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{ "a_id": [ "ck5k3xr" ], "score": [ 18 ], "text": [ "What an odd question – I'd love to know the story behind it. But anyway, I'll take a stab at it.\n\nFirst, some definitions. The Stone Age is a very long time period starting when our ancestors first started using stone tools 2.4 million years ago and ending with the first use of metal tools which, depending on which part of the world you're talking about, was anywhere between 7,000 and 50 years ago. For simplicity let's say it ended somewhere around 5,000 BCE. Garlic bread is toasted bread with garlic butter on it. \n\nSo, I'm a Stone Age chef looking to make garlic bread. Let's go through the ingredients one by one and see if I can find them:\n\n* **Bread**, i.e. ground cereals made into a dough and baked, has been the staple food of much of the Old World since people first started farming in Southwest Asia 10,000 years ago. But it was also made less frequently from wild cereals much earlier than that; currently the earliest evidence comes from 30,000 years ago, but probably it goes back even further. No problems here.\n\n* For **butter** the first thing I need is milk. Unless I'm willing to use breastmilk, this will have to wait until at least 10,000 years ago when the first milking animals (sheep and goat, then a bit later cattle) were domesticated in Southwest Asia. But making butter from milk is quite an involved process, will people have bothered? As it happens, we know that people must have been processing milk (into cheese or butter) from the beginning, because the gene that allows adults to digest lactose did not become widespread until several thousand years *after* we know people were milking animals, and therefore raw milk was inedible. There is direct evidence that people processed milk into something from 9,000 years ago, and widespread evidence for cheese-making from 8,000 years ago. So depending on where I live I might not be able to get hold of \"butter\" as we know it (i.e. churned, pasteurised cows' cream), but I could probably find some sort of processed milk product, be it something like ghee or a soft goats cheese, that would do the job.\n\n* Wild **garlic** is native to Central and Southwest Asia, and so would have always been available to people living there. We don't know exactly when it was domesticated and spread, but there is early evidence of it being used in Southwest Asia 4,000 years ago.\n\nAs for cooking technology: all I need is a grinding stone to grind cereals for dough, a fire to bake and toast the bread, and something to mash up garlic with butter. All readily available at any time in the last few million years. Pottery, which came into use 16,000–8,000 years ago, would probably be useful for churning the butter and mixing in the garlic but conceivably an animal skin or gourd or something could be used instead.\n\nSo if I lived somewhere in Western Eurasia in the latter part of the Stone Age, after 10,000 years or so ago, yes I could probably make garlic bread. We have no idea whether anyone actually did." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ccohuwc" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I know of the incident you're referring to, be careful when reading about it. Bear in mind that anti-Mongol chroniclers have a strong tendency to exxagerate their atrocities e.g. by inflating the number of deaths. While they undeniably killed many thousands the numbers cited are not borne out by archeological evidence. I could imagine that it would not be a great stretch for the incident to have been exagerated/distorted by whoever originally wrote about it (likely some Chinese chronicler).\n\nSorry for spelling typing on a mobile." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "djwl025" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The idea that continents could move didn't come about until the Reinassance, mostly because the vast majority of the Earth was unknown to the Europeans during the Middle Ages. The shape of North and South America was what spurred interest in the idea of Pangaea. Abraham Ortelius is one of the first cartographers to have linked the shape of the continents with a primordial supercontinent in 1596; he claimed that the continents were at some point separated, though he believed it to have been caused by enormous earthquakes and floods. \n\nIt was not until the 19th century that the scientific community began to discuss the mechanics of continental drift. Antonio Snider-Pellegrini became a proponent of the theory after discovering identical plant fossils in both Africa and South America. Alfred Russel Wallace, a British naturalist and explorer, believed that the continents underwent constant transformations and changes, but this idea was not seriously considered by the scientific community until Alfred Wegener formulated his theory of continental drift, and the scientific community began to seriously consider the existence of an *Urkontinent* as Alfred Wegener called it - a primordial continent." ] }

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[ "https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/6lpxkt/world_in_1567_by_ottoman_sailor_ali_macar_reis/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=hot&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=all" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "d222jcz" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "There was a great deal of support (even if it was qualified in wanting the government to improve) for the Republic of Vietnam. For this seems quite obvious. But I certainly understand how one can get this impression, as it is quite easy to encounter simplistic portrayals of Vietnam that were produced by the intense politicization of Vietnamese history during the anti-war movement.\nKeep in mind that during both the First (1945-55) and Second (1956-1975) Indochina Wars, the primary combatants were Vietnamese -- on both sides. What I mean is that the non-communist Army of the State of Vietnam and its successor after the 1954 Geneva Accords divided Vietnam, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), were doing the much of the fighting and dying. There was a vibrant society in South Vietnam and many people had misgivings about the government, that isn't the same as saying they supported the North or insurgents. In the late 1960s there was even nostalgia for the Ngo Dinh Diem period in South Vietnam. The demand of dissident South Vietnamese elites was more often for political reform and democracy -- something the other side would not deliver. The Viet Cong was not a rosy group. It used terrorism and coercion to accomplish its goals, as did their benefactors in North Vietnam, both during the 1945-55 and 1955-75 periods. The majority of people, particularly in the countryside, were caught in the middle and had to accommodate the circumstances they faced. \n\nThe other aspect I will note is that many intellectuals and youths sympathetic to the Viet Cong were very naive about the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. They did not think of their support for the Viet Cong/NLF as support for a unified state under an authoritarian communist regime. They believed they would have a say in a new government and help address problems in southern society (keep in mind there were a great deal of problems in North Vietnam at this time too, issues like press freedom, intellectual liberty, etc were tremendously worse there). Instead, after the fall of Saigon, the North Vietnamese authorities asked the Provisional Revolutionary Government/NLF to vote itself out of power. What began then was simply the extension of the communist party's control over all of Vietnam. The students and many other supporters realized that error and their relationship with the government quickly soured. That became apparent as southern Vietnam was plummeted into a police state and poverty in the late 1970s and 1980s, eventually forcing the party to implement the Doi Moi economic and cultural reforms after 1986." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "drqtrcn" ], "score": [ 56 ], "text": [ "Here's the really fun thing about the fall of Rome: Depending on your political beliefs, it was caused by [insert \"Stuff I do not like in out modern world\" here]. Some people blame immigration, others blame loss of virtue and morality, others blame the elites, or taxation, or... [you name it.](_URL_0_)\n\nAnyway, if you're looking for a consensus on the causes of the fall, or even on the question of whether \"the fall of Rome\" is a useful concept at all. (Some historians argue that the whole \"fall\" narrative was only invented after the fact when Justinian needed a good excuse to go invade Italy and Africa, and that in actual fact the Roman way of life just went on and only gradually changed over time.) \n\n[I wrote a few big posts on the subject a while ago](_URL_1_), though that questioner was coming from the opposite angle. \n\nAll that said, \"Loss of Infastructure\" seems a bit of a stretch. Unless by \"loss of infrastructure\" you mean \"The Vandals captured Carthage, the fleet that used to bring the grain to feed Rome now brings Vandals to sack it, the fleets we sent to recapture it were burnt, and now there no longer is any tax to pay the army so the local warlords, nobles and former generals and officials are just doing what they want.\" (The loss of Roman Africa is considered by many historians to be the final nail in the coffin of central Roman authority, though whether it was a symptom or a cause, an inevitability or simple contingency, and whether it actually caused any meaningful change in the lives of most peoples, are all questions you will find more debate on.)\n\nI'm also not quite sure what they mean by \"distance between the common folk and the rich.\" There was great inequality in the Roman empire, and there is evidence that this increased in late antiquity. Still, it's not like there was any particular closeness between the rich and common people during the empire's heyday. \n\nI can think of a few things they might be driving at. Were they perhaps referring to the changes in civic culture in late antiquity, where elites ceased to invest heavily in public works and became less willing to take on civic functions? That was a thing, and there's quite a lot of debate on what caused it and what effects it has, and I can expand on it if you want to. " ] }

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[ [ "http://crookedtimber.org/2003/08/25/decline-and-fall/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4oelte/how_accurate_is_the_popular_view_that/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "czow6cx", "czpb2wk" ], "score": [ 14, 4 ], "text": [ "In ancient Spartan society, the Ephors (city councilmen) would declare war every autumn on the Helots (serf/slaves) as a means of population control. During this time any Spartan citizen could kill a Helot without repercussions.\n\nHelots outnumbered Spartans, by some accounts, 7-to-1. The formation of various - possibly clandestine - organizations like the Crypteia, were done out of fear of the numbers of the Helots. There are other behaviors, like Spartan citizens (Equals) never going weaponless, and locking themselves in their homes for fear of being disarmed or an uprising.\n\nHowever, there are *~~some~~* accounts of Helots attending Spartans on various war campaigns; something unlikely to happen if they feared rebellion *(edit: or abandonment)*. And other sources claim Helots were more serf-like than slave-like. They were less likely to be sold then other Greek slaves, allowing them to form families. Indeed, it is speculated that the sale of Helots would have been far more effective population control than annual slaughter since their populations continued to remain stable and grow while other slave populations in Greece were more tenuous. They were also allowed to own property and purchase their freedom; a status that elevated them above the average Greek slave.\n\nOn the other hand, there's an account by Myron of Priene (a biased account), that all Helots must submit to a required *~~amount~~* number of beating*(s)* annually to remind them of their status as slaves.\n\n*Edited to add: There were several revolts and rebellions by the helots in the fifth century B.C., and yet they attended the Spartans on a war campaign in Plataea fifteen years prior. Forty years after that slave revolt, 20,000 slaves fled Athens to take refuge with the Sparta army in Attica. Needless to say, the relationship between the Spartans and Helots was complex.*", "Your question is a bit oddly worded. Waging war is typically thought as an action one nation-state commits to another nation-state. Could you clarify? \n\nDo you mean a ruling party using military force to control the population of a group *outside* its borders? It would be difficult to argue that population control was ever the chief motivator of war. The [American Indian Wars](_URL_5_) is the closest example that comes to mind. Although that was motivated more so by territorial gains and the ideals of Manifest Destiny rather than population based arguments. Other examples would include [Third Punic War](_URL_0_) and [ the Qing campaigns ](_URL_7_)\nagainst the Dzungar people in the 18th century.\n\nThere were certainly conflicts that were fought because one nation or group wanted to limit the expansion of another (e.g. [the Crimean War](_URL_3_)). You could argue that increasing population would be a natural progression from territorial expansion, but it was rarely explicitly stated as such. That wasn't always the case, with the Holocaust being the most significant antithesis to this idea. \n\nBut I think you meant more towards a ruling party using military force to control a population *within* its borders. Looking at western Europe, [Thomas Malthus's work](_URL_8_) served as a watershed for the idea of population control. He essentially argued for (what would later be called) carrying capacity, where populations, human and animal alike, would eventually collapse when they grew too large. There is a controversial argument that this concern contributed to the British government's [ineffective response](_URL_2_) to the Irish Famine of 1845-1852. Farther east, [the Holodomor (1932-33)](_URL_4_) is contentiously considered to have targeted Ukrainians with artificial famine. Neither case really represents direct military intervention; both governments instead relied on the military or a militarized police force for policy enforcement. \n\nOn a similar note, you can also look at national sterilization policies. For example, the [US's sterilization program in Puerto Rico](_URL_14_) in the mid-20th century. Some argue that it was a [designed program of population control](_URL_6_). Others claim that the sterilization was willingly pursued by Puerto Rican women, but that this [decision](_URL_10_) was heavily influenced by a limited access to other forms of contraception and ignorance of the procedure's permanent nature.\n\n\nIf you're talking direct military action, would you consider campaigns of internal genocide population control? The Ottomans used military force to eliminate the local [Armenian population](_URL_1_) as well as the [Assyrians and Greeks.](_URL_11_) Military forces in Rwanda greatly reduced [its Tutsi population.](_URL_12_) I could give more examples, but these events aren't typically considered to be motivated by a desire for culling or some other form of population control. \n\nI'd say the modern public understanding of overpopulation concerns didn't really pop up until the book [*The Population Bomb*](_URL_13_) came out in 1968. Otherwise, such lines of thinking tended to be contained within [the eugenics movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.](_URL_9_) " ] }

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[ [], [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Punic_War#Aftermath", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_\\(Ireland\\)#Government_response", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars", "https://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/CWLUArchive/puertorico.html", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzungar_genocide", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_eugenics", "https://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/centers/crrj/zotero/loadfile.php?entity_key=CS6NB845", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assyrian_genocide", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Puerto_Rico" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "eir1s6f" ], "score": [ 18 ], "text": [ "You are asking about tax rates in dozens of entites of various levels of independence accross a timespan of centuries. As such a simple generic answer simply can't be given. I can break you down tax rates in 15. century Kingdom of Hungary which is what I am familiar with. Many of the taxes listed span back to the kingdoms founding and were present in other countries as well, some were unique. And before I dwelve into I have to note that taxes weren't supposed to be paid only money only. In fact paying tax through labour and through giving up produce was much more common practice. Also taxes usually weren't individual taxes but instead were collected by household which roughly equaled an extended family This was determined in a variety of ways about what exactly consituted one household or a family, such as per chimney or per gate, but at the end of the road judgment was made by the landlord's appointed collector. As you can imagine people were quite creative even back then regarding tax evasion which is why the criteria was occasionally changed, the infamous example being the late modern English window tax which led to some poor walling up their windows, but in Hungary too when gate-tax was the measure peasents just demolished gates and used one leading to many households sometimes.