the [Empire of the Incas](_URL_2_) ended and a strange and unknown world began.\n\nSouth of the Maule, the Incas thought, lay a land of mystery and darkness. It was a place where the Pacific’s waters chilled and turned from blue to black, and where indigenous peoples struggled to claw the basest of livings from a hostile environment. It was also where the witches lived and evil came from. The Incas called this land “the Place of Seagulls.”\n\nToday, the Place of Seagulls begins at a spot 700 miles due south of the Chilean capital, Santiago, and stretches for another 1,200 miles all the way to [Tierra del Fuego](_URL_3_), the “land of fire” so accurately described by Lucas Bridges as “[the uttermost part of the earth](_URL_5_).” Even now, the region remains sparsely inhabited—and at its lonely heart lies [the island of Chiloé](_URL_4_): rain-soaked and rainbow-strewn, matted with untamed virgin forest and possessed of a distinct and interesting history. First visited by Europeans in 1567, Chiloé is an island about the size of Puerto Rico which was long known for piracy and privateering. In the 19th century, when Latin America revolted against imperial rule, the island remained loyal to Spain. And in 1880, a little more than half a century after it was finally incorporated into Chile, it was also the scene of a remarkable trial—the last significant witch trial, probably, anywhere in the world.\n\nWho were they, these sorcerers hauled before a court for casting spells in an industrial age? According to the traveler [Bruce Chatwin](_URL_1_), who stumbled over traces of their story in the 1970s, they belonged to a “sect of male witches” that existed “for the purpose of hurting people.” According to their own statements, made during the trial of 1880, they ran protection rackets on the island, disposing of their enemies by poisoning or, worse, by *sajaduras:* magically inflicted “profound slashes.” But since the same men also claimed to belong to a group called *La Recta Provincia*—a phrase that may be loosely translated as “The Righteous Province”—and styled themselves members of the *Mayoria*, the “Majority,” an alternative interpretation may also be advanced. Perhaps these witches were actually representatives of a strange sort of alternative government, an indigenous society that offered justice of a perverted kind to indians living under the rule of a white elite. Perhaps they were more shamans than sorcerers.\n\nThe most important of the warlocks brought to court in 1880 was a Chilote farmer by the name of Mateo Coñuecar. He was then 70 years old, and by his own admission had been a member of the Righteous Province for more than two decades. According to Coñuecar’s testimony, the society was an important power on the island, with numerous members, an elaborate hierarchy of “kings” and “viceroys”—and a headquarters located in a vast cavern, 40 or more yards long, whose secret entrance had been cleverly concealed in the side of a ravine. This cave (which Chilote tradition asserts was lit by torches burning human fat) was hidden somewhere outside the little coastal village of Quicavi, and was—Coñuecar and other witnesses swore—home to a pair of monsters that guarded the society’s most treasured possessions: an ancient leather book of magic and a bowl that, filled with water, allowed secrets to be seen.\n\nCoñuecar’s testimony, which may be found lodged among the papers of the Chilean historian [Benjamín Vicuña McKenna](_URL_0_), includes this remarkable recollection of his first visit to the cave:\n\n > *Twenty years ago, when José Mariman was king, he was ordered to go to the cave with meat for some animals that lived inside. He complied with the order, and took them the meat of a kid he had slaughtered. Mariman went with him, and when they reached the cave, he started dancing about like a sorcerer, and quickly opened the entryway. This was covered over with a layer of earth (and grass to keep it hidden), and under this there was a piece of metal \\[…\\] the ‘alchemy key.’ He used this to open the entryway, and was then faced with two completely disfigured beings which burst out of the gloom and rushed towards him. One looked like a goat, for it dragged itself along on four legs, and the other was a naked man, with a completely white beard and hair down to his waist.*\n\nIt is possible, from other records of the Righteous Province, to learn more about the hideous creatures that Coñuecar swore he had encountered in 1860. The goat-like monster was the *chivato*, a deformed mute covered in piggish bristles. The other—and by far the more dangerous—of the cave’s twin denizens was the *invunche* or *imbunche.* Like the *chivato*, it had once been a human baby, and had been kidnapped in infancy. Chatwin describes what happened to the baby next:\n\n > *When the Sect needs a new* Invunche, *the Council of the Cave orders a Member to steal a boy child from six months to a year old. The Deformer, a permanent resident of the Cave, starts work at once. He disjoints the arms and legs and the hands and feet. Then begins the delicate task of altering the position of the head. Day after day, and for hours at a stretch, he twists the head with a tourniquet until it has rotated through an angle of 180 degrees, that is until the child can look straight down the line of its own vertebrae.There remains one last operation, for which another specialist is needed. At full moon, the child is laid on a work-bench, lashed down with its head covered in a bag. The specialist cuts a deep incision under the right shoulder blade. Into the hole he inserts the right arm and sews up the wound with thread taken from the neck of a ewe. When it has healed the* Invunche *is complete.*\n\nNaked, fed principally on human flesh, and confined below ground, neither the *chivato* nor the *invunche* received any sort of education; indeed it was said that neither ever acquired human speech in all the years they served what Chatwin calls the Committee of the Cave. Nevertheless, he concludes, “over the years, \\[the *invunche*\\] does develop a working knowledge of the Committee’s procedure and can instruct novices with harsh and gutteral cries.”\n\nIt would be unwise, of course, to accept at face value the testimony given at any witch trial—not least evidence that concerns the existence of a hidden cave that a week-long search, conducted in the spring of 1880, failed utterly to uncover, and that was extracted under who knows what sort of duress. Yet it is as well to concede that, whatever the Righteous Province actually was, the society does seem to have existed in some form—and that many Chilotes regarded its members as fearsome enemies possessed of genuinely supernatural powers.\n\nAccounts dating to the 19th century tell of the regular collection of protection money on Chiloé–what Ovidio Lagos describes as “an annual tribute” demanded of “practically all villagers, to ensure they would have no accidents during the night.” These make it clear that islanders who resisted these demands for payment could expect to have their crops destroyed and their sheep killed—by sorcery, it was believed, for the men of the *Mayoria* were believed to possess a pair of magical stones that gave them the power to curse their enemies. The records of the trial of 1880-81 make it clear that the proceedings had their origins in a rash of suspicious poisonings that had claimed numerous victims over the years.", "During the American Revolutionary War, the Oneida and Tuscarora Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy allied themselves with the American colonists. Their most significant military engagement during the war was at the Battle of Oriskany on August 6, 1777.\n\nThere was an Oneida Indian woman named Tyonajanegen (which translates to \"Two Kettles Together\") who fought along side her husband *and* son during the battle. [When her husband Han Yerry was shot, Two Kettles Together reloaded his musket so he could continue fighting in the battle.](_URL_1_)\n\nHowever, the September 3, 1777 issue of the *Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser*, gave a much more exciting account of Two Kettles Together's contribution to the battle:\n\n > ... a friendly Indian, with his wife and son, who distinguished themselves remarkably on the occasion. The Indian killed nine of the enemy, when having receiv[ed] a ball through his wrist that disabled him from using his gun, he then fought with his tomahawk. His son killed two, and his wife on horseback, fought by his side, with pistols during the whole action, which lasted six hours.\n\nI take this version of the story with a grain of salt, but I can't help but love the badass image of a middle-aged, indigenous woman battling the British and her Iroquoian cousins on horseback, dual-wielding pistols.\n\nThe fact that there isn't a famous painting of her [like there is for General Herkimer at the Battle of Oriskany](_URL_0_) is a damned shame.\n\nI realize this is a pretty Colonial-centric story of an indigenous person, but I just love the made-for-hollywood story it tells.\n\n**Source**: *Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution* by Joseph T Glatthaar and James Kirby.", "The peoples of the pre-colonial Americas knew a huge variety of forms of knowledge transmission: including oral transmission, chants, pictograms, characters, and textiles. Most of these were continued after colonial contact, with some of them being suppressed by the Europeans (including the well-known quipus of the Incas). This allowed incredibly important knowledge and cultural heritage to be preserved. \n\nThey had at least one thing in common - these forms were considered inferior by the Europeans. With important exceptions, see below, those pre-colonial traditions were considered unhistoric and were subordinated to the alphabet and books.\n\n \n\nI would like to look at a particularly early example of Indian scholars recording their history in writing. In central Mexico, the descendants of the Aztecs recorded the largest written corpus of native American writing in the Americas. This is not to say that this is more important than the many other forms of history of other peoples, I just know this one better. \n\nIronically, the writing taught by the Europeans led to the preservation of knowledge about the history and culture of the Aztecs and other groups. In the words of José Rabasa: \"Tell Me the Story of How I Conquered You.\"\n\n \n\n## Aztec scholars at the Colegio ##\n\nIt took a few decades for Aztecs to learn alphabetic writing, so we don't have sources from the immediate conquest period nor from pre-colonial times. But there are important later works that still have strong connections to earlier native histories and traditions, some of them are luckily translated into English. Of course most pre-Hispanic sources (and many early colonial ones as well) were destroyed by the Spanish; and it would take some decades for Nahua - another term for \"Aztec\" I'm using here since \"Aztec\" was only popularised know the 19th century - to be sufficiently adapt at alphabetic writing and Spanish to produce writings.\n\nThe first generation of Nahua writers is seen to come up around the mid-16th century in connection with the famed Colegio de Tlatelolco, where they were schooled by the Franciscans. It was established in 1536 with the express purpose of training noble indigenous boys for Catholic priesthood as to aid in the conversions. However, none of its students was ordained, and natives were banned from ordination in 1555. So that parts of Bernardino Sahagún's works were written by his Tlatelolca collaborators.\n\n \n\nAround this time more traditional codices were also produced, using glyphs and images, which would focus more on pre-colonial history, colonial tributes etc. By the late 16th century major alphabetic chronicles and annals were written by native authors in Nahuatl and Spanish.\n\nWith all of this we have to keep in mind that all these native authors had sufficient background in European and Spanish knowledge that these permeated their writings. So it's almost impossible to speak of clear „native“ positions in this context.\n\nAll this means that the early Nahua collaborators of Sahagún's working in the 1560s and after already had a very good command of Spanish, Nahuatl and Latin. Antonio Valeriano, probably the best known of these scribes, was famed among the friars for his skills and would attain political positions through them. \n\nBy the later 16th century there were Nahua nobles like Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and Hernan Tezozomoc who were by all accounts bilingual. Alva Ixtlilxochitl actually mocks the Spanish for their lacking Nahuatl skills. By the 17th century this knowledge was becoming more widespread. Regarding political purposes: many authors like those I just mentioned used those skills to write petitions to Spanish Officials to keep praying extend their or their communities rights - often successfully.\n\nTurning things around a bit, some Spanish and creole friars also developed great Nahuatl knowledge in this time frame, esp Franciscans and some Dominicans : Sahagún, Diego Duran and later Juan Torquemada are well-known examples. A main interest for orders and the church to learn and teach indigenous languages was to aid in their conversion. However, even important Mexican Franciscans had become wary that this goal would be accomplished.\n\n \n\n## The who & the what\n\n \n\nBetween 1540 and '70, numerous works were created by former students of the 'Colegios' or by authors who were otherwise connected with the indigenous elite. These include the chronicles of Tadeo de Niza and Don Alfonso Axayacatzin, as well as those of Don Pedro Ponce de León, ruler of Tlaxcala, or Francisco Acaxitli, ruler of Tlalmancalco; the pre-Columbian tradition of anonymous historical collections was also continued with works such as the Historia Tolteca Chichimeca (1544) and the Leyenda de los Soles (1558).\n\n \n\nThe 1570s saw the emergence of the first generation of Spaniards and mestizos (of mixed descent), who were fluent in indigenous languages and were possibly considered by officials to be less subversive than indigenous scholars. In addition, in 1572 the Jesuits had arrived in New Spain, who opened their schools not only originally like the Franciscans to indigenous people, but also to Spaniards and mestizos.\n\n \n\nThe exchange between friars and indigenous people made it possible to create a corpus of texts on indigenous cultures and, through them, initiated collaboration between intellectuals of different ethnic origins. This \"post-colegio generation\", closely linked to the Franciscan and Jesuit intellectual circles, included the indigenous nobles Don Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc (Tezozomoc) and Don Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (Chimalpahin).\n\n \n\nThe latter's Crónica Mexicayotl (1609) combines oral, pictographic and written accounts of Mexica history and follows pre-colonial traditions by directly teaching readers to remember their past and be proud of their heritage. Tezozomoc's Crónica mexicana (ca. 1598) again follows the form of European chronicles, possibly suggesting colonial officials as the intended target group.\n\n \n\nThe last group within this generation of writers are individuals, mostly mestizos, belonging to both cultural systems, who had mastered Western and indigenous historiographical conventions better than their indigenous colleagues. In addition to Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, we should mention the mestizo Don Diego Muñoz Camargo, who wrote about his Tlaxkaltecan ancestors from an outsider's perspective. In his comparative study of Tezozomoc, Muñoz Camargo and Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Salvador Velazco emphasizes that there was no clearly definable \"mestizo identity \" in New Spain, but rather that different adaptation strategies were used in colonial society regardless of ethnicity or caste.\n\n[1|2]", "Indigenous people played a significant role in the development of trench warfare! At least this is what we say as Metis. I'll let you judge. Back in the 1820s, the Nehiyaw Pwat alliance of the Cree, Metis, Saulteaux and Assiniboine had an ongoing conflict with the Sioux, that lasted up to the 60s before we finally managed to end our conflicts for good (we tried several times in between, but for various reasons, the increasing scarcity of buffalo being one, it never lasted too many years). At that time Gabriel Dumont, the Metis Military leader in the Riel Rebellions or the 1869 resistance and in the 1885 resistance, was still a young boy and as such travelled with the nation on the annual buffalo hunt. Picture a thousand red river carts, un-oiled axles, as a large segment of the nation headed south following the buffalo well into disputed territory.\n\nAs I was told the story, three Metis scouts were captured by the Sioux, but at least one of them managed to get away and steal a horse, making it back to camp hotly pursued to warn people. \n\nThe Metis did the classic circle the carts move, but this included dropping some of the wheels to make the carts more of a barrier, and also included the digging of rifle pits behind the carts into which people sheltered and where they fought from. \n\nAccording to one elder, there was a special group of men who wore yellow sashes, who stayed on horseback in the middle of the circle. The Sioux would circle, trying to spread the men of the camp around to cover all the sides, then at one moment the strategy was to then use their speed to zero in on one location on horseback and overwhelm the defenders - the circling done to spread people out, the speed enabling them to concentrate their forces faster than the defenders could. It was the job of these men to recognize when this was happening and do a suicide charge into the middle of the oncoming charge, slowing it down enough to allow the defenders to reposition.\n\nAnyways, Gabriel survived this battle which ended up being considered a great victory for the nation, and then went on to lead us during the resistances, and during these battles he more than once used rifle pits to great effect. In particular, during the final battle of Batoche, a battle that lasted a few days, there were almost no Metis casualties until the end of the battle when ammunition had all been depleted, because of the effectiveness of the rifle pits, even in the face of the gatling gun that the expeditionary force had brought with them.\n\nWhat I find interesting is that at least some of the men who fought in this battle on the side of the Canadian government later went on to fight in the Boer war, where they again faced entrenched soldiers. I'm curious if any lessons were learnt.\n\nA couple other interesting tidbits - The Nehiyaw Pwat had done an alliance with the Sioux by this point, and a contingent of men were sent by Sitting Bull to fight with us there. At the treaty that the Alliance made with the Sioux, the Sioux actually passed on treaty medals that had been given them by the US, and later on there were some Metis men who were present who were buried with their medals, and one of my friends actually found one at a location where a cemetary was being washed away.