\n\nThe two quintessential tax form was the *nona* aka \"the ninth\", and the tithe, also called *decima* or tenth, each being a 10% of harvested produce. Of this the tithe has the longest history spanning back to early Christian ages, and were collected in practically all countries from the point of their conversion. The nona was collected from the 14. century and was to be given to their respective landlord by each peasent household in form of produce. However this was typically done together with collecting the tithe for sake of easier administration and work (and in turn the landlord had to pay an appropiate share to the local church body). There were designated places to give over your tax-goods, and in many Hungarian villages they are still preserved as \"decima-houses\", \"decima-caverns\" (think paying wine) and so on. \n\nA regal tax pretty always paid in coin were plot/house taxes. The size of this was quite exact: 18 denarius for most of the 14-15. century (100 denarius = 1 florin, with most peasent household having a total of one to few florin worth annual income). Another regal tax was the subsidium which wasn't a regular payment, but could be imposed in wartime. Depending on how much land the peasent family worked on, one to three florins annually. The other large class of taxes were theose to be paid in labour, variously called *robot* or *servitum*, and it entailed unpaid work on the landlords lands, which was basically the rental fee of the land peasents cultivated for their own living (as they themselves **did not own** the land they worked on). This was few days a year from the XI. up to the XVI. century, then a day per month after, but by the XVII. century a day per week! \n\nCompulsory \"gifts\" called *census* and *munera* were also a thing, and yes these were intended to be gifts given to the landlord as form of goodwill. Three times a year until 1514, then monthly after. Hard to quantify, mainly paid in form of smaller livestock like pigs or chicken. Then there were many, many smaller items. Milling tax for milling your grain, all sorts of customs taxes and and a mind-boggling number of local taxes depending on a regions product speciality, but I'll disregard these for now. \n\nSo of course everyone wants a number, but as you can see even if I focus on a specific century for a specific kingdom its not so easy to add numbers up due to the nature of these taxes. But I'll make an attempt: Tithe + nona = 20%, plot tax = ~5-20%, robot = few %, munera = few %. So *per household* a **rough average would be 40-50%**, with poorer hhs. paying relatively more due to the plot taxes's fixed nature. But if the subsidium was collected (some games do simulate this through war tax), then the % can jump up quite a lot, up to and **over 90% !**\n\n\nSources I used:\n\nHungarian Ethnographic Lexicon\n\nHistory of money in Hungary, Márton Gyöngyössy\n\nFinancial and economic policy in the Kingdom of Hungary, Bálint Hómann\n\nLife of Serfs, György Domanovszky" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cvn0w6p", "cvn0xxt", "cvn14h7", "cvn9p24" ], "score": [ 2, 4, 6, 5 ], "text": [ "Not a mod.\n\nThat being said, when a comment that has no children is removed by the moderators, it will show up in the \"all X comments\" part but will be invisible to all but the moderators and the user who made the comment in question. /r/AskHistorians is famed for being actively moderated, meaning low-quality or inaccurate comments will be removed. So in your question, the 5 comments were too short, irrelevant, or inaccurate, and were consequently removed by the mods so they can no longer be seen.", "Comments which don't comport with the subreddit are removed by the moderator team. Unfortunately, due to reddit architecture, the comment count displayed doesn't count *visible* comments, but includes removed ones as well. Nothing we can do about that unfortunately.", "As others have said, these comments have been removed. We expect quite a lot from answers in this subreddit and answers which don't meet our standards are removed. \n\nSince people always want to know what's been hidden from them, here's a brief description of the 5 removed comments:\n\n* A 2 sentence reply containing a platitude\n* A 3 sentence reply without proper grammar\n* A 4 sentence reply containing an anecdote\n* A 2 sentence reply referencing the removed comments\n* A 1 sentence reply containing a guess\n", "I'm not a historian, just a regular reader and occasional questioner. But let me encourage you to stick around and explain one thing that tends to be true of this sub --\n\nMost questions effectively go unanswered. It's still worthwhile to stick around and ask questions.\n\nIn AskHistorians, your questions about history get answered by actual historians - people who are academically trained, often in the specific aspect of history you're asking about. And they do it *for free.*\n\nThat's amazing. I don't work in my field for free. Many people refuse to on principle. But here, you'll find people so dedicated to their subject matter that they get paid to do it all day, and in their spare time, they do it for free for those of us who are just curious.\n\nThe answers are often given in great detail, and usually with sources. \n\nSo if you ask a question, you'll often find that there wasn't a trained historian in that subject who had the inclination and the time to write you a detailed, sourced answer for free. So you don't get an answer every time. It's still worth sticking around, because when there *is* such a user available, the answers are incredibly enlightening. \n\n(Incidentally, I say they \"effectively\" go unanswered, because a typical pattern is that 5 or 6 unqualified people give anecdotal, unsourced answers, which a mod deletes because of the rules of the sub)" ] }

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[ "http://imgur.com/rb3wRIs" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "ccgu151", "ccgurjc" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "Someone might be able to help here, but /r/Genealogy would also be a great place to ask in!", "I wouldn't exactly say Puerto Rico is a young island. There were indigneous groups there for thousands of years, and Spanish, African, and indigenous peoples have lived on the island for over 500 years now. As to your family. If you think they arrived during the colonial period there is a chance that their travel licenses were preserved in the Archivo General de Indias. Much of the immigration data is searchable online via the ministry of culture website _URL_0_ The only problem if it is the name of a place in Spain you will get a ton of hits, but it might still be worth trying. As to possible Arab ancestry, I doubt that you would find that. " ] }

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[ [], [ "pares.mcu.es" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d9oxkvl" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Yes, Pope Nicholas V wrote a papal bull in 1452 to Alfonso V of Portugal (and also authorized the same for Spain). In that writing it authorized Alfonso V to consign the pagans to \"perpetual servitude.\" Pope Calixtus III renewed that bull and Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Leo X (in 1514) again renewed the bull. \"We grant you by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ wherever they may be, as well as their kingdoms, duchies, counties, principalities, and other property... and to reduce their persons into perpetual servitude.\" There was a movement against enslaving Christians, but no such qualms with regards to non-Christians and a lot of ambivalence towards non-Christians who converted to Catholicism. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d3pvkjh" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "If I could ask you to clarify, what period or groups are you referring to?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d7s02h1" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "**Part I**\n\nThe success of the Russians in the 1812 campaign had many factors. Napoleon's overall strategic plan for victory was faulty as it entailed pinning the Russian forces at the border and dealing a crushing blow, a task for which the massive Grande Armee was too unwieldy to accomplish. The chase through the interior further sapped away at the invaders, overburdening the logistical system and making Napoleon impatient for a battle. The climax of the campaign at Borodino turned into one of the slugging matches that characterized late-Napoleonic warfare in no small measure because Napoleon did not feel confident that a more dramatic turning maneuver championed by Davout was practical. But Napoleon's failure was not just due to Napoleon himself, the Russians certainly played a major role and during 1812 the Russian army showed a number of its virtues. \n\nOne of the strengths of the Russian army was that it was not just a military, but a major social institution within the Romanov state. Conscription, at first for life under Peter I and then for 25 years under Catherine II, meant that the peasant recruit left one social world for another one completely different. This was part of the reason that underlay the oft-misunderstood tradition of a recruit holding a funeral before he left. In the stratified Russian social order, being a soldier meant entering into a different social estate. Retired soldiers became *raznochintsy* (men of various ranks) which meant they could move into towns and ply a trade. Conscription itself was often delegated to the patriarchs of the *mir* (peasant commune) who often selected troublemakers, men with little prospects, family rivals, or younger sons that would have trouble being married off. Thus the serf-recruit typically left one social world and entered another with little chance of returning. \n\nThis social milieu imparted to the Russian army an *esprit de corps* that was relatively unique among its European contemporaries. The expansive Russian empire meant that there ususally was some kind of war for the Russian army to fight, whether against the Ottomans, the Swedes, or the French, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In some cases, NCOs and the the rank and file Russian troops racked up an extraordinary amount of service and experience. At Borodino, for example, the Russian NCOs were typically veterans of 6 to 8 battles. The officer corps, which drew both from the Baltic German nobility as well as various other noble ranks, was quite different in character than other nobles in the empire. Most officers did not own any serfs or other property and the officer class as a whole was largely a service nobility dependent upon the state for wealth and titles. As with the NCOs, this meant some officers had accrued a fair amount of experience and encouraged the type of rough and hard-talking officer as exemplified by Suvorov. Discipline and corporal punishment within the army was often quite severe, but not terribly out of line with other European contemporaries. Rations were often arranged along an artel' system in which small groups of soldiers would pool their pay for their provisions. The artel' system was prone to abuse, but it also allowed some soldiers to buy luxuries and acted as a social safety net of sorts for both men who mustered out or otherwise befell certain other misfortunes like gambling debts or injuries. They system was not perfect, but then again, there were very few smooth-running provisioning systems in the Napoleonic era and Napoleonic memoirs often describe starvation or bad food as one of the perennial hazards of a soldier's life. But the artel' system helped encourage a bond of solidarity among small units that long-term service also helped foster. \n\nThis is not to say that the Russian system did not have deficiencies. Poor performance both in the Revolutionary wars and the Austerlitz campaign showed deficiencies in tactics and equipment. The massive standing army and Russia's own relative economic underdevelopment meant that the army had to rely upon state-run arsenals for the bulk of its equipment. This allowed for massive economies of scale, but also made it much harder to change production or new innovations. For the Revolutionary and early half of the Napoleonic Wars, the muskets produced at these factories were often substandard compared to their contemporaries and slightly heavier. In 1805, the British observer Reginald Heber noted that while the Tula works could produce a large number of muskets, they suffered from poor quality control and were prone to bursting. After Austerlitz and the Polish campaigns exposed some of the shortcomings of Russian muskets, Emperor Alexander I directed that the state factories come up with an improved model. The resulting Model 1808 pattern was based both of the Brown Bess and the French Model 1777 Charleville. The Model 1808 became one of the bedrocks for Russian musketry in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars. There were similiar innovations in Russia's artillery park, and as an aphorism popularized during the USSR, \"quantity has a quality of its own,\" and Russian per capita artillery often outnumbered the French, much to Napoleon's chagrin. Russian artillery began the nineteenth century in a fairly sorry state, but reforms in artillery adjusted to new, workmanlike designs and the state arsenals could turn out prodigious numbers of artillery pieces. Paul I's Minister of War, General Aleksei Arakcheev, was a former artillery man an inspector general of the artillery, and not only completed earlier modernizing efforts, but also militarized the drivers and artillery trains so that by 1812 Russian artillery was among Europe's most efficient in terms of getting tubes onto the battlefield and keeping them supplied with shot. \n\nThe turn of the century failures also forced the state to reform the human elements of the army. Emperor Paul I began a process of cleaning out the Katrine deadwood from upper echelons of the army, a process that was never fully completed by the 1807 campaigns, but opened up the upper ranks to new ideas and lessons. A. I. Khatov's 1807 handbook on infantry tactics had begun to filter into junior officers' minds by 1812 and there was the start of a military intellectual culture within the officer corps with various journals discussing the innovations and arguments of the day. \n\nThe problem for the Russian army in wider historical memory was two-fold. Firstly, although in many respects Russian developments in raising, equipping, and training its massive army paralleled similar developments in Europe, the army became entrenched as one of the main tools of autocracy. This locked out Russian developments from wider narratives of evolving civil-military relations within Europe. The Russian serf-recruit did not become a citizen through service, but remained a servant of the state, albeit in a different estate. This lent an alien quality to the institution as a whole, especially when viewed by outsiders unfamiliar with how the Romanov state and society functioned.\n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfgw456", "cfh1sp3", "cfh9pfl" ], "score": [ 13, 3, 8 ], "text": [ "There is a very long history of people *accusing* marginal groups of practicing religious rites which included ritual murder. It goes back at least to the Roman empire, and continues through the middle ages to the present.\n\nEarly Christian groups wrote books in which they defended themselves against accusations which (their books claim) non-Christian Romans were making against the early church (we don't know if these accusations were real, because we don't have records of what non-Christians were actually saying). A common charge Christians defended against was that Christians murdered children and drank their blood or ate their flesh as part of their initiation rituals.\n\nFor example, Minucius Felix defends against one accusation that Christians initiate new members into the church by tricking them into killing a baby (the baby is covered in flour, and the new guy is told to stab the flour with a knife, not realizing there's a baby under the flour until it's too late); then they drink the baby's blood, tear its body up, and eat it (presumably, it's covered in flour so they can enjoy their baby with a breaded or batter dipped crust).\n\nOther Christian authors defend against this charge (e.g. Tertualian, Athenagoras).\n\nBut Romans didn't just accuse *Christians* of ritual murders. Sallust (a Roman historian) accuses Cataline (a Roman politician who led an unsuccessful revolt) of initiating new followers to his conspiracy by forcing them to murder innocent civilians. After this, they met in secret and drank human blood in a twisted sacred ritual that bound them together in their evil plot to overthrow the Roman Republic. Or so Sallust claims.\n\nLivy (another Roman historian) accuses members of Dionysus' cult of murdering people (along with having crazy orgies).\n\nSo accusations of meeting in secret to practice inappropriate religious rites that involved murder seem to have been something of a Roman trope for marking out a group of people as antisocial or 'bad' (for various reasons).\n\nAs Christianity became more mainstream and public, Christians started to adopt a similar suspicion of religious practices that didn't fit the normal, public model. So you start to see Christian leaders accusing groups that don't line up with their values being accused of killing children and having wild sex parties. The language is very similar to that used earlier by the Roman against Christians and other groups that had secret religious meetings. So again, it seems to be a trope, more a way of marking a group as 'bad' by saying they eat babies than an actual statement of fact. These kinds of accusations continue into the middle ages, being leveled against various 'heretical' groups, and against the Jews. To read more about how these accusations of murder followed by cannibalism were used to mark out 'bad' religious groups in the middle ages, see Norman Cohn, *Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom* (University of Chicago Press: 2000).\n\nSo, to go back to your question: stories of Satanists (or Jews, or heretics, or Christians, or Dyonisians, etc) who murder people as part of their secret rituals go back at least as far as the Roman empire. These stories tend to use similar language and similar accusations, which suggests that they're a trope, a set of stock phrases you use to mark a religious group as 'bad', and not a description of real religious rituals. Did any of these groups really kill (and eat) babies? Probably not.", "Charles Manson combined elements of Satanism as practised by the 'process church' of which he'd been a member with elements of Scientology. But the 'murder cult' he created was didn't exactly have an organised theology - there was elements of doomsday cult, race-war-cult, anarchist-cult etc, so whether you'd call it 'Satanist' I dunno, it was a factor but not necessarily the sole or even the central focus. ", "The Satanic Ritual Abuse and satanism scare in the USA (and in Europe, to a lesser degree) was shown to be a moral panic rather than an actual large-scale conspiracy involving the abuse and torture of children. Multiple factors contributed to the spread of this panic, and it became deeply ingrained in US popular culture during the 1980's through the middle 1990's. The genesis of the panic was the book 'Michelle Remembers', published in 1980, an \"autobiography\" by an alleged survivor of SRA that has since been widely discredited. The spread of this panic was stoked by newly developed therapeutic techniques that \"recovered\" past memories, leading adults to claim they had experienced SRA in the past, and a growing awareness/interest in prosecuting child abuse in general that led to overzealousness and overconfidence in the coached testimony of young children. Two things abetted all of this... a sensationalizing press (Geraldo's famous TV special with the line \"there are over 1,000,000 practicing satanists in the US\" is a classic example), and the rise of Christian fundamentalism. The SRA panic led to some really terrible things in the same vein of the 1940s-50s \"Red Scare\" over communism, including the prosecution of a large number of innocent people and the expenditure of huge sums of money investigating/prosecuting cases with no basis in fact. In the end no conclusive proof was ever discovered that organized satanic murder or abuse cults were extant in the USA. What was seen, though, was that people who were child abusers already started using claims of satanist cults to scare their victims into being quiet. So, of course there are horrible people out there who abuse kids or perform awful murders, but in terms of organized Satanic cults... it does not appear to be a thing. So, that covers the \"modern paranoia\" aspect. \n\nOne thing to note, the infamous \"Son of Sam\" killer, who murdered numerous people in NYC in the 1970s, has made repeated claims that he was part of a nation-wide satanic cult responsible for far more deaths than those in NYC, and that he did not act alone in even those murders. Some officials in NYC law enforcement considered his claims plausible enough that they reopened the case in the 1990's (others do not consider them plausible at all), but they have never found anything conclusive. Witnesses did see other people at crime scenes, etc. For what it's worth, though, he was making these claims as far back as his arrest... so they predate the satanic panic of the 1980's.