\n\nI've also been told by another elder that one group of Sioux were stopped at the border prior to the 1885 battle of batoche. They were bringing up a coffin that they said was a chief to be buried, but it actually contained a gatling gun and several thousand rounds of ammunition that were being brought to the Metis - something that would have definitely made a different at the battle, if not the war.\n\nAND one more - Although the battles I'm talking about took place between 200 and 135 years ago, I've heard them third and 4th hand. My friend Chii Mike Keplin was raised by his grandparents, who were raised by their grandparents (or ggrandparents?) who were children at the battle of the grand coutou back in the 1820s or 30s - it was one of the defining stories of their childhoods, so they told their grandkids, who told Mike - so he was raised on stories of the 1830s when he asked to hear the stories of \"when your parents were small\". As to the battle of Batoche, my mentor who taught me Michif was babysat by a woman who was a child at the battle, and described watching Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel ride off to the battle on their horses, looking so handsome with their sashes, and all the men going with them. This goes to show that things that happened several generations ago, really are only a few generations in terms of oral transmission." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.irlandeses.org/0610_283to284.pdf", "http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/bruce-chatwin-letters-from-a-fallen-angel-6506843.html", "http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/cultures/the_americas/incas.aspx", "http://www.tierradelfuego.org.ar/v4/_eng/index.php?seccion=4", "http://www.chiloeweb.com/chwb/chiloeisland/english/tem_gen_historia.html", "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/22/AR2006092200413.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maule_River" ], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Oriskany#/media/File:Herkimer_at_oriskany.jpg", "https://www.oneidaindiannation.com/key-figures-in-oneida-history-the-american-revolution/" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cd8ijak" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "At the very least such an idea is ethnocentric to Western Europe - the Russian Empire had something like a national consciousness at least as far back as the fall of Constantinople, seeing as it was the only Orthodox state in existence, something it took very seriously.\n\nAlso, [this](_URL_0_) was the corpse of the Holy Roman Empire after the Peace of Westphalia. Looks real modern and not fractured and feudal at all, right?\n\nI think the focus is slightly misplaced - the Westphalian Peace meant that the European kings were no longer beholden to the Pope. That does matter. Religion is an important factor in the concept of a nation state and this allowed states to differentiate by religion." ] }

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[ "http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.wlu.ca/stable/3078632?seq=" ]

[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holy_Roman_Empire_1648.svg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eejvlbs" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "Hi there!\n\nThe answer is of course, yes. Just to cite perhaps the most blindingly obvious case of this sort of thing, Christianity surely qualifies as having had a \"substantial effect\" on Roman society. [Here](_URL_0_) is a thread on the FAQ in which /u/Zosim deals with the rise of Christianity within Roman society.\n\nCheers!" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3f1joe/assuming_an_atheistic_perspective_what_factors/ctkona4/?context=3" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cmhzo6f", "cmi71ig", "cmie7w0", "cmieav9" ], "score": [ 52, 9, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Fair warning, the War of the Roses is a very complex and dense topic to dive into. Any book you pick up worth it's salt, will have (and better have) at least two chapters dedicated to just background before you even begin to get to the foundations of the causes for the War. The WotR is easily the most defining moment in English history between the Norman invasion and the Civil War and covers decades of history, literally. \n\nHaving said that, while this is not my subject area, and I'm not terribly well read in the topic, I do have a recommendation for a book that sits astride \"popular history\" and \"academic history\". I say that, because again, this is a dense subject and no book that is worth your time would be purely \"pop history\".\n\nAlison Weir's [War of the Roses](_URL_0_), does a good job of making the subject accessible to readers of history, though not to fans of \"lite history.\" \"Lite History\" to me are those pulpy history paperbacks that tend to populate the military history sections of bookstores about Navy Seals, Special Forces, Nazis, and those god awful books about the Merovingians being descendants of Jesus.\n\nWhile the book only has one footnote that I can recall (giving a rough estimation of price equivalencies between 14th century money and late 20th Century), it does have an extensive bibliography and helpful index. Footnoting would be helpful in knowing the sources and providing additional information (my favorite thing about footnotes!) provided, but since the book is not \"academic\" its overlooked. The most helpful addition to the book are simplified family trees which I promise will be useful as the overlapping and twisting mixtures of marriages, second cousins, and family offshoots played a major part in being the cause and agitator of the war, and I promise you will refer to it more than once. \n\nWhile the writing style is very casual and doesn't run down various rabbit hole topics that would fascinate an academic (and confuse the casual), it is still very dense. Keeping track of the names of the players, which Houses they were loyal to, and what role they play requires close attention to be paid or you will find yourself backtracking. I myself restarted the book three or four times before I reached page 100 over the years as I easily became lost and confused. I don't fault the writer at all as this was my first book on the subject and I often found myself lost. You will still need to sit quietly and read alone; this is not a book to read on a busy cross town bus, its by no means is a summer page turner.\n\nWeir has a background in history, but is not a formal academic. She focuses mostly on historical fictions and biographies of England's royalty from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. You can clearly tell that she has strong familiarity with the subject, knows how to research, and is thorough in covering the topics she tries to tackle (though through out her career some have been better than others). She presents her works in a way that makes complex histories and dense materials accessible to those who want to go beyond a tv documentary familiarity but not ready to delve into the dense undergrowth of an academic book.\n\nFor a casual yet informative and quality work, I recommend [Alison Weir's War of the Roses](_URL_1_).\n\nJust don't use it as a source for your history paper.", "I'm not an expert on this topic but I was looking to get a good academic history of the War of the Roses recently. There doesn't seem to be a single definitive work, which is pretty common for this kind of subject, since there are many different aspects/events/perspectives to consider when discussing it. There are several good works on the subject. I found [this review](_URL_0_) of Michael Hicks' history really useful both in what it says about that work and how it compares it to other, similar general histories. I used it as a basis for picking which history I thought emphasized the topics that interested me the most. ", "I found The Winter King by Thomas Penn to be a good balance to Alison weir. It is a biography of Henry VII but provides a lot f solid background to put his accession and reign in context.", "Side question: Is the Conn Iggulden fictionalised series on the War of the Roses a good read? I liked the Ghengis Khan series." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.amazon.com/The-Wars-Roses-Alison-Weir-ebook/dp/product-description/B005MHHRO8/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books", "http://www.amazon.com/Wars-Roses-Alison-Weir/dp/0345404335/ref=la_B000AQ41I6_1_1_title_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1417451322&sr=1-1" ], [ "http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1218" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dfd6u1e" ], "score": [ 31 ], "text": [ "In short, yes! Slaves were trained as blacksmiths, millers, chefs, dressmakers, and worked in a wide range of industries. Often, their owners would hire out their slaves labor. And slaves would frequently work alongside paid white labor. The best example of this is the White House and the U.S. Capitol. [Enslaved people quarried and cut the rough stone that was later dressed and laid by Scottish masons to erect the walls of the President's House.](_URL_1_). \n\n[According to the White House Historical Association]( _URL_0_)\"Slaves were likely involved in all aspects of construction, including carpentry, masonry, carting, rafting, plastering, glazing and painting, the task force reported,” Lane writes. “And slaves appear to have shouldered alone the grueling work of sawing logs and stones.”\n\nMany large plantations would use slaves as carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, tanners, spinners, weavers and other artisans, since a large plantation would need all of those skills on site. \n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/white-house-was-fact-built-slaves-180959916/#4Z2EtTkCZY0tXYrJ.99", "https://www.whitehousehistory.org/questions/did-slaves-build-the-white-house" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c9stpk4" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ "Many of them had been--Epaminondas worked towards diversifying the Greek army, Isocrates laid out a formation type of hoplites with lighter armor and longer spears, Xenophon in his *Anabasis* stressed the importance of light skirmishers--but ultimately no state in Greece could implement a full reform. Philip's changes were really only possible with a full time, professional army, which no other place in Greece had the economic capability to create. Specifically, Philip exploited the enormous mineral wealth of the northern Balkans to give himself the financial ability to create his new army.\n\nAs for its success, the simplest answer is that no other army of the time so brilliantly applied the principles of combined arms. For the other Greeks, the real \"army\" was the phalanx, and everything else was there to support it. In Philip's system, every part is supporting each other. This principle has lay at the heart of virtually all highly successful militaries, from the Assyrians to the Romans to Cromwell." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fhpzsrq" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "The US military has had a continuous, official presence in Honduras since the early 80s, particularly in an air base called José Enrique Soto Cano, near the city of Comayagua. Even today, according to [_URL_1_](https://_URL_1_), there are around 550 US military personnel and 650 Honduran and US civilians working at Soto Cano air base, under Joint Task Force Bravo.\n\nI have spoken about US intervention in Latin América since the Monroe Doctrine before [here](_URL_2_). The relevant part to your question comes next\n\n > There is an often forgotten part of this continent’s history that directly conflicts with an idealized interpretation of the Doctrine: the School of the Américas. It is a military institute managed by the US Department of Defense, it has existed since 1946, and it is responsible for training the top military commanders involved in the coup d’états and subsequent dictatorships established across Latin América during the 1970s and 80s. There, they were trained in several standard military techniques, but they were also trained in counter-insurgency tactics, involving familiarization with torture techniques and devices, cultural censorship, mass civilian surveillance, among other methodologies, all of which they took with them to their home countries, applying them later on while in power. Some of the School’s graduates include Argentinians Jorge Rafael Videla, Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri and Roberto Eduardo Viola, the three consecutive de facto dictators of Argentina between 1976 and 1983, responsible for kidnapping, torturing, murdering and disappearing of thirty thousand people; Hugo Banzer, de facto dictator of Bolivia between 1971 and 1978; Juan Velasco Alvarado, dictator of Perú; Vladimiro Montesinos, director of intelligence during Alberto Fujimori’s presidency in Perú, a time during which death squads were formed in order to allegedly combat the Shining Path terrorist group, killing hundreds of civilians in the process; Efraín Ríos Montt, dictator of Guatemala; Guillermo Rodríguez Lara, dictator of Colombia; Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, the two, nearly consecutive dictators of Panamá; among many others. \n > \n > This entire group of alumnae were not only trained by the US, but were also the main protagonists of the Plan Cóndor (Operation Condor), a US backed plan to install military dictatorships in Latin América during the 70s, with three main objectives: to secure the continent as the US’ sphere of influence; to exterminate alleged marxist or left leaning terrorist groups; and to further the expansion of neoliberalism as both an economic and governmental model in the region. For many years, the Plan was thought to have been a myth, until two judicial processes helped prove it existed. First, the 1985 trials of the military juntas in Argentina, during which a book of testimonies and evidence was used by the prosecution, led by Chief Prosecutor Julio César Strassera, to sentence the dictators and many other collaborators to life imprisonment. The book, called *Nunca Más* (*Never Again*) was published in 1984 by the CONADEP, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, and is a chilling compilation of thousands of testimonies, forensic evidence and expert statements regarding the systematic kidnapping, torturing and disappearance of thousands of Argentinians. It inspired the publishing of a similar work, in Brazil. The second instance was the finding, in 1992, of the *Archivos del Terror* (*Archives of Terror*), a series of documents kept by Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s intelligence agencies, detailing hundreds of thousands of kidnappings, and tens of thousands of disappeared and murdered by every South Américan State during the 70’s and 80’s. The records are extensive and very detailed, mainly due to the fact that Stroessner was dictator between 1954 and 1989, during which time he had contact with every dictator in the region, and perhaps most importantly, with the CIA. The Archives of Terror are the quintessential piece of evidence proving the US and the CIA’s involvement in State terrorism in Latin América. Thanks to these two pieces of evidence, the School of the Américas came into the public eye, forcing the US government to change its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).\n\nI cannot speak specifically for your father's experience, because I do not know his military record and, even if I knew, the majority of US intelligence and military specific activities in Latin América during the 70s and 80s continue to be classified information. However, considering the fact that, ever since the beginning of the XX century, during what we commonly know as Banana Wars, the US has held an, at first intermittent, and then continuous presence in Honduras via not only intelligence but mainly military personnel. Even though a surprising amount of people don't know this, the US has either military personnel in many Latin América countries, or it even has its own military bases in several nations.\n\nThe early period of interventions is detailed in Walter LaFeber's *Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America* (1993).\n\nDuring the Reagan administration, US intelligence and military presence increased, in both official and covert capacities, both working alongside and against the Honduran government. If one were to believe idealist theorists such as Thomas Carothers, Reagan intervened in Honduras an Central América in general, in order to promote democracy. The reality is much less sugarcoated, as evidenced by the economic, social and humanitarian crises caused by US intervention both in Honduras and the rest of the continent.\n\nJoseph Nevins wrote [a fascinating article last year](_URL_0_) regarding the long term effects the US has ad in Honduras politics, including the human rights violations the Honduran military had, after being trained by the US forces.\n\nWhile as you say, it is true that the US did not send soldiers into active combat, they were there nevertheless, and they were, together with the School of the Americas, there to train Honduran soldiers in guerrilla warfare. The School was responsible, for example, for the training of General Luis Discua Elvir, commander of the Honduran Intelligence Battalion 3-16, a death squad, in charge of carrying out political assassinations.\n\nI am of course in no way implying that your father is responsible for any of these things, I hope you can see that. I'm merely trying to explain what the purpose of US military presence was during the 80s." ] }

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[ [ "http://theconversation.com/how-us-policy-in-honduras-set-the-stage-for-todays-migration-65935", "globalsecurity.org", "https://new.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ejiv6l/what_exactly_was_the_purpose_and_intent_behind/fcz1win/", "https://globalsecurity.org" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fbdk51m", "fbeai48", "fbeccvl" ], "score": [ 43, 2, 5 ], "text": [ "Oh boy, *this* question. I did a quick r/AskHistorians search to see if it had been answered before (as I was sure it must have been), but came up empty handed. It's really an honor (though a dubious one) to be able to contribute to the AH record on this topic. I really hope my answer lives up to the gravity this question demands and deserves.\n\nBefore we launch into a discussion about whether or not Joseph Stalin intentionally sought to starve out his opponents in an attempt to crush Ukrainian nationalism during the famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933, which has come to be remembered as Голодомор (Holodomor, meaning roughly Mass Death by Starvation), I think the best course of action with which to start is just to enumerate some of the *undisputed facts* concerning this unmitigated tragedy so that anyone who might be tempted into entertaining some kind of denialism or speculation around this topic be forced to immediately account for them. \\[[1](_URL_4_)\\] It frees up any further dialogue from having to restate the central issues as well.