\n\nSources: See JS Victor, \"Satanic Panic:The creation of a contemporary legend\"; Also, Mary de Young, \"The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic\". \n " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ci4syip" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Great question!\n\nTo give a meaningful answer, I will focus my post on the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, whose rise and decline are significant factors in the rise and decline of the Dutch Empire. \n\nLet us consider three factors that allowed the VOC to become the world's largest global company: 1) Capitalistic investment via shares and dividents, 2) Trade between Asia and Europe, and 3) Trade between Asian countries. \n\nThe last one is often overlooked. For a very long time the VOC had exclusive rights to trade with Japan, and had holdings in Persia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia. In the 17th century they developed a sophisticated network of trade: Cotton and opium from India were sold in China. The money was used to buy porcelain and tea, sold in Japan. Here, they also sold European firearms and Indian tea along with Chinese tea. The Japanese paid them in silver and minerals. These were then used to buy spices in Indonesia. Eventually some of these things were also consolidated in Batavia (today's Jakarta) to be shipped back to Europe. \n\nThis lasted for a while, until the second part of the 17th century when the Anglo-Dutch Wars commenced. Due to this, shipments between Europe and Asia became difficult. Price of spices spiked, giving the English incentive to try to expand their own influence in Asia. \n\nThe intra-Asia trade also suffered for a variety of reasons, including growing rivalry between China's Ming Dynasty and the VOC. The Ming rulers supported local powers to usurp Dutch control in Taiwan, severing their trade with Japan. For a while the Dutch tried to encourage the Japanese to develop their own porcelain, to mixed success. \n\nIn Batavia, the situation also wasn't all rosy. The practice of sending all Asian goods to Batavia for consolidation and control, became problematic with growing corruption, and the English controlling Bengkulu in Sumatra in the early 1700s. The fourth and last Anglo-Dutch war (1780-1784) was extremely bad for the Dutch, as the Cape Colony at the tip of South Africa was threatened, Ceylon and Indian colonies were lost, and they had to trade Malacca for Bengkulu. \n\nFinally, the VOC itself shot itself in the foot by over-paying dividends even when profits shrank, and had to declare bankruptcy in 1798. Just in time for the French Revolution to break out, and the French establishment of the Batavian Republic. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dw6ljbu" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "It would be interesting to hear new answers particularly given the somewhat conflicting information given in the thread linked below, but you might be interested in this:\n\n[How accepted is the theory that most humans practiced \"segmented sleep\" prior to the Industrial Revolution?](_URL_0_) with an answer from u/zagreus9 and a counterpoint from u/whatthefat" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37xksx/how_accepted_is_the_theory_that_most_humans/crqo7v5/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cye94zm" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "I recommend the following sources if you can get your hands on them. Some relate directly with the war, some related to life in the area known as Gran Chichimeca. And because this topic deals with Mexico, some of the sources are in Spanish.\n\nPowell, Philip Wayne. Soldiers, Indians & Silver: North America's First Frontier War. Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University, 1952.\n\nPowell, Philip Wayne. \"The Chichimecas: Scourge of the Silver Frontier in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.\" Hispanic American Historical Review (1945): 315-338.\n\nPowell, Philip Wayne. \"Spanish Warfare Against the Chichimecas in the 1570's.\" Hispanic American Historical Review (1944): 580-604.\n\nJackson, Robert H. \"La frontera chichimeca y la evangelización de la Sierra Gorda.\" Estudios de historia novohispana 47 (2012): 45-91.\n\nWar and peace on the North Mexican frontier: a documentary record. No. 32. Ediciones Jose Porrua Turanzas, 1971.\n\nPoole, Stafford. \"\" War by Fire and Blood\" the Church and the Chichimecas 1585.\" The Americas (1965): 115-137.\n\nGradie, Charlotte M. \"Discovering the Chichimecas.\" The Americas (1994): 67-88.\n\nNúñez, Alfredo Jiménez. El gran norte de México: una frontera imperial en la Nueva España (1540-1820). Editorial Tebar, 2006.\n\nPowell, Philip Wayne. \"Spanish Warfare Against the Chichimecas in the 1570's.\" Hispanic American Historical Review (1944): 580-604.\n\nVillagómez, Mirtha Leonela Urbina. \"INDÍGENAS, DANZANTES Y REBELDES (LA OTRA HISTORIA: PLANES DE LAS LUCHAS INDÍGENAS EN QUERÉTARO Y GUANAJUATO DURANTE EL PORFIRIATO).\"\n\nCázares, Alberto Carrillo. El debate sobre la Guerra Chichimeca, 1531-1585: derecho y política en la Nueva España. Vol. 1. El Colegio de Michoacán AC, 2000.\n\nPowell, Philip Wayne, and Juan José Utrilla. La guerra chichimeca (1550-1600). Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica, 1977.\n\nWright, David. Conquistadores otomíes en la Guerra Chichimeca. Vol. 6. Gobierno del Estado de Querétaro, 1988.\nCázares, Alberto Carrillo. El debate sobre la Guerra Chichimeca, 1531-1585: derecho y política en la Nueva España. Vol. 1. El Colegio de Michoacán AC, 2000.\n\nBraniff, Beatriz. La gran Chichimeca: el lugar de las rocas secas. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2001.\n\nCasas, Gonzalo de las. \"La guerra de los chichimecas.\" Noticias de la obra por José F (1944).\n\nde Santa María, Guillermo. Guerra de los chichimecas:(México 1575-Zirosto 1580). El Colegio de Michoacán AC, 2003." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d0qwm5u" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "Where have you read it? " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cph4e6g", "cph4z4v" ], "score": [ 6, 8 ], "text": [ "The ancient polynesians were skilled navigators, having crossed thousands of miles of open ocean on outrigger canoes. They used a combination of navigation technquies including using the stars, observing ocean/wave patterns and flights of birds. Most of their knowledge was through oral tradition, having no written language. The knowledge was passed down from generation to generation through song and chant.\n\nAbout the Polynesians making contact with South America, I wrote a short paper about it last semester for my history class so let me just copy and paste a paragraph here:\n\nThere is evidence to suggest polynesians could have gotten as far as south america. The sweet potato which is native to south america, was already widespread in polynesia when European explorers observed it in there in the 18th century. [1] Furthermore the Quechua (South American native language) word for sweet potato is k’umara. Easter Island word for it is kumara, Maori word for it is kumāra. [2] Is this just a big coincidence or could have they learned the word from the South American natives?\n\nAlso a chicken bone in Chile was found that was radiocarbon dated to be from before European contact. The chicken bone also showed genetic similarities to chickens from Tonga and Samoa. This suggests that the chicken was introduced to Chile via the Polynesians. [3]\n\nThere is also genetic evidence; two studies suggest that the Easter Island population have some American Indian genetics that are pre-European contact. I also read that on Mapuche Island off the coast of Chile, human bones found have “Polynesian features” [4].\n\nback to your original question, there is evidence that Polynesians made continuous deliberate voyages back and forth throughout the Pacific. Adze tools were found on Napuka Island in French Polynesia are made of rocks that originate from Pitcairn island, Marquesas island, Rurutu island and most notably Kahoolawe island in Hawaii [5] This suggests that there was travel between these islands in French Polynesia and Hawaii. Also in 2009 Hawaiian-style petroglyphs were found in Tonga [6]. \n\nthe only way for these things to happen were for the polynesians to be expert navigators capable of travelling over long distances at will and expert craftsmen having the ability to build their outrigger canoes to make the voyage.\n\n[1] Gibson, Arthur C. \"BATATAS, NOT POTATOES.\" CLA, 2011. Web.\n[2]\"Genetic relations of South American Indian languages\". In Adelaar & Muysken, eds, The Languages of the Andes. Cambridge University Press, 2004 p. 41.\n[3] Storey, A. A., J. M. Ramirez, D. Quiroz, D. V. Burley, D. J. Addison, R. Walter, A. J. Anderson, T. L. Hunt, J. S. Athens, L. Huynen, and E. A. Matisoo-Smith. \"Radiocarbon and DNA Evidence for a Pre-Columbian Introduction of Polynesian Chickens to Chile.\" \n[4] Lawler, A. \"Beyond Kon-Tiki: Did Polynesians Sail to South America?\" Science 328.5984 (2010): 1344-347. Web.\n[5]Collerson, K. D., and M. I. Weisler. \"Stone Adze Compositions and the Extent of Ancient Polynesian Voyaging and Trade.\" Science 317.5846 (2007): 1907-911. Web.\n[6]Egan, Shane, and David V. Burley. \"209 TRIANGULAR MEN ON ONE VERY LONG VOYAGE: THE CONTEXT AND IMPLICATIONS OF A HAWAIIAN- STYLE PETROGLYPH SITE IN THE POLYNESIAN KINGDOM OF TONGA.\" The Journal of the Polynesian Society 118.3 (2009): n. pag. Web. ", "There is broad consensus that there was contact with South America; the primary evidence being the extensive cultivation of the sweet potato (or Kumara, Kumala, etc) in the Polynesian Pacific which was originally domesticated in Central/South America. Furthermore there is possible chicken DNA crossing, human genetic evidence, and the presence of the coconut in South America which may indicate more extensive contact than just one instance of voyaging- yet, that further evidence is subject to debate.\n\nAs to the other islands; the pattern is usually one of exploration from a central island; for example from Tahiti or the Tuamotus northward along the winds to discover Hawaii- a voyage that may have taken place intentionally as part of a project of exploration, or accidentally as a fishing or voyaging expedition between known sites gone wrong. This is usually followed by voyages of settlement; we know the voyages were intentional, otherwise they would not have brought stores of seeds and pairs of animals to reproduce. This could have been on voyage- or more likely several as many of the Pacific Islands required some amount of terraforming to make the islands more habitable for people. Many of the islands had little in the way of food for people until it was planted and could be harvested.\n\nAfter these initial voyages of exploration and settlement, the island chains would often stay in contact with one another. Both Hawaiian and Tahitian oral traditions discuss episodes of voyaging between the island chains as families remained in contact and continued to exchange goods and people for several generations. It seems gradually voyaging grew less and less common across long distances; the islands simply didn't have lots of resources that were not also present at home, which reduced the impetus for the long voyages. \n\nSo that little overview mostly covers long distance voyaging. As to inter island voyaging- amongst islands of an archipelago like Tahiti or Hawaii; voyaging was extensive and continued constantly. It was relatively common between island chains that were near each other as well, such as Tahiti and the Tuamotus. Or, extremely regular, such as the voyaging that took place between Samoa-Tonga-Fiji.\n\nKnowledge was pretty well known amongst those in the position of navigator or priest. Tupaia is perhaps the best example of this in the past; he was a Tahitian priest/navigator who sailed with Captain Cook for a while and at one point drew a European style map for Cook- attempting to translate the geographical-voyaging knowledge he had gained from oral traditions to the representational style used by Europeans to accomplish overlapping goals. He drew out some forty islands that have since been placed. \nMany oral traditions contain geographic reference points which has been another way in which historians or anthropologists can ascertain the extent of geographical knowledge or memory.\n\nSo, how much did a commoner in Tahiti know about Hawaii? That would likely depend on if they had a genealogical connection to someone who left as a settler to Hawaii or were charged with maintaining the oral histories or traditions that contained reference to the distant places.\n\nSome academic reading if you want to explore the topic in some more depth:\n\n* D’Arcy, Paul. People of the Sea: Environment, Identity, and History in Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006.\n\nD'Arcy's work is a very recent and well regarded; he discusses voyaging to a good extent, especially in Micronesia, where the voyaging traditions maintained themselves up until the present and have since spread back out across the Pacific and help inform the work of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and others.\n\n* Irwin, Geoffrey. The Prehistorical Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.\n\nIrwin uses lots of computer simulation and explores how they work and what they show us. His focus is really on the initial stage of exploration and how Polynesians- and other Oceanic navigators were able to accomplish such an extensive settlement of the Pacific.\n\n* Kirch, Patrick Vinton. On the Road of the Winds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.\n\nGreat overview; very thorough, and covers everything from settlement to continued trading and the likely voyages to South America." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ctmngpz" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Not to discourage further answers, but /u/400-Rabbits and I discussed some of the influence of colonization on cocoliztli [in this thread](_URL_0_). You might also be interested in a previous answer I wrote on [diseases and epidemics in the New World before contact](_URL_1_)." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2a4e1e/what_were_cocoliztli_and_matlazahuatl_and_how_did/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/20n7mm/is_there_any_evidence_for_epidemics_occurring_in/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dajbbv8", "dajbz06", "dajdck5", "dajiwpx" ], "score": [ 4, 65, 3, 11 ], "text": [ "It is said that the end of the Golden Age is marked when the Abbasid caliphate collapsed in the 13th century, but the decline started much earlier.\n\nThe role of the sciences declined closer to the 11th century. The cause for this decline can be accredited to the change of Islamic leadership. During the Sunni Revival, the role of Islamic leaders changed dramatically. Before the revival, religious leaders sustained themselves through secular occupations, but the revival saw a significant shift of power as these leaders exchanged their occupations for full-time scholarly employment at madrasas (Islamic teaching college). These institutions were funded by waqf, trusts consisting of donations of land, property, or money by individuals with no expectation of reimbursement. \n\nThe laws regulating the waqf state that they may not serve any purpose that would harm the principles and beliefs of Islam, and the religious leaders were the sole judges of what could be deemed \"harmful\". As donations to these trusts grew, so did the power of the religious leaders. Once the religious leaders gained significant power in the region, the majority banished scientific work at the colleges claiming they were a threat to Islamic ideals, thus updating the law of waqf. This greatly limited the study of science in the region as education came under control of religious leaders. Non-religious institutions dedicated to scientific study soon failed as they struggled to keep funding due to the laws of waqf. \n\nThe religious elites used their new power to limit scientific study because they believed it led to religious skepticism. They limited the study of sciences to individuals that could be trusted not to go astray. The only individuals deemed worthy of this standard were typically the religious leaders themselves, many of which did not pursue these studies. \n\nI learned of this during a Comparative Religions course I took in the Spring, but check out [this paper](_URL_0_) on the Rise and Fall of Islamic Science. It's an interesting read.", "The short answer: it depends on how we understand science and the Scientific Revolution. But since you came to askhistorians, you probably want the long answer! I can't speak to the Safavids much (see my user name), but the Ottomans kept up scientific production, it is just that much of it was what we would today consider pseudo-science. For example, they produced a great deal of innovation in things like alchemy and astrology through the 17th and 18th centuries. \n\nToday we tend to think of science as a straight arrow, always pointing forward, with everyone in a given era being totally committed to whatever was going on. In reality, for every Bacon or Copernicus, there were dozens more people working in traditional veins of producing knowledge about the natural world like alchemy or astrology. Those were highly advanced, intricate, and well thought out systems. Today we know they are wrong, but it took many centuries for anything close to most of society to understand that even AFTER major innovations. And even then, many of who we would today consider groundbreaking scientists were all about alchemy, like Newton and Brahe. Once empiricism was formulated in Europe, it still took many decades for Boyle to formulate his law rejecting the four element theory, in the late 17th century.