\n\n* Up to 5 million men, women, and children were starved to death between 1932 and 1935 in Ukraine, that means (if we accept the barest minimum plausible figure of 3 million deaths) that for those three years no fewer than 30,000 human beings died every single day, on average. \\[[2](_URL_0_)\\]\n* These deaths were the *direct result* of Soviet policy which dictated that any and all grain be confiscated, ration distribution be ceased, and free movement (i.e. fleeing this man-made hell on earth) be restricted. \\[[3](_URL_1_)\\]\n* During and after the famine, the Soviet state actively spread denialism and disinformation concerning the events and Soviet secret police and intelligence agencies forced entry into various local government archival offices where deaths were registered and destroyed immediately or confiscated and then destroyed nearly all extant records of these deaths. \\[[4](_URL_2_?)\\]\n\nI don't say all that to try to trigger an emotional reaction in the reader before I slide in some ill-informed editorializing about what Stalin was up to, but like I said at the outset, when discussing things like the Holodomor it is absolutely critical that we not lose sight of what *is* and what *is not* up for debate here (even by those who might not agree with anyone else's conclusions).\n\nI also want to step back and define the term genocide so there can be no confusion about what the underlying question in the OP is asking about. *The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide* (1948) from the United Nations offers a succinct definition we can use:\n\n > In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: \n > \n > (a) Killing members of the group; \n > \n > (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; \n > \n > (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; \n > \n > (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; \n > \n > (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. \\[[5](_URL_3_)\\]\n\nSo I hope by this point that there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the people of Ukraine (whether or not they were ethnically Ukrainians) were killed. They were harmed bodily and mentally. Their life conditions were inflicted upon so as to bring about physical destruction. Measures were imposed upon them that prevented births. Their children were transferred to another group, i.e. the no longer alive. We just went right down the list and, there is *no debate* about whether or not these things happened. The only question that is *at all* ambiguous is whether or not this was done on a racially motivated basis.\n\nThe source above *Population Losses in the Holodomor and the Destruction of Related Archives: New Archival Evidence* indicates that we have existing records for approximately *650,000* deaths during this period in Ukraine. That is the primary reason why there is such disparity in the estimations of various parties concerning the *actual* number of deaths which took place. Again though, this isn't a debate about the substantive results of this famine-- it's about the intentions.", "There's been some very good answers by [/u/Kochevnik81](_URL_0_) and [/u/amp1212](_URL_1_) touching on this question.", "I may remember incorrectly, but i had access to some primary souces as a university student during the glasnost era. I was preparing for a PhD on vygotsky at the time but was also randimly searching details of my family. As i remember the record stated that Stalin's entourage were on a train with his wife Nedezhda as it went through the Ukraine. It was an armoured train with steel window shields which were raised for a moment to reveal hundreds of starving women and children begging for grain. They were forcibly restrained from knocking on the train sides by soldiers. Shortly after stalin's wife shot herself over an argument about collectivisation. I have tried to find the documentary evidence online since (i changed my line of post graduate study from history to computer science). These records, and those of the Kazakhstan famine, seem no longer to be around or at least, easily available. The reason i was interested was bc my family were in both locations post famine and often talked about it. I wanted to confirm/deny their oral first hand accounts. Apparently during a dinner sometime after, Stalin's wife wanted grain to be distributed to the women and children, and he insisted that only non saboteurs were permitted to eat. She said that the children were innocent and shot herself. The odd thing is that access to these files seems no longer to be available, but they were very detailed. The secret police and administration kept a lot of detailed records. For example, i found my mother's name quite easily at the time. I don't think such access is available any longer. Note: I'm not sure if this counts as a proper source and am happy to be removed." ] }

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[ [ "http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1265217823", "https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/k3grain.gif", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/23611473", "https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crimeofgenocide.aspx", "https://sputniknews.com/world/20080402102830217/" ], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/b3e0xo/how_isnt_the_holodomor_not_a_genocide/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ackguz/what_do_historians_agree_on_about_the_holodomor/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c9ro9wq" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "Your life may be very similar to that of your Roman counterpart. Carthage and Rome were by far the two largets cities in the Western Mediterranean and It was a long way to third so you will see a sort of ancient Cosmopolitan lifestyle, probably more so in Carthage than in Rome. Carthage's culture and way of life however will resemble your Phoenician ancestors. Ancient Carthaginian Religious life is derived from Phoenician customs. Your culture is also very based towards trading and sea-faring rather than land and agrarian based like Rome's. One of the main problems of studying Carthage is the lack of information. The sacking of Carthage is one of the most famous in history and was almost a complete genocide of the culture and records. If you want a really good book to study Carthage further check out \"Carthage Must be Destroyed\" by Richard Miles. It might be one of the best books I have ever read on Carthage. \n\nAlso If you read anything on Carthage sacrificing babies or children I would take it with a grain of salt. Historians are incredibly divided on the issue of if it actually happend or not. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cx0oynr" ], "score": [ 25 ], "text": [ "To my knowledge, the answer is unclear. It seems like veils (face-coverings) were present from the earliest periods of Islam, but that veiling was not required. However, debates about whether or not it is required seem to date to relatively early period.\n\nThe relevant passages in the Quran are not very specific. You have things like:\n\n > O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them. That will be better, so that they may be recognized and not harassed. Allah is ever Forgiving, Merciful.\n\nand\n\n > Say to the believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty: that will make for greater purity for them: And Allah is well acquainted with all that they do. And say that the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands, their fathers, their husband's fathers, their sons, their husbands' sons, their brothers or their brothers' sons, or their sisters' sons, or their women, or the slaves whom their right hands possess, or male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex; and that they should not strike their feet in order to draw attention to their hidden ornaments. 'And O ye Believers! turn ye all together towards Allah, that ye may attain Bliss.'\n\nWhat does it mean to draw your cloaks close? What does it mean to cover your bosom and hide your beauty? Especially when discussing ahadith, it's also unclear in tradition what's required and what's merely commendable/praiseworthy; what's necessary for everyday wear and what's obligatory for prayer and other special circumstances. Hiding your bosom, for instance, has been generally understood--as far as I know--in all periods to include hair and neck.\n\nOne of the problems is writers very often describe clothes as modest, or commend modesty, without actually describing the details of the garments. This is a pretty universal problem for historians, and generally cultural historians then turn to pictorial depictions (Egyptian wall paintings are roughly how we know how early Hebrews dressed). Unfortunately for cultural historians of early Islam, there are no visual depictions to fall back on in this period. I know of no detailed descriptions from Muslim or non-Muslim sources of typical women's clothing in the earliest centuries (we suffer from a general lack of written sources for this period).\n\nSunni Islam has four madhdhabs (schools of Islamic jurisprudence), but their opinions are not evenly divided on the issue of veiling (all require some form of modest dress). Some opinions say veiling (covering one's face, rather than just hair, around unrelated men) is unambiguously not required, whereas others say that it unambiguously is required because the face counts as *arwah*, nakedness. I believe in several of the schools you can find opinions saying veiling is obligatory and some saying it is not, though some tend to come down more clearly on one side or the other. I'm not sure quite the timeline of arguments in each school--that's likely an area that deserves more study (though it may have already been studied, I'm not very learned on the history of fiqh).