\n\nEven long after Boyle, well into the 18th century, tons of European scientists were adding to alchemal knowledge, and conceiving of the world along the basic 4 elements model that had ancient roots, then continued to be added onto, modified, and innovated for centuries. \"Modern\" chemistry slowly overtook alchemy, but it was not as simple and sudden as \"Boyle invented chemistry, then overnight everyone was convinced and the world was transformed.\" \n\nBack to the Islamic world. The roots of alchemy are very ancient, and the ancient Greeks had a fairly comprehensive system built around them. Islamic science in the \"Golden Era\" had a tendency to take Greek ideas of natural philosophy and refine them into complex and intricate systems of thought. So they took the Greek ideas about alchemy and ran with them, elaborating endlessly on the basic four elements theory and turning it into something closer to what we wold consider a field of science. \"Alchemy\" the word comes from a greek root, chemie, with the Arabic definite article \"al\" tacked on, and meant \"the philosopher's stone.\" Eventually in Europe alchemy became chemistry, and the \"al\" was dropped to distinguish the two. The work of the Islamic natural philosophers in that era became incredibly influential. Christian and Muslim philosophers would build upon their frameworks for centuries. When Christian philosophers began to introduce true empiricism into their work, they eventually moved away from the four elements model at the highest levels of academic debate. But, in the terms of Thomas Kuhn's idea about how Scientific Revolutions happen, the \"paradigm shift\" that caused most scientists and the public to shift their ideas from an alchemal, 4 element model of how the universe functioned to a modern chemical model took another century or two to happen.\n\nAnd that is what the Ottomans were up to in science, generally. They continued to elaborate and add to what was a formal, scientific discipline that was based on centuries of precedent, and was the same body of knowledge Europeans were working from. It wasn't based strictly on empiricism, but it did explain the world well enough, and was reproducible enough. Astrology followed a similar trajectory. Listen to Tuna Artun's Ottoman History Podcast episode for further elaboration on what Ottoman scientists were up to.\n\nThis story takes us up the late 18th century. Chemistry had won out over alchemy in most of European science, and the proof was in the pudding. Modern chemistry led to modern metallurgy (metallurgy itself was an alchemal concept, and was discussed as such well into the late 18th century). This led to modern guns and artillery. The Ottomans, who continued producing alchemal knowledge, wanted better guns. So they opened military academies in the late 18th century teaching modern artillery science. They imported technical workers to help make modern guns and apply the fruits of modern chemistry. They began translating scientific treatises and manuals. \n\nThis is all to say the timetable for Ottoman science is not that far off the timetable of European nations. In say, 1750, if you went to a bustling town in Austria, most people you asked, even the educated ones, would probably explain the world using the ancient four element model, that had been invented by the Greeks, turned into a science by the early Muslims, and had been elaborated upon endlessly by even 17th and 18th century scientists. The same would be true in a bustling Ottoman town. Things were already changed forever, it just took a little for society to catch up. Once the decision making classes of Ottoman society decided to begin working with \"modern\" science in the late 18th century, they picked it up fairly rapidly. \n\nWe tend to look back at history and connect all the situations that worked out into one narrative, and ignore at best or actively demean at worst what didn't work out. Science had millions of smart minds working on it for centuries, and out of all those minds, a few in the 1500s started working in empiricism. But even then, for a couple of hundred years after that, many sharp minds continued to elaborate on old systems that were still impressively rigorous, we just discount them as \"pseudo-scientists\" or charlatans because today we know they were wrong. But from the perspective most most 1750s people, that wouldn't have been so clear. Just because the Ottomans were pursuing, with great vigor, what turned out to be a dead-end, doesn't mean we should totally discount it. Thousands of Europeans were pursuing the same dead ends with equal vigor. Much of this was innovative in its own right; it just took many centuries for everyone to realize the underlying premises were wrong.\n", "Whilst not answering you question directly, below are some notable scholars from well past the period of the Golden Age. I note however that you leave a gap in your time period - the Islamic World did not pass from the Golden Age directly into the age of the Safavids and Ottomans, but rather had to go through centuries of serious dislocations due various causes including invading Turks, Mongols and Crusaders. But even in this period at least, Islamic science was not dead. The following people are from that period.\n\n**Al-Tusi** (1201-1274) invented the ‘Tusi-Couple’ a mathematical construction that Copernicus used to remove the need for the equant in the Ptolemaic System. He also wrote the first book to treat trigonometry as an independent discipline.\n\n**Ibn al-Nafis** (1213-1288) was an Arab physician who was the first to mention metabolism, and the first to describe the pulmonary transit of the blood from the right side of the heart to the lungs, where it is mingled with air, and back to the left side.\n\n**Kamal al-Farisi** (1267-1319) was a Persian Muslim optician who experimented with water in a glass sphere in order to understand the interaction of light with raindrops, and from this developed the first mathematically satisfactory explanation of the rainbow as the refraction of light through water drops.\n\nThe north-African Arab **Ibn Khaldun** (1332-1406). The celebrated historian Arnold Toynbee said of *The Muqaddima*, his magnum opus on human civilisation, ‘it undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.’\n\nSource: *Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science* - Jim Al Khalili\n", "I would argue that the significance of the Golden Age doesn't lie in scientific contribution alone, and that understanding the context of the Golden Age is crucial if we want to understand why this time period received such an appellation. This may not be a direct answer to your question, but I'd like to use my response to illustrate how the Golden Age was much more than just a scientific renaissance and that that should be taken into account when looking at it relative to later time periods.\n\n\n\nThe Islamic Golden Age, which is tentatively dated 800 to 1100 AD, was greatly fueled by the intellectual community in Baghdad. Haroon al-Rasheed's early 8th century Baghdad was remarkably wealthy. Glubb writes in _A Short History of the Arab Peoples_, \"Under Haroon, the empire achieved its high noon of glory and wealth, comparable perhaps to Victorian England.\" During this period, \"No one wanted anymore to conquer the world for God.\" He also notes that \"Baghdad was the richest city in the world, Constantinople being the only other capital which could aspire to be in the same class for luxury and refinement. \"\n\nGlubb continues, \"Yet the Baghdad of Haroon was not characterized by a mere vulgar display of wealth. It was an age in which conversation and culture were considered an art. Intellectual, and even theological, discussions were among the recreations of the educated classes.\"\n\nAnd von Grunebaum writes this in _Classical Islam_: \"The cultural excitement of those days can hardly be exaggerated. The conventicles of thinkers of all tendencies rose up and strove for recognition; the monolithic orthodoxy which had in fact never existed except in the minds of obstinately pious believers, gave way to a luxuriant growth of the most varied ideas and shouldering crises of faith.\"\n\nHaroon's son and successor, Mamoon, was considered a brilliant mind like his father, and \"his fourteen year reign in Baghdad saw one of the most brilliant intellectual epochs in history.\" It was Mamoon who formally founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, whose chief aim was to translate foreign works into Arabic. \n\nIt was during this time that we see the first textbook on opthamology, a work by Hunain. We see the use of zero and the introduction of arabic numerals. Algebra was invented along with plane and spherical trigonometry, and we also see the discovery of trigonometric ratios, logarithms, and the invention of sine, cosine, tangent and cotangent. During Mamoon's reign an astronomical observatory was established \"whose astronomers measured the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy, six hundred years before Europe admitted that it was not flat.\" In fact, even today most of the named stars in the night sky have Arabic names. Medical Schools were opened, and in Baghdad there even existed a free public hospital. Plus many more achievements in many different fields.\n\nAnother aspect that made Baghdad special was the fact that it was open to all visitors regardless of faith or ethnic origin. In fact, \"Some historians... have pointed out that the artists, the scientists, the theologians and the philosophers of the Golden Age were individually not Arabs but Persians, Armenians, Syrians or Greeks.\" Most thinkers were arabicized, but not themselves Arab. \n\nMamoon was succeeded by Mutasim. Mutasim died in 842 when the Arab Empire was at its pinnacle. There were 8 million gold dinars in the treasury and the khalif's army seemed invincible. But reliance on foreign military recruits and the alienation of the Arab tribes would lead to the demise of the Abbasid empire. As confidence in the Caliphate faded provinces began to fall away, and by 892 Baghdad was only able to collect taxes from a small area. Baghdad could also no longer rely on military support from the Arab tribes whose loyalty it had lost. By the time the Samanids took over, Baghdad was half-ruined and under barbarian control. The brilliant culture of Baghdad was no more, and the centers of thought in the Islamic world were to be reproduced at the extremities of the former empire, in Bukhara and in Andalus. \n\nBut the Islamic Golden Age was not victim only to political and economic upheaval. The intellectual community itself underwent its own crisis. Religious leaders sought to restore back to nature the essence of divinity that had been taken by Hellenzied thought, which they considered to be in many ways irrational when compared to the transcendent nature of God and His divine will. One of the persons leading this charge was Imam Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111). He wrote a book called *The Incoherence of Philosophers*, and in it he argued that falsafa was incompatible with Islam. His work was so influential that Averroes wrote a rebuttal in an attempt to restore the culture of skepticism in intellectualism, but this work, *The Incoherence of the Incoherence*, could not stop the swelling influence of religion. Another figure that helped to bring about the shift from science to fundamentalism was Nizam al-Muk. He was grand vizier in the Seljuk dynasty and he created an educational system that focused on religion. He also institutionalized religious studies, making it the more lucrative career path.\n\n\nWhat set the Golden Age apart were not just its contributions to science, but the economic and political environment that allowed such contributions. Wealth and attitude were crucial to the advancements made during this Islamic renaissance. But we saw both economic misfortune hit Baghdad, and attitudes toward the intellectualism of the day change. Comparing the Golden Age to later periods while looking solely at scientific achievements ignores the context in which the Golden Age arose. And it's that context, the environment, the wealth, the culture that existed that embraced thinkers of all backgrounds, that made the Golden Age golden. \n\n\n\n\n \n " ] }

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[ [ "http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/chaney/files/paper.pdf" ], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cci2sw9", "cci3rf9" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "The Magyars are a part of the Ugro-Finnic language group, but they themselves appear to have been a confederation of Finno-Ugric tribes with the Magyars being the most prominent. They came to the Pannonian plain in the late 9th and the 10th century. As is the case with any strong tribe, they imposed their name, culture and language both upon the populace that was present there and the tribes that came with them, much as how the Western Germanic invaders of Britain and the Slavic invaders of the Balkans did. ", "Hi there, a Magyar (or Hungarian) here. \n\nYeah, BobTheSerb summarized our story pretty well. We came from the Urals from the Magyar homeland called Magna Hungaria. It took like 300 years of Westward emigration to get to the Carpathian basin (the entry happened in 896 AD). As usual, we assimilated and/or killed the people living here. It took another one hundred year to form a Western-syle kingdom (in 1000 or 1001 AD). We adopted Christianity and then our history was pretty much about wars, just like any kingdoms in Europe, sometimes fighting neighbours, sometimes making allies etc. etc.\n\nAcademics presume that there was a common Finno-Ugric homeland near the Urals. First the Finns and Estonians, then it was us who left. Of course, by then these nations spoke a quite different language (although Finnish and Estonian are mutually intelligible). There are some very small tribes living in the ancient homeland today and they are the closest relatives of us. Those are the Khanties and the Mansis. Their languages are very different from Hungarian of course, but the basic words (like numbers, some animal names and family words) are still very similar. \n\nSome nationalist crazy fucks say that we are related to Mongols. Funny enough, it is said by Romanian, Slovakian etc AND Hungarian nationalist. The first group says it because they are retards and they think it's derogatory, the latter group says it because they are retards and they think it's something to be proud of. No academic support, of course.\n\nToday there are about 14-15 millions Hungarians in the world, ~approx 12 million lives in the Carpathian basin, 9.5 of them in Hungary.\n\nAMA :D" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "f8bviaq", "f8cnvra" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "I would recommend you figure out what aspect you are interested in, and then reading up on the theory for that discipline. An example is that cultural anthropological theory differs from archaeological theory, but those two are far more alike when compared to the theory used in studying post Soviet nations.", "For a general framework, I would recommend The Historian's Craft, by Marc Bloch. It's really old-- Bloch was a member of the French Resistance, and was killed by the Nazis. But it's still a solid introduction to how historians think, and a really elegant reminder of why our profession matters. I'd recommend reading it before you throw yourself into more complex historiography." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "flxdfw5" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "I think part of this comes from a misunderstanding of what Ike was hoping to point out in his Farewell Address. He certainly was not advocating for some grand unilateral disarmament scheme in the face of what he understood to be the Soviet threat. He was very much for the hope for peace, fear war, but prepare for the worst. And he certainly attempted his fair share of diplomacy and even personal talks with Khrushchev, though the U-2 shoot down in the midst of talks over the status of Berlin in 1960 scuttled the last major chance during his Presidency at any realignment of relations.\n\n > Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment. _URL_0_\n\nNor was he against the peacetime establishment of the military being larger than at any time in the nation's history. He recognized that modern war was being fought by tools far to complex to create on the fly. Many of which did require long development time, not all of which could be done by the government itself.\n\n > Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.\n\n > Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.\n\nSo he was not against the thing per se. He was raising a warning that statesmen must be strong enough to not let there become inexorable weight of inertia in that sector. Or if they would not, for voters to hold them to account. As larger and larger organizations can act on agendas all their own. \n\n > In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.\n\n > We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.\n\n > ... It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.\n\nAlmost as an aside too he bemoans the change in the focus of research and funding at many universities. Something that certainly speaks to anyone in academia or higher ed work thats dealt with a grant process!\n\n > Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.\n\nWhile finally its worth remembering the political context of this speech. He was about to be replaced as President, by a man in JFK, he thought was unprepared and weak on corruption issues and of course the Democrat preceding him in office, Truman, had 'lost' China while allowing the DoD to become gutted to the point of barely being able to intervene at the start of the war in Korea. \n\nAbout Kennedy Ike once quipped:\n\n > \"We have a new genius in our midst who is incapable of making any mistakes and therefore deserving of no criticism whatsoever,\"\n\nIke was saying as much about watching Boeing and Northrup Grumman as he was about watching how well or poorly JFK was on managing the defense of the nation." ] }

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[ [ "https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dff7rtz" ], "score": [ 28 ], "text": [ "In 1863, the year the movie is set, the fastest route would have involved a ship to Panama, then a trip across [the Panama Railroad](_URL_0_), and another ship from Panama to California.\n\nThe drawback to this approach for a character in the movie would have been the expense involved. The Panama route was used by middle-to-upper-class individuals willing and able to pay to save time. The last governor of Russian America (and his wife) traveled by this route to reach Alaska, for example. \n\nThe route around the southern tip of South America was long, but it was relatively cheap and relatively safe. Traveling overland at this time would have been expensive and somewhat dangerous because of the war. Most cross-continent voyages started in Missouri, which was still a war zone at the time. Many stagecoach companies closed or restricted their operations during the war. Those that remained were able to charge a premium.\n\nIn addition, the withdrawal of the U.S. Army from the western plains allowed American Indians to reclaim much of their homeland and otherwise assert themselves militarily. Whites in the western territories and states formed militias that fought the Natives with mixed (and frequently bloody) results.\n\nIn short, a trip around the southern tip of South America would have made sense for a lower-class individual from New York City in 1863." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-train-crosses-the-panamanian-isthmus" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7oj25i", "c7oklyk" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "I'm not an expert in this area by any means, I just did some research. c:\n\nThe Greek Olympics was a huge phenomenon for Greeks. It actually inspired the largest sporting event we have right now. But that aside, the Greek Olympics were initially started for a number of reasons: the belief that the Greek gods favored a winner, keeping soldiers fit, and because many city-states wanted to compete with other city-states. The Greek Olympics were huge for the Greeks. A Greek who won in the Greek Olympics would gain much respect and fame. :) \n\nSources: _URL_2_ _URL_4_\n\nThere were also jousting tournaments that were common across Europe in the late 15th century. Jousting tournaments served two main purposes: provide practice for knights and have knights compete with each other for championship. \n\nSources: _URL_1_ _URL_3_\n\nBows and arrows may have been replace by guns by the 16th century, but archery still remained a very popular sport in England. :)\n\nSource: _URL_0_ (3rd paragraph)\n\nIn general, the use of sports seems to have evolved overtime. Earlier, many sport competitions were held to test people, but now sporting events have a lot less of that and a lot more entertainment built in. \n", "Cricket would probably be the closest competitor. In the 19th century, it was vey much the pre-eminent sport in Britain, attracting huge crowds and high salaries for leading players. The leading cricketer of the time, W.G. Grace, has stamped his mark onto British (and, through the Empire, global) culture - C.L.R. James argued he was the most significant British cultural figure of the 19th century. The pervasiveness of cricketing jargon in English bears this out - 'sticky wicket', 'hit for six', 'bowled over', 'making runs off your own bat' - even the concept of the hat trick stems from the feats of famous bowlers. It even came to define morality - that which is unacceptable is 'not cricket'. \n\nEven as late as the Second World War, cricket was the first sport of Britain. Learie Constantine, playing Lancashire league cricket, was the highest payed sportsman in Britain, before being elevated to the Lords in the 1960s. \n\nOutside Britain, the significance of cricket is enormous. In the West Indies, it came to define culture and society. Every male (and a not insignificant number of women) played cricket whenever they could, with Test matches against England taking on gargantuan proportions. Test matches were the sites of riots, songs were written about popular players or dramatic victories, and skill placed in high regard. Of the ten official national heroes of Barbados, two are cricketers. One of the major political issues of the 1950s was the campaign to appoint a black captain to the team, whilst victories over the old colonial master were considered essential - after the West Indies won their first series in England, the substantial West Indian immigrant population were elated. Not only was it a sporting achievement, but in a profoundly racist society, victory over a white establishment team was doubly significant. One West Indian, a bus driver, even invested a week's wages in renting a tuxedo, which he defiantly wore on his bus route. Later, cricketers who participated in rebel tours to apartheid South Africa were cast out of society, with many forced to leave their homes to escape the disgust of their fellow West Indians. \n\nIn India, the story is not entirely dissimilar - the Indian Premier League (a cricket tournament) is one of the best-attended and highest-paid leagues (2nd only to the NBA, IIRC) in the world, whilst Sachin Tendulkar, their most famous cricketer, has a permanent 13-man secret service detail for protection. When he released his autobiography, his publisher even made him sign a couple of hundred copies. In his own blood.\n\nFootball seems almost relaxed by comparison..." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.topendsports.com/sport/archery/history.htm", "http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-jousting.htm", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/greek_olympics_01.shtml", "http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/history-of-jousting.htm", "http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/ancient_greeks/the_olympic_games/" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c4x3iq8", "c4x3qou", "c4x3txn", "c4x42af", "c4x4vas", "c4x54oq", "c4x5886", "c4x65v8", "c4x75nx", "c4x7pai", "c4x7z9n", "c4x8gsu", "c4x8zb1", "c4x8zjg", "c4x96wq", "c4x9mf1", "c4x9npe", "c4x9pl9", "c4xakgh", "c4xbzix", "c4xcva1", "c4xe88l", "c4xe9nt" ], "score": [ 9, 10, 9, 92, 3, 3, 17, 3, 3, 5, 3, 4, 5, 2, 2, 2, 3, 7, 2, 2, 3, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "I think it comes down to heinousness and personality. Holocaust? Germany. First, long-term, frightening anti-Allied successes? Germany. That evil dude? Hitler, Germany. His evil posse? Göring, Goebbels, Mengele, Eichmann, etc? German. Famous Generals? Rommel, Guderian, Kesselring, Greman. How many counterparts from Japan can the average person name? Yamamoto, if you're lucky? Or, for that matter, how many counterparts from Britain? Churchill, maybe Montgomery, and..?\n\nBasically, Nazis are seen as the root cause of that war, and there was a lot more dramatic combat because there was more land and more time.", "Mr. Mace, in my opinion I believe what you've experienced is because most do not even associate WWII with the battles in the Pacific. It seems those Battles are encapsulated as their own war, separated from the European side of the fighting. Maybe it's just my experiences, but when I talk about WWII and mention places like Iwo Jima or Peleliu many people look at me with blank stares and some even ask 'those were in WWII also?\"\n\nI know media coverage of the Pacific battles happened, but I also think because of the attention the Third Reich, Hitler, the reporting/discovery of the Concentration Camps, and the total brutality learned from those camps almost overshadow everything of WWII.\n\nIn school, I was never taught that June 15, 1944 was D-Day in the Pacific. Maybe it is also due to the fact that D-Day June 6, 1944 happened first and therefore takes some sort of precedence. Whatever the reason(s), one can never forget the sacrifices taking place in the Pacific. To do so removes an entire generation from our hearts and minds.\n\nGod bless you, sir and all those who served with you.\n\n\n\nKelly Shannon", "I would like to say that culture plays a big role in the modern perception of the war. When someone of the younger generation think of WWII, it's from the sequences and images from video games and movies they've seen. Let's take movies in this perspective. Presumably the most watched movie in this context is \"Saving Private Ryan\" followed by the mini-series \"Band of Brothers\". This is what the new generation has been exposed to and has captured their imagination. Take the British, for example. What are their most famous war movies? \"Battle of Britain\", \"A Bridge Too Far\", \"The Great Escape\", \"The Bridge over the River Kwai\" - out of all of these, only one takes place in the Pacific and does not portray any type of fighting that the British actually did in the Pacific.\n\nLooking at the last 20 years, there has been few things produced about the Pacific theatre of war and those that have has not been *dumbed down* (not saying that the aforementioned movies are in any way silly or stupid) to a level that the average teenager would find a fascination with. Movies like \"Letters from Iwo-Jima\", \"Flags of our Fathers\", \"The Thin Red Line\" and \"The Pacific\" mini-series are mostly considered to be *boring* by the kids who just want to see cool action scenes and fighting.\n\nJust my two cents in this discussion, thought I'd throw this out there.", "So I have a few *opinions* on this.\n\n1) **CRUSADE IN EUROPE** vs. *War in the Pacific.* In retrospect, the morality and value issues involved in Europe; that of fighting Fascism an ideology disdainful of democracy, as well as the Holocaust, makes the war in Europe a moral crusade instead of a territorial/economic conflict which the Pacific was. It makes for a better social narrative.\n\n2) The Hollywood Factor. There have been far more movies made about the war in Europe than the Pacific for some reason. I can't speak to it with any authority outside of my opinion, but it could be for several reasons; Jungle sets are harder to make believable, models of Navy vessels are expensive, easier to pretend Southern California is Europe than Eniwetok/Iwo Jima/Okinawa/Guadalcanal, and quite uncomfortably possible...that they couldn't find enough Asian or people who looked Asian to play the Japanese.\n\n3) Europe First Strategy. Since the early secret talks in 1940, it was accepted by the Roosevelt administration that Europe was going to come first, with the Pacific taking a back seat (what would be the point of defending Singapore successfully if London was overrun?). As such, much of the wartime propaganda and media effort was on Europe rather than Japan.\n\n4) War is Ugly, but Europe is Pretty. Anyone with a head on their shoulders knows that war is not a sterile event; civilians die, atrocities and war crimes occur, and is truly a human tragedy. With Europe, while we had no love for Nazi's, we still were okay with *Germans*. They looked like us, they acted like us, they behaved like us (Most Caucasian Americans are descended from Germans than any other European ethnicity). Germans could be expected to follow *most* of the rules of war; surrender like proper gentlemen, respect prisoners, not bayonet babies, etc. They were familiar to us, and *generally* played by the same moral and value code as us.\n\nThe Japanese on the other hand... The Japanese were alien. Their value system was strange, we couldn't understand why they wouldn't surrender, it was crazy to us that they would bite at your ankles while you stood on their throats, they tortured and executed prisoners, they were brutal and fierce soldiers who honestly brought out the absolute worst aspects of warfare. No veteran or historian of the war in the Pacific can look at that period and think anything but horrible things about it. It brought out the worst in humanity on both sides, was heavily tainted with racist attitudes, and was probably one of the lowest points for America morally, we really did some terrible (but sometimes necessary) things. That's not something American's really want to reflect upon.", "K/3/5? Did you know Eugene Sledge?\n\nAnyways, I think a big part of it is most Americans view the war in Europe as more conventional and also as more diverse. You had well documented battles in a variety of locations. The Pacific largely is viewed by the public as fighting for one airfield after another in some tropical hellhole that most Americans didn't know existed until there were battles there. Also, the aftermath of the Holocaust and the beginning of the Cold War definitely shifted American attention to Europe rather than the Pacific. \n\nAlso it was easier to cast and film movies about the War in Europe. So it got more attention.\n\nThank you for your service, Mr. Mace.", "My concentration and interest in the Normandy landings and in the ETO centers on the fact that it is where my father served and that he landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day.\n\nHowever, I am fully aware that both theatres of this war were equal in importance and devastation. And certainly to those of you who fought. My concentration now is on the PTO because I am trying to find out more about it. \n\nI really can't speak with any authority on why so few people knew about what happened in the Pacific or believed you when you spoke of it when you came home. Maybe because of the brutality of the fighting there, it just seemed so unbelievable. I know that's not any consolation to someone like you who went through it, to not have people believe it, but I think it really is hard for people who haven't been through it to truly understand. And those things were not as widely reported then, so people just didn't know the reality of it.\n\nAs for today, I think the war in Europe overshadows the war in the Pacific and receives so much more attention, if you will, because the Nazis are more obvious villains. I don't mean to say that what you faced with the Japanese wasn't every bit as bad, and in some cases even more brutal. But the Japanese are not villains today, and so I think it is difficult for people now to see and understand exactly what you faced during WWII and to understand some of the choices that were made. There's always glory (for lack of a better word, because there is little glory in war) in defeating an evil enemy, and very few would argue the Nazi regime was just that - even today. So that makes them, and the ETO, an easy choice in the telling of stories about good vs. evil. But the Japan of today is different than the Japan of WWII, and I'd say most people don't understand the Japanese mindset of the time, and how that played out in battle, and so it isn't as clear to people today. (I am not saying it's right, just that it is how people are.)\n\nThis is why I believe it is so important for people like you to share your history, Mr. Mace. So people understand, and people remember. \n\n\n ", "White people were more involved in Europe. Obviously just one reason.", "K/3/5? I am just about to start reading \"With the Old Breed\" by E.B. Sledge. I am honored that,even though through a computer, I am with a true hero. Thank you so much for your service!\nEdit: down vote this if need be because it is not an answer to the question.", "You and all of our brothers who fought in the Pacific are alive and remembered in the hearts of thousands of Marines currently serving. ", "Mr. Mace, it's been my pleasure to read your Facebook posts, and this one. I'm amazed and thankful for how well you get around on the internet. I'm in the middle of reading your book... good stuff.\n\nTo give you my two cents, in addition to the points already discussed, I think it has to do with two things. First, more American men served in the European Theater than the Pacific Theater, so there were probably more Baby Boomer children that grew up hearing about Europe. They have more kids and it snowballs. I don't know this for a fact, but I speculate that there were more reporters embedded with Army units in Europe than Marine Corps units in the Pacific, a la Ernie Pile and Ernest Hemingway. Same deal there; more guys coming home and talking about it.\n\nSecond, possibly related to the first, are the mediocre public schools in the US. Speaking for my own history education through high school, I heard very little about WWII in general, and even less about the Pacific Theater. It was only when I got to college and determined my own course of study that I learned about the many, MANY areas of American military history that my crappy teachers were too myopic or too lazy to cover.\n\nAs always, I'll end with this: thanks for saving the world, today and every day.\n\n- Ray\n", "After Midway and Guadalcanal, was there any doubt that we would win in the Pacific? I remember reading the arguments between the British and American chiefs of staff over the relative importance of the two theaters, and I took the distinct impression that they viewed Japan as the lesser of the enemies even before the pivotal battles. Midway and Guadalcanal were merely holding the Australia/Hawaii/Alaska line until our buildup would inevitably crush the weaker Japanese (hypothetical situations of the Japanese learning new methods of training pilots and basing them mainly on land instead of carriers nonwithstanding). We had a relatively easy time cutting off their fuel, isolating their strongholds and choosing which battles we wanted to fight.\n\nIn Europe we didn't have that. The British convinced FDR to support the Torch landings because they feared being thrown into the English Channel for the second time during the conflict (see - opposition to Sledgehammer and Roundup), and daydreamed about advancing up the Italian Peninsula into Austria as being the easy route to victory. The Americans knew better given the Clauswitzian theory of concentrating force on the critical point of battle, in Western Europe's case being France. Did any commanders in the Pacific carry a letter apologizing for the failure of their planned landings on the evening before set landings were set* to go off?\n\nSimply put, it seems as if the chance of defeat in Europe made the eventual victory more memorable. In the Pacific, it was just a matter of how much blood and treasure we wanted to spend to achieve what we wanted. Or so it seems from the present.", "One more thing. It's easier to visit the sites of the European Theater. Many battlefields are preserved for our memories and our education. I've walked the beaches and seen the cemeteries; they'll be in my memory forever.\n\nI've also been to Japan. There isn't squat there for WWII memorials. The rest of the islands are a HIKE to get to, so far fewer people visit them. I would push an old lady down the stairs to see Iwo Jima, but it's off limits to regular civilians like me. Conversely, I can (and did) stroll on Omaha and Utah Beaches to my heart's content pretty easily.", "I think a major factor is that the majority of Americans are of European descent and feel more connected to Europe because of this, not to mention we started as a colony (or more accurately a set of colonies). As a result of that, we share language(s) and are more familiar with the history of Europe. Americans before and after the war are/were more familiar with the on-goings 'across the pond'. \n\nOn the other hand, Asia in general was a very foreign place for the general populace. There was little cultural connection to the Far East apart from some relations growing in China. ", "Mr.Mace, thank you for the fascinating conversation as well as your service. My beloved dad served in H/3/5 just prior to the Korean Conflict. While he was lucky (his consideration) to have been transferred out just before his unit was deployed, he was always so proud to have served with those guys. He gave me a love of history-especially military history. Your stories and evaluations have reminded me of him. Thank you. For him, it was \"once a Marine, always a Marine.