\n\nHowever, as I mentioned above, veiling does seem to be a very old practice. Not only does the debate between the schools seem to indicate it was a widespread practice (but not a universal one), pre-Islamic Christian Roman writer Tertullian apparently describes a pre-cursor:\n\n > Arabia's heathen females will be your judges, who cover not only the head, but the face also, so entirely, that they are content, with one eye free, to enjoy rather half the light than to prostitute the entire face.\n\nDetails of Tertullian's life aren't known, but I would guess this is second-hand knowledge rather than first-hand experience. And he's definitely using it as an example to make a point to Roman, Christian women about modesty, so it may be an exaggerated example. Still, this and the fiqh debates point to this being a very old custom. However, its lack of universal recognition among the different fiqh traditions seems to suggest that the veil specifically was not obligatory in the earliest period. Veilling could have still been seen as a praise-worthy tradition in the earliest period. One of the interesting things is how little the details of modest dress are covered in either the Quran or Hadith. [This source](_URL_1_) says that, \n\n > Of the thousands of reports included in the canonical hadith collections, only one can be said to address explicitly the requirement of women’s covering. This hadith is reported by the ninth-century hadith compiler Abu Dawud (d. 888).\n\n > > Book 32, Number 4092\n\n > > This hadith is narrated by Aisha (the youngest wife of the Prophet) and reports an incident involving an encounter between the Prophet and Asma who is the daughter of Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s closest friend and first Caliph at the death of the Prophet:\n\n > > *Asma, daughter of Abu Bakr, entered upon the Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) wearing thin clothes. The Apostle of Allah (peace_be_upon_him) turned his attention from her. He said: O Asma’, when a woman reaches the age of menstruation, it does not suit her that she displays her parts of body except this and this, and he pointed to her face and hands.*\n\nNote, here, that the face is specifically uncovered. That's the only hadith that makes covering so explicitly obligatory, but other ahadith make it clear that covering one's face--at least in some situations--was a praiseworthy act, or at least an act that was preformed by praiseworthy people. In Salih Bukhari (considered the most trustworthy hadith collection), Volume 6, Book 60, Number 282, we find:\n\n > Narrated Safiya bint Shaiba:\n\n > 'Aisha used to say: \"When (the Verse): \"They should draw their veils over their necks and bosoms,\" was revealed, (the ladies) cut their waist sheets at the edges and covered their faces with the cut pieces.\"\n\nThere are other places where similar face veiling is mentioned, but if I recall correctly, all or at least more of these examples in hadith specifically involve the prophets' family, and none involve an explicit requirement.\n\nWe also have evidence that some women were unveiled, such as this hadith from Volume 8, Book 74, Number 247 of Sahih Bukhara:\n\n > Narrated 'Abdullah bin 'Abbas:\n\n > Al-Fadl bin 'Abbas rode behind the Prophet as his companion rider on the back portion of his she camel on the Day of Nahr (slaughtering of sacrifice, 10th Dhul-Hijja) and Al-Fadl was a handsome man. The Prophet stopped to give the people verdicts. In the meantime, *a beautiful woman From the tribe of Khath'am came, asking the verdict of Allah's Apostle. Al-Fadl started looking at her as her beauty attracted him. The Prophet looked behind while Al-Fadl was looking at her; so the Prophet held out his hand backwards and caught the chin of Al-Fadl and turned his face (to the owner sides in order that he should not gaze at her)*. She said, \"O Allah's Apostle! The obligation of Performing Hajj enjoined by Allah on His worshipers, has become due (compulsory) on my father who is an old man and who cannot sit firmly on the riding animal. Will it be sufficient that I perform Hajj on his behalf?\" He said, \"Yes.\" (*emphasis added*)\n\nFrom there it seems like it was not required to cover one's face.\n\nIslamic historians also give us mixed evidence. Remember the line from above from the Quran? \n\n > O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them.\n\nThere are Tafsir (Quranic commentaries) that include commentaries on that line. The earliest is Tanwir al-Miqbas, though unfortunately it was only collected and standardized much later so is considered suspect by many scholars. Still, the commentary on this verse is:\n\n > (O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them) to cover their necks and bosoms ((when they go abroad). That will be better, that so they may be recognised) as free women (and not annoyed) and not be harmed by the fornicators. (Allah is ever Forgiving) He forgives what they have done in the past, (Merciful) He shows mercy on them regarding that which they will do in the future.\n\nWhich specifies neck and bosom, but not face.\n\nHowever, Tafsir al-Tabiri, the second oldest and most respected tafsir gives the comment on this line:\n\n > Ibn Abbas(RA) narrated regarding (Allah’s) order [O Prophet! Tell thy wives and thy daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks close round them…] that Allah commanded the believing women, when they went out of their houses for some need, to cover their faces from above their heads with the Jilbab, leaving only one eye showing. (*note*: this is from an online resource--I haven't looked this up in a translation of Tafsir al Tabiri myself).\n\nIndicating from an early point that there were arguments that this should be an obligatory behavior.\n\nSo, in sum, veiling seems to be an old tradition, quite possibly dating even back to pre-Islamic times, but it likely wasn't seen as obligatory for believing women in the time of the Prophet Muhammad. However, debates about whether or not it was obligatory seem to emerge relatively early.\n \nAs a small side note, burqa is widely used in the West for all full-body coverings and veils, but actually refers to a specific kind of [strikingly sky-blue garment only found in Afghanistan](_URL_0_). " ] }

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[ [ "http://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2014/02/11/01146366-0625-4c53-9a9f-47a534cdd603/thumbnail/620x350/7c30e2af3e18acaf7e59f85ef9a79f76/afghanistan-185023232.jpg", "http://veil.unc.edu/religions/islam/hadith/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cz0po2y" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Hello, I'll take a stab at your question. The terms you listed actually have a lot of variation, some are officer ranks while others are very different. I'll just go through and answer to the best of my ability.\n\nHussar - A type of cavalryman who fights with a saber. Light cavalry, generally considered dashing and prestigious.\n\nCornet - A type of musical instrument. Not sure on the context, but it may perhaps be used in short-hand to refer to the person that plays the Cornet. It's basically a type of trumpet.\n\nColonel - middle-high ranking military officer, just below 'General'. Generally an important fellow in the era of Tolstoy, who would command a 'regiment' of around a thousand men.\n\nStaff Officer - a officer in the service of a General or some kind of high command apparatus. Generally more concerned with administrative, or military planning functions than with leading men into battle. In most armies, being a Staff officer was considered a safe posting with high chance of promotion.\n\nJunker - was a type of German aristocrat or landed nobleman. It may have been applied to German community leaders in the Baltic States (which Russia controlled at this period). It's doubtful this would be used as a short-hand term for a Russian aristocrat but without knowledge of the context I can't be more detailed.\n\nRegimental/Battalion/Companies are just the building blocks of military units. A regiment is made up of battalions, which are made up of companies. Recall that a Regiment is made up of 1,000 men, give or take.\n\nCommander in Chief - Generally refers to some kind of overall commander of the military. Hence, for example, the US President is often called the 'Commander in Chief'...in theory, the highest level of military authority.\n\nCossack - Cossacks were an ethnic group of war-like people who lived mostly in modern day Ukraine, and although a source of frequent rebellions were also prized as cavalrymen and soldiers by the Russians. Pretty interesting people with a complex history, worth a topic of their own.\n\nCaptain - Mid level rank above Lieutenant, but several grades beneath Colonel. Generally comands a Company.\n\n\"The Guards\" - Refers to a special class of soldier that was a part of one of the elite 'Guards' regiments of the Imperial Army. The Guards weren't exactly a small unit of bodyguards, they were a military force of thousands of men divided into different regiments, although they were often in charge of the Tsar's security and upkeep of the regime. Being posted to The Guards would be a prestigious post.\n\nPrince - generally a title denoting that someone is a member of the royal family. Hence it's not explicitly a political or military rank, but Princes often held a lot of political and military positions." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cw8gji1" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Well, no. Not really.\n\nWhile medieval cities were a far cry from what we would call \"clean\", they did at least try. We do know that people on occasion did toss garbage, offal, and human waste into the streets because there are numerous edicts and laws passed throughout the Middle Ages where individual cities would outlaw such practices, often leveraging fines on the offenders. For example, London instituted fines for leaving excrement (human or animal) in the roads in 1309, further rules against where you could and could not throw refuse in 1357, and the 1388 Statute of Cambridge set the fine for dumping excrement, trash, or offal in ditches and waterways at a whopping £20. \n \nMost houses in the cities, e.g., London, had access to either a cesspit or a privy. These would need to be cleaned out on occasion. This, combined with needing to clean the streets of gunk, gave rise to a not terribly prestigious but nonetheless necessary occupational opportunity. In England these folks were called \"Gongfermors\" or \"Gong farmers\"--part garbageman, part street-sweeper, part sewage removal technician. Some enterprising individuals even made a decent amount of money. \n\nPeople were sensitive about smells in the Middle Ages. It was tied to their ideas of cleanliness. Bad odors--specifically rotting offal and sewage--were thought to be a vector of disease. The reality of logistics prevented cities from getting rid of this waste entirely, but people were at least aware of the problem and did at least try to remedy it.\n\nTL:DR: if someone in the Middle Ages in England did what your professor described, they'd likely have been slapped with a hefty fine." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cak9b8z" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "The issue is that both have changed. While Quebec French has maintained some features of earlier forms of French, it's changed things that European French hasn't. Quebec French trills /r/ more often, which is older, and shifts /ɛ/ to /æ/ in some contexts, both of which are relics of older sorts of French. But affrication of dental consonants is a Quebecois innovation.\n\nThat's true of virtually all times two languages diverge. Haitian Creole preserved very old colloquial French things, too, as do different dialects of English. Northern England preserved \"thou\" until quite recently, and didn't undergo certain parts of the Great Vowel Shift, but also does funky things with consonants. American English preserves the \"r\" sound where it was historically, but lost vowel sounds that many varieties of British English preserved. Every language changes over time, without exception." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "chg0gad", "chg0z6e", "chg11l2", "chg2bra", "chg3gh2", "chg87ao" ], "score": [ 189, 55, 20, 7, 3, 15 ], "text": [ "The most practical reason is Germany did not possess the naval resources for an invasion of Great Britain at any period of time during the war. \n\nThe German Navy had no suitable landing craft for a cross channel invasion so the plan was to use converted river barges for the crossing. This would have been disastrous not only because of the unpredictable seas in the channel, but also because of the lack of sufficient numbers of German war ships to secure their crossing. The Royal Navy would have annihilated the invasion force long before they got close to the English coast. ", "Hitler wasnt actually willing to sacrifice that many men and materials in 1941. The Russian experience in the Russo-Finnish War (the Winter War) seemed to prove that the Russians were incapable of waging an effective defense against a Nazi attack, using the same armies which had just beaten France (considered, in 1940, one of the most powerful armies in Europe). The *Wehrmacht* and Hitler felt that they could repeat their success in 1941 by encircling the Russian Army along the inter-Polish border, destroying it, then quickly seizing Moscow. The idea was, the Red Army would be overwhelmed and destroyed, leaving the rest of Russia defenseless. But, contrary to expectations the Red Army fought tenaciously, and while it gave ground, it cost the Germans heavily. Further, the Germans were not as good destroying the Red Army as had been predicted. The titanic scale of the invasion meant that there was a lot of space between German units. While the *Wehrmacht* was very good at stopping Regiments, Brigades, and Divisions (large units) from escaping encirclement, many Russians were able to pass through German lines and return to service for the winter campaign. Further, the Russians were able to mobilize a massive segment of its population for war service, especially post-1942. Those losses that the Germans inflicted (which were substantial) could eventually be replaced by fresh soldiers, and new, domestic, weapons. \n\nHitler didnt really count on any of that in 1941. He expected the campaign to end before the fall of 1941, and the German army, sans a garrison force, would be able to return to Germany that year. He was merely committing himself to employing the Army for the summer, not launching on a titanic 4 year campaign which would destroy Germany. By the winter of 1941, it was obvious that the invasion had not succeeded, but by then it was already too late. War was declared, and the Red Army would not simply go away. \n\nAs for a Cross Channel invasion, I suppose I hold a contrarian view on Operation SeaLion. We could get into that, if youd like, and if we can keep it civil. But by 1941, there wasnt any real chance of a Cross Channel invasion without some serious changes in the German War effort. The *Kriegsmarine* was smashed, and the *Luftwaffe* had been badly handled during the Battle of Britain. Further, the British Army was fully recovered from their Dunkirk evacuation, and were remarkably prepared for any sort of invasion. So, from that perspective too, Barbarossa made some sense. Getting at England from France would have been a pain in the Ass. But Russia, (seemingly)weak Russia, shared a common border with Germany. ", "There were also philosophical or world view reasons. \n\nHitler utterly despised the Soviet Union, and catastrophically underestimated the Soviet ability to put up a fight. He has been quoted as saying: You only need to kick in the (Soviet) door, and the whole building will come crashing down\".\n\nHe also had a sort of half baked \"plan\" of forcing England to sue for peace by conquering the S.U. He reasoned that the S.U. was England's last \"ally\" and hope on the continent, and by knocking them out, England would lose hope and sue for peace.\n\nSo, in his own head, Hitler thought that the easiest way to defeat England was to knock The S.U out. \n\nPersonally, I have my doubts whether he *actually* believed this, or if it was just a way to avoid invading England, a task he admittedly feared.\n\nThe huge losses on the Eastern front came as a very nasty surprise. The plan was to defeat the S.U by christmas. The invasion started in June, and most everyone expected it to be a walkover... ", "As well as the logistical reasons mentioned here, Hitler kept a favourable view of the \"English\" (either this is him incorrectly naming them, or emphasising the \"Germanicness\" of Britain - he often spoke of the \"Anglo-Saxons\"). He essentially saw them as Germanic equals - this certainly softened the blow when thinking of WWI, as being defeated by an equal is not as hard to accept.\n\nIn addition, he had a rather vague plan of Germany ruling the continent and Britain ruling the waves. Hitler even considered offering German troops to help Britain preserve her empire, although to what extent the plan was considered is up for debate.\n\nHowever, as it became apparent that Britain would not back down, German propaganda had to change to attempt to display the British as evil, Jew-ridden, and everything else you would expect. Nevertheless, Hitler still liked the British and whilst it would be naive to suggest he did not want an invasion, between attacking the \"racially inferior\" USSR and their \"British brothers,\" Hitler was more inclined to put effort into combating the actual military threat - Britain was not exactly in a great position at the time.\n\n\"The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain\" by Gerwin Strobl is a good book on this, as well as Mein Kampf if you can get through it.", "There's some evidence to suggest that in Hitler's mind he envisioned Europe as having Germany as a dominant power, but not the sole power, and the British would be more a rival.