\" I'd just like to close by saying what I know he would say: Semper Fi!", "I'm an adult who's read about/studied WW II for pleasure since childhood, and for my own experience, the European theater was simply less alien to me. My grandfather served in it, I have German ancestry (my grandmother was the first native-born American on my mother's side), and it was easier to recreate or see battles in my mind taking place in France or Germany than the Pacific theater. I think as far as the layman goes, it's just easier to identify with the European theater. In the last few years, though, I've become obsessed with our war with Japan and Asian history in general.", "I think the most significant difference between the two d-days is that june 6 marked a much more noticeable change in the nature and progression of the war in europe. Up til then, the war for america had mostly been limited to some efforts in north africa and the italian campaign. And like i mentioned about the eastern front, most americans aren't really aware of those parts of the war. June 6 marked the first really significant in the minds of the public action by america in europe. The campaigns that started a week later just continued the war in the pacific in the same way as it had been going, albeit with a change in momentum and scale.\n\nAdd to that the fact that europe is relateable to both the public and the soldiers in many ways that the pacific isn't. The press can talk about progress toward towns and cities like Paris and Berlin whose names even back country bumpkins might have heard of instead of talking about spending months trying to take over a 25 square mile island with a name like okinawa or peleliu. And then of course, the japanese were dehumanized by the press and public in a way that the germans never were, even in light of the concentration camps. We were fighting in europe to liberate people like us from other people like us who just had some fucked up ideas. We were fighting in the pacific against an ununderstandable, barely human enemy for the purposes of revenge and to protect access to resources. It is a lot easier to look back at the former in a relatively good light. The latter is much darker when looked at historically.", "Europe is where the bulk of our population came from, and everyone knew at least a little European geography and culture, whereas the Pacific is huge, empty and the unknown, full of little faraway places with confusing names. My hat is off to you and your fellow servicemen who fought in the Pacific, it was a really brutal theater.", " > acknowledge June 15th, 1944, \"D-Day in the Pacific\" when the United States invaded the Mariana Island chain to crack open the Japanese forces, and open up the other islands to get us to Japan. We started with Saipan, then Tinian, then Guam.\n\nIt is very easy to see the significance of the D-Day landings in France because the landing took place on the European continent. One can then see the advance across land, all the way to Germany. There was always a clearly-defined front. People back home could see a line on the map and see how that line was gradually advancing. And that advance across Northern Europe began on the big D-Day: June 6th.\n\nSaipan and the Marianas had strategic significance, but they were islands in the middle of the Ocean. The ground war in the Pacific boiled down to an island-hopping campaign: each island its own D-day and its own separate battle. After islands were captured, marines and soldiers would have to travel thousands of miles by boat to the next battle. Many Japanese-occupied islands were completely skipped. It is much more difficult to understand.\n\nThere is also the issue of numbers: campaigns on the European continent involved much larger numbers of ground troops. Wikipedia lists over a million allied troops fighting in the [Normandy Invasion](_URL_5_), 600,000 in the [Battle of the Bulge](_URL_2_), and 5 million in the [advance from Paris to the Rhine](_URL_0_). In contrast, the [Battle of Saipan](_URL_4_) involved 71,000 Americans, the [Battle of Okinawa](_URL_1_) involved 183,000, and [Iwo Jima](_URL_3_) 70,000. \n\n\n", "As an Australian, the only things that seemed to be referenced in terms of world war 2 are Tobruk and the Kokoda track. This is sad because my Grandfather went from Tobruk to Europe with the Australian army and there is no mention of anything about his service after Tobruk.\n\nI suspect that you might have the same problem... Everyone knows about D-Day in Europe, but little attention is paid to the pacific theater because people are probably unwilling to understand and accept how brutal that theater of operations was.\n\nI myself would like to see the full stories of all theaters of operations told at some point, because all of the theaters of operations had their own trial and tribulations and every single person who served in those theaters should be remembered for sacrificing for their country.", "Sadly after Pearl Harbor and the President took us into war with Japan, then with Hitler declaring war on us a few days later the war in Europe became # 1. \n\nThat was what Churchill needed to survive and it was the underlying plan between him and Roosevelt for a long time.\n\nThen with the successes in the Pacific at Midway and keeping them out of Australia the Pacific Theatre became less reported on and cared about other than by the participants.\n\nBesides it was so far away out in the middle of the vast Pacific with few Americans having even read about or knew of many of the island chains.\n\nWhile many American families came from Europe, and they knew that villiage or even still had family and friends there, While an island or even an island chain in the Pacific was unknown or even cared about.\n\nThat was how it was in the Pacific. News was better from there, more battles seemed to go our way at least in the news and movietone films.\n\nYet the Marine Corps was torn to shreds but still produced positive results. Then you guys get to Iwo and with Rosenthals photograph it appeared as if the Corps had it under control, yet we were losing boys by the minute.\n\n\nThen there is the Hollywood factor, the just were fewer movies made about the Pacific Theatre. Until now where you heros are telling your stories. Hell I just finally heard of the Monteford Marines this January and got to meet several of them. I never saw any black marines in the newsreels, yet they fought just as hard as the white marines.\n\nNo disrespect Mr. Mace but if you want to talk about a forgotten Theatre,lets look at the CBI. Hell those guys fought just as tough a battles as you in the Pacific and got even less recognition than the Corps and the Navy/ Coast Guard did in the Pacific.\n\n\nI want to thank you for your service and am so glad you have written your book. I suspect there may even be a couple more left inside your head, try to bring them out won't you??\n\nIf you ever get to Rockford, Il please make sure you stop in the US Navy Club Ship #1 and wear your uniform, we would be honored to host your visit. As you may know Ship 1 is the charter club and we are here to serve all who served in the sea borne services...\n\n_URL_0_ \n\nBest Regards,\n\nUS NAVY CLUB(S)", "I'm from Europe and we do celebrate VE day more than VJ day for obvious reasons (it was closer and we had almost no skin in the game in the Pacific).\n\nI would say that when we do see coverage of the war in the Pacific it tends ot ignore most of the Sino-Japanese war and the American actions in the Pacific and focus instead on one thing - The Bomb.\n\nCould it be that there is a certain amount of guilt in using the bomb (justified or not)? ", "Personally, I find the war in the Pacific to be much more interesting than the war in Europe. The sheer brutality of that conflict boggles the mind: taking no prisoners, isolation from civilization, it was totally a \"war without mercy\" (to quote the John Dower book of the same name). I highly respect and admire the soldiers and marines (more so the marines) who fought against Japan under such trying conditions. \n\nI feel that the fighting in the Pacific required a tougher breed of human than that of Europe (mentally and physically). You performed more with less, and it saddens me to hear that you don't feel you got enough credit and respect for what you've done. \n\nYou have a lot of great explanations in this thread and I believe that you will find an explanation that you are looking for (although perhaps not a satisfactory one).\n\nThat being said, thank you so much for your service to the United States and all the democracies that exist in the Pacific and East Asia. Thanks to you and your sacrifice we all lead lives that are more enriching, dignified, and safer than they may have been otherwise. \n\nSemper Fi! ", "The very basic reason was that the war in Europe was by far more significant. That's the long and short of it.\n\nEven PRE-WW2 Soviet Union could defeat the Japanese ground forces on a scale that made it possible to speculate (based on the Winter War), that the FINNISH military might have had a decent chance of beating the Japanese in Manchuria.\n\nThe Japanese were always very weak on land with the exception of very heavy foliage territory. A Soviet or German tank (lets say JS-3 or Tiger 2) might take out a batallion of Japanese tanks without firing a shot by simply catching up and driving over them, while shrugging off all the shots taken by the Japanese tanks.\n\nTheir weakness on land made their war ultimately completely hopeless... *except* if Germany was victorious. Japan could never invade the United States, but Germany could have plausibly defeated UK, France and the Soviet Union and occupied all three, creating an Empire (especially if UK and France yielded their Empires) unlike anything seen before in the world.\n\n**TL;DR** The war against Germany is considered more important, because Germany was magnitudes more powerful and hence dangerous than Japan ever was" ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_advance_from_Paris_to_the_Rhine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Saipan", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Normandy" ], [], [ "www.navyclubusa.org/" ], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cngtf64", "cngvb34" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "A book I'd recommend is Russell E. Weigley's *The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo*. It tackles how warfare changed from the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) to the Napoleonic Era (1799-1815). Good, cheapish, and available.", "/u/DonaldFDraper has reccomend the best possible book you could find on European Strategy, Weigley's [*The Age of Battles*](_URL_1_). Another of his books, [*The American Way of War*](_URL_0_), which explores American Military history from the Colonial Period to Vietnam. \n\nIf youre more interested in primary works, you could start with the classics. Carl von Clausewitz's [*On War*](_URL_5_) is free, and is *the* book to read on military strategy. Sun Tzu's [*Art of War*](_URL_3_) is both short, and also a classic. If youre interested in modern warfare, Heinz Guderian's [*Auchtung-Panzer!*](_URL_4_) is a seminal work, which influenced German theory during World War Two. Guderian is also a decent historian himself!\n\nBut the classics at times can be ponderous. If you have any specific interests, I can recommend specific books. Also check out the [Book List](_URL_2_)." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.amazon.com/American-Way-War-Military-Strategy/dp/025328029X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420598406&sr=8-1&keywords=The+American+Way+of+War", "http://www.amazon.com/Age-Battles-Decisive-Breitenfeld-Waterloo/dp/0253363802/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420598370&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Age+of+Battles", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/books", "http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html", "http://www.amazon.com/Achtung-Panzer-Cassell-Military-Classics/dp/0304352853", "http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1946/1946-h/1946-h.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "clxd9c0", "clxfnjn", "clxfy7s" ], "score": [ 8, 143, 368 ], "text": [ "Side question: \nHow was the situation after the construction of the seuz canal in 1869?", "Chilean here.\n\nTo put you in context, Valparaiso was perhaps the most important port in the Pacific shore during the first half of XIX century. This lasted until 1865, when Chile went to war against Spain (again) and, as Spain was defeated and retreating with the remains of the fleet, they decided to [bombard Valparaiso](_URL_2_) on their way home. \n\nValparaiso was a commercial port, not prepared to repel such attack. There were British and American ships on the port, whose captains opposed the Spanish action because it violated implicit laws of war. In the end, being outnumbered, they chose not to interfere and just left the port during the bombardment. The spanish fleet then proceeded to the bombardment and left a few hours later back to Spain leaving a ruined port, three dozen sunk freighters, hundreds of civil casualties and a vivid memory of the spanish sense of \"honor\".\n\nWhile Valparaiso was rebuilt, in the in-between El Callao, in Peru, rose to be the most important port in the Pacific coast. Valparaiso never got back to its former glory.\n\nEven being the second in importance, the surge in mining explotation and exports during the next 3 decades gave enough traffic to the zone for even smaller ports to be profitable. This prosperity lasted until the beggining of the next century. It turns out that Chilean main export was [Nitratine](_URL_0_), but then germans invented an artificial substitute that performed well enough as a farming fertilizer for a fraction of the cost. This rendered nitratine obsolete and, when Panama Canal was open, chilean expots were only a fraction of their former volume.\n\nValparaiso and El Callao where a forced stop for any ship that passed through Cabo de Hornos in its way to or from Europe. This route was slow and very dangerous, and even those ships that passed Cabo de Hornos unharmed, they still had to pass throuh [Gulf of Penas ](_URL_1_) which claimed many ships and lifes throughout history. So yes, as any intermediary, Valparaiso and El Callao took their benefit on traffic, but traffic itself was impaired because the lengthy and dangerous route around Cabo de Hornos.\n\nFast forward to when Panama Canal was opened, Valparaiso wasn't a midway station anymore, but the very end of the route. Panama Canal offered a faster and safer route to europe. As shipping costs dropped, many local manufacture and produce became now viable for exportation. Many imported european products became more affordable and saw their demand increased. \n\n\n\n**TL /DR** So all in all\n\n* It sure did hurt not being a forced stop for sailing routes\n* Over the years Valparaiso saw a sustained increase in cargo, which is the real business core of any port.\n\n\nSources: \n\n* Armada de Chile, [El bombardeo a Valparaíso]( _URL_3_)\n* Courcelle-Seneuil, Jean Gustave, Agresión de España ocontra Chile.\nImpr. del Ferrocarril, 1866. Biblioteca Nacional de Chile\n* Bermúdez, Oscar (1963). Historia del salitre desde sus orígenes hasta la Guerra del Pacífico. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile.\n* Resumen de la Historia de Chile, Francisco Antonio Encina y Leopoldo Castedo. 3a edición, 1959, ed Zig Zag\n", "[This map](_URL_3_) is a plot of all ocean voyages contained in millions of entries contained in the Maury collection, a collection of ship logbook entries chronicling global shipping (and weather data) from 1792 to 1910, currently in the possession of NOAA National Climatic Data Center. The entire collection was digitized in 1998.\n\nFor comparison purposes, [today's global shipping plot.](_URL_1_)\n\nEdited to add sources:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_2_" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitratine", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Penas", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War#Bombardment_of_Valparaiso", "http://www.armada.cl/armada/tradicion-e-historia/principales-acciones-navales/la-guerra-contra-espana/bombardeo-de-valparaiso-31-de-marzo-de-1866/2014-05-14/152220.html" ], [ "http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/11/reading-digital-sources-case-study-in.html#more", "http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/access-map.png", "http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/index.htm", "http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rpKWf1ZEZxk/UKQmrPWdlDI/AAAAAAAADpE/Vx4qBM6pPYI/s1600/MauryMetadata.png" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d1ot3bh" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "This is a very difficult question, English itself isn't a \"single language\" in a sense and was instead throughout history has gone through various stages.\n\nFirstly there was **Old-English** also known as Anglo-Saxon. Which is again, divided into even more stages, some of which we know more about than others. Such as **Prehistoric English**, which only exists so far in epigraphic evidence^[1]. Historians are conflicted on where this strain of English came from, but the main two are that it came from either Frisia in the Netherlands, or from Scandinavia. Neither of these two theories however can be proved without further archaeological excavations. \n\nThis then heads into **Early Old English**, of which we have evidence from Anglo-Saxon written sources, such as the **Anglo-Saxon Chronicles** ^[2] and **Beowulf** ^[3]. According to the *Chronicles*, the Britons, requested the aid of Rome against the Picts in 449 but were rejected by them and instead turned to the Angles. Who in turn came to the Britons aid in return for land in the South of England. The Angles at the time were led by **Hengest and Horsa**, so these two are the \"instigators\" of bringing Old English to Britannia, but it could also be attributed to Wurtgern, the king of the Britons who had invited them to Britannia. In terms of Old English becoming an official language, following the original gifting of land many settlers from Mainland Germania headed to Britannia and set up seven kingdoms (The Heptarchy.) They originally spoke Prehistoric English, but this eventually evolved into Old English this spread throughout what would later be known as the Kingdom of England planting it firmly as the official language, or *lingua franca* of the area\n\nHowever as this is not what we know as \"English\" today, the next step was after 1066, following the Norman invasion **Middle English** was formed. While English had been evolving earlier due to the Danelaw in northern England it wasn't until the Norman conquest that it really supplanted itself from Old English, as the Norman kings replaced the top part of both religious and political positions with Old French speakers. This led to \"Anglo-Norman\", which was used primarily by the upper classes and clergy becoming the literary norm, meaning this is what most evidence at the time is written in. While this didn't change the language immediately and most would have continued speaking their dialect of Old English, it did have an affect over many years. But not to the extent of becoming \"English\" and was mostly more French as many higher ups spoke Norman with the average person speaking a warped version of Old English. This can be seen in the **Ormulum** ^[4].