\n\n\n\nPractically speaking though, while the British as a land presence at the onset of WW2 was a joke- their tanks designed from WW1 standards that either had them as a replacement for traditional cavalry, or as infantry support vehicles, their small arms were dated, and many in the volunteer army recounted that there might have been 20 soldiers, a single ww1 field gun and some rifles to protect a mile or two of coast line- to their credit the British possessed a highly capable navy- if lacking for submarines- and a skilled air force. \n\n\nGermany meanwhile had a navy- kriegsmarine- that was no where *near* it's intended production figures laid out in Plan Z. At one point Hitler considered simply scrapping the entire above-water fleet. Submarines were useful, but limiting in scope. \n\n\nAnd while Germany's air force had plenty of talent behind it, it did lack a few critical pieces of technology. For some bizarre reason the Germans never really developed external drop tanks for fuel to expand the range of their aircraft, and the wizardry of the Supercharger (no pun intended- the Rolls Royce Merlin Engine by some estimates saved England) wasn't something the Germans were not entirely thinking of. \n\n\n\nTo be blunt, while Germany had many individual technologies that could have made invading the British Isles a reality, in execution the Germans simply had nothing in full production. They had large gliders and naval vessles, but nothing that could be used practically in an amphibious assault. Before Germany could land in England they'd need to establish naval power, which their submarines weren't quite capable of, and their above-water fleet simply could not do. Furthermore the Luftwaffe tore itself to ribbons trying to wrest the skies from the RAF. Granted, the English were doing the same, but they had the advantage of defense. \n\n\n\nSimilarly, Hitler seems to have sorely underestimated the Soviet Union's will to fight. In both situations he'd hoped that a sufficiently large display of force would cause the states to sue for peace.", "Operation Barbarossa was planned to carry out a swift land grab, with combat ending by Fall at the latest and pursuit following after. Hitler and the military commanders and staffs working under him generally agreed that the campaign’s casualties would be proportionately small (275,000 men according to Halder), the strain of combat on ammunition and fuel would be low after the first weeks, and the political system of the Soviet Union would be unable to handle such rapid defeats. Even before the air war over Britain was decided, the promise of swift and easy conquest of the Soviet Union proved too difficult to resist. \n\nWar with the Soviet Union began to be seriously discussed a month after France signed its armistice. General Fritz Halder, Chief of the General Staff of the Army, noted in his diary that on 22 July, 1940 Hitler made his intention to conquer and subjugate the Soviet Union clear to all his commanders; the day before had ordered the Commander in Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, to begin developing plans to invade the Soviet Union. General Erich Marcks was selected to head this initial study.\n\nFrom its inception the plan was marked by several assumptions and flaws. First, the vast distances of the Soviet Union, while noted, were not properly addressed or prepared for. Second the pervasive racism of German military and political leadership caused them to demean Soviet capabilities, technology, and leadership, leading in turn to the assumption that the war would be short and easy. Third, the rivalry between the two main German military bodies, OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, High Command of the Armed Forces) and OKH (Oberkommando ders Heeres, High Command of the Army), led to friction, compartmentalization, and competition. The plan was as much about soothing egos and meeting racial expectations as achieving victory.\n\nMarck’s initial concept representing OKH’s view, codenamed Operation Otto, was delivered to Hitler on August 5, 1940 and formed the basis for future variants of what would become Operation Barbarossa. His plan assumed that Moscow would be the campaign’s main objective that the war would last only “9 to 17 weeks”, and most importantly, that the Red Army’s 170 combat ready divisions, an inaccurate number, would be destroyed along the border west of the Dnieper River. \n\nA second study, called the “Lossberg Study”, conducted separately by OKW called for a stronger focus on Ukraine and Leningrad, though Moscow would remain the central objective. It also was more concerned with the flanks of the Ostheer as it advanced into the interior of Russia than OKH's proposal, concerns which would be repeated by Hitler later in the final plan. Though never presented to Hitler, it influenced subsequent planning by Goering and the Reich Ministry of Economics and from there likely reached his ears. \n\nHalder presented OKH’s final plan, codenamed Operation Fritz, to Hitler on December 5, 1940, with the three objectives now being Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev. The Red Army was assumed to be destroyed within 500 kilometers of the border within the first weeks of war, followed by a pursuit to the Archangelsk-Astrakhan Line. \n\nOn December 18, 1940, Hitler issued Fuhrer Directive 21, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, which was a synthesis of the past 3 months' planning. In the final plan the Red Army was still to be destroyed near the border, with the assumption that future reserves could not be raised. Three Army Groups, North, Center, and South, would advance on Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, respectively. However, the plan stressed that while Moscow was the most important objective Army Group Center should be diverted to assist Army Groups North and South if they failed to seize their objectives. Rambling and vague, Directive 21 failed to resolve the disputes planning had opened and in fact was a plan only to defeat the Red Army, not the Soviet Union as a whole. \n\nThe planning for Operation Barbarossa was marred by a number of problems. Most importantly, logistics and the factor of space were never addressed; Martin Crevald in Supplying War notes that an absurd number of problems were swept under the rug, from fuel consumption to rolling stock. German planners also lacked a unity of command which led to a mixture of objectives and no clear focus. OKH and OKW had each had their own assumptions about what objective would achieve final victory, and forces were diluted along the Northern, Central, and Southern axis to achieve all of them; the Germans entered the campaign with only the vaguest idea of what success meant. Finally, racism towards Slavs caused the Germans to underestimate their opponents and ignore potential problems, maintaining confidence that ultimate victory could be achieved quickly and easily. \n\nGerman planning for Barbarossa was confused and unrealistic, to the point of absurdity. Thus it's impossible to look at Barbarossa vs Sealion from a rational standpoint as Hitler and his inner circle were driven by irrational assumptions in their decision to go to war. Adam Tooze uses the phrase \"mad logic\", and I think that best sums it up; Barbarossa seemed like the best option within their own worldview, even if today its flaws are easily apparent to us.\n \nSources:\n\n*Supplying War* by Martin van Crevald\n\n*Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East* by David Stahel\n\n*Barbarossa: Planning for Operational Failure* by John D. Snively\n\n*Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941* by David Glantz\n\n*The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality* by Wolfram Wette\n\n*The Strategy of Barbarossa* by Austin C. Wedemeyer\n\n*Operational Logic and Identifying Soviet Operational Centers of Gravity During Operation Barbarossa, 1941* by Major David J. Bongi\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c49iju2", "c49paqp", "c49q67r" ], "score": [ 3, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "I really enjoyed [Conquistador](_URL_0_): Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy.\n\nI think he does a great job of delving into the people instead of just the events. It was a good read.", "You might rethink your approach - \"historiography\" means a study of how different historians have approached the topic over time. As such, you probably shouldn't base your paper on original sources. Instead, I'd suggest to go to your library, find the section on conquest, and start reading the introductions to historical monographs. ", "In my experience, the best thing to do for historiography papers is to find some books on the topic, read their introductions, foot/end-notes as well as their bibliography. Find out what kinds of sources they use and how they use them, then write a paper outlining that. Usually you need to pick a topic, for example, I was once given the assignment to write a historiography paper on some subject relating to the Andean civilization. I chose pre-Columbian belief systems and then went about finding papers and books which delved into that subject from a variety angles. My paper was not about pre-Columbian belief systems themselves, but about how people had studied pre-Columbian belief systems. So, I looked at what kinds of sources and data they used, how they had analyzed these sources and synthesized their data, then I wrote my own analysis of their methods. \n\nTLDR **Don't write about the topic, write about how other people have studied the topic.**" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.amazon.com/Conquistador-Hernan-Cortes-Montezuma-Aztecs/dp/0553384716/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1333811788&sr=1-2" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cbx696w", "cbx6u2y" ], "score": [ 5, 3 ], "text": [ "There are several memorials dedicated to those who died during the world-wars and I think there are memorial services as well. If you compare the attention given to the non-war victims of the 3rd reich, this is negligible.\nFor the Wehrmacht, I guess the general consensus is \"don't talk about it\", but they are rarely considered criminals. This is slightly different for the SS though.", "Germany has [*Volkstrauertag*](_URL_1_) where the dead of the wars are remembered, including the soldiers. Veterans usually organize ceremonies that include a procession from the respective Church service to a war memorial, prayer by the pastor, speeches by the mayor and the veterans' chairmen, a military guard of honor, several wreaths are laid, and the famous song [“Ich hatt' einen Kameraden”](_URL_0_) is sung. Where available, there will also be the attendance of a Bundeswehr officer as official representative. And yes, fallen Wehrmacht soldiers are mostly considered victims in Germany." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_hatt%27_einen_Kameraden", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkstrauertag" ] ]