\n\nThis then later evolved into Early Modern English around the 15th or 16th century, which was following large urbanisation of the populace (mainly moving to London) led to a more recognisable version of English as well as the printing press leading to more literacy meaning a more singular language opposed to the dialectical old and middle version of English. Examples of this would include William Shakespeare's work.\n\nFinally what we could call **\"Modern English\"** in Britain, would be seen after the invention of the Dictionary, firstly in 1604^[5], but mainly in 1755 following the printing of Samuel Johnson's **Dictionary of the English Language**. Finally formalising the language and making what we know as \"English\".\n\nSo therefore, this question isn't a simple one, as many different people could be seen as bringing English to Britannia, and formalising it.\n\n > ^[1] [Prehistoric English Runes](_URL_0_)\n^[2] [Anglo-Saxon Chronicles] (_URL_2_)\n^[3] [Beowulf] (_URL_4_)\n^[4] [Ormulum](_URL_1_)\n^[5] [Table Alphibeticall](_URL_3_)\n\nA good book to read on this would be The Story of English by David Crystal.\n\nFor more information head over to (r/Linguistics)\nor (r/asklinguistics)" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.arild-hauge.com/eanglor.htm", "https://archive.org/details/ormulumwithnotes01whituoft", "http://www.britannia.com/history/docs/asintro2.html", "http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/dic/caw/1613cawdrey.html", "http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/beowulf#" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ecdcb4r" ], "score": [ 18 ], "text": [ "Pardon my Spanish, but no, that is 100% *carajo*. It's also not something your teacher made up; the myth has been popular for a long time, especially online. \n\nWhile prestige is a factor in language change, this is not how it works. People do not immitate the speech of *one person*, only groups of people, for it to catch on in a community, and furthermore if they immitated the speech of a lisping king in such a manner, it would certainly not be out of reverence and certainly not be welcomed. We have no examples of language changing in this way. \n\nLinguists do, however, completely understand every minute sound change that brings Latin into Medieval Castilian and finally into Modern Spanish, including the origin of the sibilant system. And we know for a fact that [θ] (modern orthography: *z* as in *cabeza*) has a completely different origin from [s] (modern orthography *s* as in *soledad*). \n\nWhat's more, if Spaniards were actually *lisping*, they wouldn't be able to say *both sounds* in the same sentence as they do: *la cena es deliciosa* [la θena es deliθiosa]. This isn't lisping. Are English speakers lisping when they say *thistle* [θisl]? No. They're lisping when they say [θiθl]. \n\nThe origin of [θ] in Spanish begins with Latin [k] and [t]. Everywhere [k] and [t] appeared before front vowels, or the palatal glide [j], they were changed to [ts] (really [k] was changed to [ʧ] and *then* to [ts], but we can skip a step). Latin *capita* was *capitia* in Hispanic Latin, the Latin spoken in Iberia, for the purposes of these examples. So first we have [kapita] > [kapetea] > [kapetja], due to some vowel mergers and hiatus resolution. Then because [t] occurs before [j] here, the sound change [t] > [ts] applies: [kapetsa] in medieval Castilian. Because [ts] occurs between two vowels, it also changes voicing - but it will change back before we're through, so it's not important (the same thing happens to the [p]): [kapetsa] > [kaβedza]. We'll pause here. \n\nNow three things happen to this phoneme between Medieval Castilian and Modern Spanish, and they happen in a specific order. The first is *deaffrication*, changing an affricate (two sounds together) like [ts] or [dz] into just one sound. In Castilian this sound was *ş* and it's voiced pair *z̧*, which are laminal (also called dorsal) sibilants. At this point in the language the pair of laminal sibilants contrasted with the pair of apical sibilants (the *s* in delicio*s*a). Basque has this same contrast today, but it has been lost in Spanish. Anyway the important thing here is that they're still two distinct sounds that would not sound the same to any Spaniard. So [bratso] became [braşo], and [kaβedza] became [kaβez̧a]. \n\nThe second thing that happens is voiced sibilants devoice. This is believed to have began in the northern region of Castile in the mid-16th century and expanded as people moved to the new capital of Madrid. Every instance of [z] became [s], every instance of [z̧] became [ş], every instance of [ʒ] became [ʃ]. So [kaβez̧a] becomes [kaβeşa]. \n\nThe third thing that happens is the laminal sibilant (now there's only one, no pair) [ş] becomes fronted, or what we call *maximally anterior*, meaning the tip of the tongue goes as far forward as it can. This may have been due to a theory sometimes called 'functional distribution', where sounds in a language's phonemic inventory want to be maximally distinct from each other, and so some sounds move back in the mouth and some move forward, but whatever the reason, that doesn't change the data, and it certainly wasn't because of a lisping king (that the internet legends cannot agree on who that was, either, incidentally, because they made it up). \n\nWhat maximally-anterior means in the case of a sibilant is it becomes an interdental fricative, so here [ş] > [θ], and we finally have the Modern Spanish form [kaβeθa] or *cabeza* as it is written (note how the *z* is a holdover from medieval orthography from back when [θ] was a laminal sibilant, and voiced. And of course it isn't just this word, but anywhere the sound occurred. So *el Çid* underwent: [kid] > [tsid] > [şid] > [θid]. And here note the *c*, another relic of medieval orthography. \n\nAnd then in the Americas the sounds [θ] and [s] merged into [s], and the history was obscured even more. \n\nSource for examples: Pharies, David A. (2007) *A Brief History of the Spanish Language.* University of Chicago Press. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dbp5qq3" ], "score": [ 34 ], "text": [ "French was the language of European aristocracy, nobility and royalty for most of (early) modern history. The Romanovs were, like all the major European houses, deeply interconnected and intermarried with the European nobility. This is why French was also spoken at the Russian court, because it was the language of the nobility. \n\nNicholas II and his cousins Wilhelm II of Germany and George V of the United Kingdom are great examples of how interwoven European nobility was. They corresponded and visited each other and their other relatives regularly. You can imagine that this necessitates a common language. \n\nEmperor Nicholas II did speak English though, his famous pre-WWI correspondence with German Emperor Wilhelm II was conducted in English. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dw1iqk8" ], "score": [ 808 ], "text": [ "This question is really complex to answer.\n\nFirst of all, because of movies and the way \"la resistance\" is portrayed we tend to think of it as this monolithic entity. It absolutely was not the case. Resistance is in its essence anyone who does subversive acts against an occupier. Like \"insurgent\", the term itself encompasses a lot of different activities from smuggling to bombings, from hiding people to hunting people, passing on pamphlets etc.\n\nYour question includes 1942, young and politically minded.\n\nI'm going to assume your theoretical person is 15 to 25 years of age and has a political affiliation. Because not being politically minded does not imply you can't be a resistance fighter.\n\nFirst of all, you do not need to be affiliated with any organized movement to do any of the subversive actions. Plenty of citizens that partook in acts of resistance were just regular people who took matters into their own hands. Such as hiding Jews.\n\nThe FFI (Forces françaises de l'intérieur) that was more akin to a well organized monolithic Resistance was not created until Feb 1, 1944, therefore I am not going to mention it. Also, Jean Moulin's CNR (Conseil national de la Résistance) will not come to be until 43-44.\n\nNow as far as political influences you had several (in no particular order and not-exhaustive):\n\n1. The \"Milieu\", while this is a rabbit hole of its own, the French organized crime was deep into resistance. It is important to know that some families also collaborated, and some played both sides. This choice would not really be politically motivated.\n\n1. Communist, outfits such as \"Bataillons de la jeunesse\" that joined the FTP (Franc tireur et partisans) in 1942. Those guys had a lot of veterans from the \"Brigades Internationales\" that fought in the Spanish civil war.\n\n1. Far right and Royalist, while it may seem odd at first glance because far right = nazi amirite guys /s , some members of the far right did not take kindly to strangers invading France, and while a lot of them where pro-Vichy, a lot of them where not fond of being told what to do by a foreign power, least of all Germany in a post Franco-Prussian War and 14-18 world.\n\n1. Socialists could join organisations such as the CAS (Comité d'action socialiste)\n\nThere is something important I want to note. As stated in the question, it was relating to 1942. 1942 is still very early for the Resistance and the \"Maquis\". Moreover, the question is asking about Paris when a lot if not most subversive activities were taken elsewhere in the territory.\n\nNow for \"Was obtaining this information easy, or do I need to know somebody to talk to?\".\n\nOnce again the answers will vary across the board depending on the time and the place. In Paris in 1942, times where incredibly dangerous, the French police in Paris was actively collaborating with the Germans, organizing things like the infamous \"Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver\" aka. \" rafle du Vél’d’Hiv\" on July 16 and 17 1942 which is the biggest mass arrest of Jews on french soil. Over 13000 men, women and children where rounded up, with the help of 7000 French policemen and hundreds of \"activists\" from groups such as Jacques Doriot's \"Parti Populaire Francais\". In a perfume of neighbors ratting out neighbors.\n\nMost resistance groups also had to dodge the infamous \"Brigades spéciales\" (or BS for short) which was a unit of police dedicated to tracking and destroying resistance cells.\n\nSo asking around in 1942 Paris for a Resistance group to join will most likely result in your untimely death after very degrading and cruel interrogations.\n\nLastly, while the resistance had some politically oriented groups it's also important to acknowledge that people from all walks of life, sex, political affiliations, creed, class etc. helped or joined the Resistance. An estimated half a million French, and also foreigners, risked or lost their lives. And this is the part of that war that we'd rather remember and pay homage to.\n\nSources:\n\nCyril Guinet - *Occupation : La police française, précieuse alliée du IIIe Reich*\n\nDaniel Cordier - *Jean Moulin. La République des Catacombes*\n\nDominique Balvet, Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Claire Andrieu, Guillaume Piketty, Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, Jean-Pierre Le Crom - *Dictionnaire historique de la Résistance*" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "coawrt5" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "In trying to impose an ideal germanic mythology in all of society, many NS leaders and party members preferred \"germanic\" or germanic sounding names like Siegfried, Brunhild, Gerhild etc. Of course, Adolf was extremely popular as well. \n \nA law of 1938 stated that \"children of German nationals should generally receive only German first names\". \"Un-German\" names are only to be given for good reasons (like family traditions).\n\nConcerning your examples, as both are listed in this law: Sara(h) would be a very unpopular first name, as all Jews had to use a \"distinctly jewish\" name, and if they didn't have one, males would have to adopt \"Israel\" as middle name, females \"Sara\" and had to use that name and sign with it. \n \nThe law also states that names that have been in long standing traditional use are not be defined as \"un-German\". The law lists \"Hans, Joachim, Peter, Julius, Elisabeth, Maria, Sofie, Charlotte\" as example. \n \nSource: Richtlinien über die Führung von Vornamen RdErl. d. RMdI. v. 18. 8. 1938 \n \n[Wikisource (German)](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Richtlinien_%C3%BCber_die_F%C3%BChrung_von_Vornamen" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cvgfw4j" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "hi! do check out these posts from a few months ago\n\n* [What was the meaning of \"Muhammad\" before Muhammad?](_URL_1_) - featuring /u/gingerkid1234\n\n* [Was the name Mohammed common in Mohammed's time?](_URL_0_) - featuring /u/sln26 and and /u/shlin28 \n\nThese posts have been archived, so if you have follow-up questions, just ask them here & mention the user's username to notify them" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2s1b7b/was_the_name_mohammed_common_in_mohammeds_time/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1du1v7/what_was_the_meaning_of_muhammad_before_muhammad/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cqdbknu" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "I've had a search as I didn't know myself and I came upon a couple of things, although they concern differing periods. You can judge the reliability of these yourself, they are sourced so I assume if you do some digging you can find the raw data. \n\nFirstly, [this](_URL_1_) I found at the Texas Digital Library, and it states that in Germany \"A conservative estimate of literacy rates at the beginning of the sixteenth century include a thirty percent literacy rate in urban areas, but only a five-percent rate of literacy overall (Lindberg)\".\n\nNext, I found [this](_URL_0_) in the collection at the Institute of Education Sciences, although it isn't peer-reviewed so again, judge it yourself. The author states \"Graff states, for example, that the literacy rate for London males in the fifteenth century was 'around 40%' (1991, p. 97).\" If you look further into the source in this, at Graff's \"The Legacies of Literacy\", he comments on pg. 143 that \"it remains doubtful that the literacy rate for Poland exceeded 10%\". Graff also mentions on pg. 163 that during the sixteenth century, the rate of literacy in England was \"no higher than 40%\". In Italy, Graff states on pg. 77 that during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries \"the rate of adult literacy was probably in the range of 25-35%\".\n\nI hope this helps, took a bit of a search. To put the above in a more readable form:\n\nEngland: 40% (Late 1400s - early 1500s)\n\nPoland: 10% (1500s)\n\nItaly: 25-35% (Late 1200s - early 1300s)\n\nGermany: 5% overall, 30% urban areas (Early 1500s)" ] }

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[ [ "http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED451570", "http://repositories.tdl.org/ttu-ir/handle/2346/23230" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "djexjw3", "djg9xhw" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "In Sweden, there were several ways news spread around.\n\nBefore the reformation, news often spread through meetings - at things, markets and estates parliament meetings, people would talk, exchange news and information and listen to storytellers or bards telling chronicles, often financed by great men as a tool of propaganda. The Engelbrekt chronicle and the Karl chronicle are examples of such propaganda works, aimed at telling a rosy pespective of the actions of the man who ordered the work and paint his enemies in as bad a light as possible. Noblemen would attend or send representatives, often to spread news or a narrative suitable to their interests.\n\nFor example, when Gustav Eriksson (Vasa), the future King of Sweden arrived to Mora to attempt to have the men of Dalarna rise against the Danish Kalmar Union King Kristian II, the news of the bloodbath in Stockholm did not reach Mora from several sources (enough for the men to believe them) until after the would-be revolted had attempted to raise the men in revolt.\n\nAfter the reformation and the invention of the printing press, the local priests were given the task of reading news, announcements and other information to the people in their parish from the pulpit after the sermon. Printed information also became available, first as shot announcements and reports from the estates parliament sessions and later as whole books with all decrees from the king and the parliament over the year.\n\nWith the allotment (indelning) soldier system, soldiers were required to travel to train with their company, their battalion and their regiment monthly, bi-monthly and yearly and were thus often carriers of news and informaton from far away, as they met other soldiers and were read announcements and information by their officers.\n\nThe first Swedish newspaper, Ordinari Post Tijdender (ordinary/regular postal news) was started 1645 and was a state-run newspaper that included letters from correspondents both domestic and foreign. However, the weekly 4-page paper was expensive and printed in a very small pressing, mainly being intended for state officials, priests and the upper crust of society, for them to spread orally as they saw fit.\n\nNews were more or less word-by-mouth, where the rich and powerful would hire people to influence what was being said by songs and epics until the printing press and more organised states, when officials and priests were often given the task to spread (state-sanctioned) news in their districts, provinces and parishes. ", "Interestingly enough, in many cases \"the news\" as we see it wasn't really something people cared or even thought about. It wasn't until the development of commodity trade and towns/cities that news really took off. Habermas describes this very well in his landmark publication:\n\n > The traffic in news that developed alongside the traffic in\ncommodities showed a similar pattern. With the expansion of\ntrade, merchants' market-oriented calculations required more\nfrequent and more exact information about distant events.\nFrom the fourteenth century on, the traditional letter carrying\nby merchants was for this reason organized into a kind of guildbased\nsystem of correspondence for their purposes. The merchants\norganized the first mail routes, the so-called ordinary\nmail, departing on assigned days. The great trade cities became\nat the same time centers for the traffic in news;!1 the organization\nof this traffic on a continuow basis became imperative to\nthe degree to which the exchange of commodities and of securities\nbecame continuous. Almost simultaneously with the\norigin of stock markets, postal services and the press insthutionalized\nregular contacts and regular communication. To be\nsure, the merchants were satisfied with a system that limited\ninformation to insiders; the urban and court chanceries preferred\none that served only the needs of administration. Neither\nhad a stake in information that was public. What\ncorresponded to their interests, rather, were \"news letters,\" the\nprivate correspondences commercially organized by newsdealers.'I2\n\n > The new sector of communications, with its institutions\nfor a traffic in news, fitted in with the existing forms of communication\nwithout difficulty as long as the decisive elementpublicness-was\nlacking. Just as, according to Sombart's definition,\none could speak of \"mail\" only when the regular opportunity\nfor letter dispatch became accessible to the general\npublic,slI so there existed a press in the strict sense only once\nthe regular supply of news became public, that is, again, accessible\nto the general public. But this occurred only at the end\nof the seventeenth century.1I4 Until then the traditional domain\nof communication in which publicity of representation held\nsway was not fundamentally threatened by the new domain of\na public sphere whose decisive mark was the published word. \n\n > There was as yet no publication of commercially distributed\nnews; the irregularly published reports of recent events were\nnot comparable to the routine production of news.\n\n > Habermas, Jurgen. *The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.*\n\nApologies for the poor copy job. He goes on to explain the development of a public sphere coinciding with the development of public governance, and the need therefore for the passing of information between the government and consituents. He further discusses the development of news in the public sphere as a growing commodity intertwined with the increasing interconnectedness of the ascendant capitalist economy." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cac0e4j" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Just a few points:\n\n1. Marriage wasn't necessarily adjudicated by the church until later on in the medieval period, starting with Pope Alexander III who pondered ruling that all marriages should be solemnized in a church to be legal. Marriage could simply be mutual consent + sexual intercouse and that made you married. This then created a problem, as noted by Peter Lombard, that Mary and Joseph were by that definition **not** married, so it was changed to simply 'consent between two parties'. This created another problem in that two people could claim to be married against their parents' wishes which is why the Fourth Lateran Council ruled against 'clandestine' marriages in 1215. This means that marriage wasn't under church rule, although divorce was.\n\n2. Jewish communities, often sequestered in concentrated areas of a city or town, lived under their own courts - which enforced a variety of marriage related *takkanah*, or laws, some local, some universal. These enforced marriage/divorce rulings." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c892uxw", "c895sud" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "My focus is on the American Revolutionary period, so my recommendations will be a bit narrow, but I hope you'll find them helpful.\n\nStarting with early colonization, there is an immensely readable book by Nathaniel Philbrick entitled *Mayflower.* It's a comparative piece: examining both the initial landing and settlement at Plymouth and King Philip's War. What makes this particularly interesting is the way that Philbrick explores the interaction between the Europeans and the Native Americans, and what changed between he settlement and the war to increase the frequency and violence of their conflicts.\n\nThe French and Indian War is most succinctly explored in Fred Anderson's *The War That Made America*. The book is a fairly quick read, and quite entertaining. The book covers all perspectives of the French and Indian War, including the French, British, and their respective colonists; but the crux of his argument is that the Native Americans were the deciding faction, the ones who tipped the balance. This was made into a fantastic documentary by PBS, which can be found [here.](_URL_0_)\n\nOne of my favorite books is an examination of the Oneida nation during the Revolutionary War: *Forgotten Allies* by Joseph Glathaar and James Kirby. It gives much more emphasis to Native American culture (religious beliefs, economy, political structures, kinship systems, etc.), though not as much as an anthropological study would. Glathaar and Kirby give us just enough to really start critically reading their analysis of why and how the Oneida joined the Americans during the War, and what that meant for them. Truly fascinating.\n\nI would also recommend some of Gavin K. Watt's books about the far Northern theater of the American Revolution (*Burning of the Valleys* for example). He focuses on the British experience, but their strong alliance with Native peoples of Canada and much of upstate New York necessitates a closer examination of them.\n\nLike I said, my focus is on the American Revolution, so I don't have any suggestions beyond the Northeast United States, but I hope you find these suggestions useful!", "In contemporary North American anthropology, most people are careful in how they exactly use the word \"shamans\". Many North Americanists, for example, don't like South Americanists using the word \"shamans\". Look at [this post I made a week ago](_URL_0_) (the first paragraph doesn't apply to your question, but the others do). I talked a little more about trances and shamanism in [another comment from two weeks ago](_URL_0_), and I'm going to re-recommend Piers Vitebsky's *Shamanism*. It's not perfect, and I have some qualms with it, but it's the best place I know to start. If you want a second book, I still recommend Alice Kehoe's *Shamans and Religion*, which is more of an academic read (Vitebsky is an academic, but he's clearly writing for a popular audience. Kehoe is writing for an academic one). Mircea Eliade's book is *not* recommended (which I hate saying, because I love most of his other books--his book on shamanism is... dated).\n\nThat's just about shamanism... I actually don't where to turn for information about Native American religion more generally. Alice Kehoe has another book called *the Ghost Dance* which I've been interested in picking up. The problem with a lot of this stuff is it's written by people who identify as \"neo-shamans\", which doesn't mean the work is bogus, but there are many, many writers out there who at have a hard time distinguishing between how a tradition is and how they would like it to be (or perhaps don't care about distinguishing about how the tradition is and what their audience wants to hear). In part because of that (and other changes in the field of anthropology more generally), many academics have backed off researching \"shamanism\" in general or \"Native American religion\" in general. There are lots of books with \"anthropology of religion\" or \"anthropology and religion\" in the title, and you may want to check out one or two of those from the library and read the chapter on North America (see who it cites, etc.)" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SaT7yvv6bE&list=PLhKhBBMZ2xY5JTddz1QuIGEcmyfpnjSYV" ], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/17jght/is_there_any_relationship_to_ancient_asian/c869h5i" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c51yg9t", "c51yij3", "c51ypkp", "c51ysxy", "c51yvpp", "c51z60r", "c51z6ck", "c51zqk0", "c520mqc", "c521a4g", "c5226ua", "c528x5q" ], "score": [ 9, 31, 11, 11, 2, 7, 13, 2, 4, 6, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "What about Stephen Ambrose? Granted, he ran into some trouble late in his life, but it was his work that led to Band of Brothers.", "I think the problem is that it's difficult to make history simultaneously interesting and inspiring. It seems like these are the two things which make someone like Bill Nye or Sagan a cultural phenomenon. The closest history has come recently is maybe when Doris Kearns Goodwin published *Team of Rivals*, which garnered attention for telling an interesting and inspiring historical story. (Then again I personally think her book is ok, but there are much more interesting and inspiring books on similar subject material out there.)\n\nAnother issue is that scientific breakthroughs are obvious, discrete events. First we thought time was absolute; after Einstein we began thinking it is relative. First we thought nothing comes out of black holes; after Hawking, we think they do emit some sort of radiation. It's much harder to point to any individual historian turning a whole field upside down in one discrete discovery; perhaps the closest history can come is when, e.g., DNA testing of one of Sally Hemings's descendants showed that they had some of Thomas Jefferson's DNA.\n\nFinally, another challenge is that even when historians do make groundbreaking discoveries that turn the world upside down, history is much more bound up with society's sense of itself than science is. The closest thing science has to this is evolution. But nobody really feels an existential or identity threat from the discovery of relativity or of Hawking radiation. Yet when you tell them the US Civil War was in fact fought over freedom with respect to slavery, not so much freedom with respect to states' rights, many Southerners won't exactly respond neutrally, let alone positively. When you tell a descendant of plantation owners that slavery in the antebellum South was not idyllic, or the descendant of a colonial officer that his \"civilising mission\" brought misery to many in Africa or Asia, you're not going to get a great welcome party.\n\nPopularising history faces challenges on a number of fronts:\n\n1. Its most interesting stories are not necessarily inspiring (e.g. the politics of the antebellum US are actually pretty interesting but hardly anyone comes out of it looking good; the same can be said of the Reconstruction period);\n2. History advances in a less discrete, groundbreaking way compared to the natural sciences;\n3. Historical discoveries which challenge the way we see the world will typically face a much more hostile response compared to scientific discoveries which challenge the way we see the world.", "Can you explain why you don't think Ken Burns counts? I mean, Neil DeGrasse Tyson isn't doing original research. Carl Sagan is more noted for writing/narration than he is for his work on the atmosphere of Venus. \n\nI guess I don't get why Ken Burns doesn't count. ", "I asked a historian friend why more historians don't write newspaper articles to give a more balanced and long-term view of issues. He told me it was considered slumming. ", "It isn't the entire story by a long shot, but history is inherently political, which makes broad appeal harder.", "What about [Niall Ferguson](_URL_0_)? Maybe not on the level of Sagan or Nye, but still influential. Has written popular books, hosted popular documentaries, and frequently writes Op.Eds etc.\n\nThe reason it's difficult to get to the level of Sagan or Nye is the inherent political nature of all history, thus any opinion is always, and should always be, questioned and debated by opponents even within the same field.", "What about all the movies and video games based on history. This sub gets questions about games like Assassins Creed all the time. I think works of fiction set in historical context are one of the main ways people become interested in real history. It really isn't that different than Bill Nye simplifying science to get kids interested.\n\nTL;DR: I think history popularization happens a little differently than science popularization, but it is happening.", "Stephen Ambrose, Max Hastings, John Keegan. Barbara Truchman and Cornelius Ryan (especially because of the two movies _The Longest Day_, and _A Bridge Too Far_ based on his books) a generation earlier. \n\nDavid McCullough. Jared Diamond.\n\nIf you're at least a little bit interested in history you're familiar with at least one of those names, especially Ambrose's because of the HBO series _Band of Brothers_ based on his work. \n", "From an Australian POV Simon Schama & Geoffery Blainey are the two names that immediately spring to mind when thinking 'popular historian'.\n\nI think the crucial difference between scientists and historians is the degree of certainty that scientists can give their work vs historians. There is so much about our past that we* just don't know*. Further, there are a lot more areas in history where there are legitimately different schools of thought.", "In Britain, Stephen Fry (studied a lot of history in university) and Terry Brooks (the other Terry formerly of Monty Python, also a historian as well as an actor) are rather famous for their historical specials. Then again, I'm American and not a professional historian so I'm not entirely sure I'm giving a good counter-example.", "This is clearly is not a complete answer to your question, but it's a pet peeve of mine, so I am going to say it.\n\nOne reason we have the \"Ken Burns\" documentaries is that Ken Burns has a massive ego. He set out to create a documentary with his name attached to it. The use of historians to do this was almost incidental. Shelby Foote was the person who made Burns famous, and the series very well could have been Shelby Foote's Civil War (though, of course, Foote isn't actually an historian either.) \n\nNow consider the possibility that another individual with a massive ego who got distribution rights for *Cosmos* had decided to put his name on it instead of Sagan's. We'd have *Ted Turner's Cosmos*, featuring Carl Sagan. \n\nThe point is twofold. One, historians, for various reasons, tend not to want to be popularizers in this way and so do not start the project nor demand top billing when they are involved with those projects. Second, a big part of your answer lies not with the historians but with the way entertainment production works. It makes it difficult for those who are not already popular and who are outside the entertainment industry to get involved with these projects unless someone else asks them.\n\nThis last also happens to be part of the reason some historians don't get involved as popularizers. Navigating that nightmare while having other, actual jobs to do is not worth it. One of my friends makes short documentaries for his classes and presentations he gives. PBS has bought a few of them. When they are done, his name has been demoted to \"associate producer\" credit, even though he did the vast majority of the work on the documentary itself and certainly all the work on content. PBS usually takes out his voice if he's done voice-overs, changes some transitions, re-edits, etc. And then they call it theirs. He couldn't have sold the things if he'd demanded anything more. And this is **PBS**. It is vastly more difficult with major media companies.", " > there are none with the sort of cultural impact as the great scientific popularizers\n\nMost replies so far have examined the \"popularizer\" side of this question. But surely Western culture's receptiveness to popular history and popular science must play a part. \n\nTo me, public interest in science is fed by an animating myth, that science brings \"progress\": shiny gadgets, awesome powers, and perhaps immortality. \n\nIf history has an animating myth, it's perhaps about national legend or legacy: our country exceptional, destined for greatness. Few respectable historians are willing to preach that myth today. And that myth rings increasingly hollow in the early 21st century.\n\nAlso, if history offers any lessons, they directly contradict the shiny myth of science. History reveals that--almost invariably--the more power humans get, the more devastation they wreak. Not a happy message that fits tidily in 30 minute increments and send viewers off to buy the products they see during commercials. " ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "dn100hg", "dn100hg" ], "score": [ 3, 3 ], "text": [ "Constantinople fell in 1453, I believe you mean the start date is 1444.", "Constantinople fell in 1453, I believe you mean the start date is 1444." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dt96i8h" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "There are a lot of factors that feed into vehicle design. It was more economical to begin with, requiring less material, and in a war economy that was always important. It was often more practical; in the case of large self-propelled guns, a full casemate would limit visibility, gun traversal and elevation, would require venting systems, and would not be thick enough to provide much protection, as chassis were often overloaded as-is thanks to their large main armament; if they fully invested in the same sort of design and thickness of armour of contemporaneous tanks, then they would essentially be replicating another design and there would be no saving of effort or material. The vehicle would be slower, have higher ground pressure, and so on.\n\nWhen it comes to the threats mentioned, tanks were still vulnerable to artillery fire. The thinnest part of their armour was often the top, and a direct hit from an artillery piece in the indirect fire role could take out a tank. This was unlikely in practice because artillery is not a precision weapon. Artillery pieces are deployed in groups against area targets. An open-topped vehicle's best defence against artillery fire was mobility, displacing before artillery could respond to their presence.\n\nGrenades are only a problem if the vehicles are within throwing range. Supporting infantry's presence generally dissuaded that, albeit in urban warfare isolated vehicles of any kind were very vulnerable. Being open-topped exacerbated this vulnerability, but tanks did not have any special immunity.\n\nAircraft were feared, but actually only a small percentage of vehicles were destroyed by aircraft. Pilots were infamous for claiming kills far in excess of what they actually inflicted. While their weaponry (cannons, bombs, rockets) was certainly capable of tank busting, hitting those targets (low altitude, high speed, low accuracy) was difficult and again, mobility was a better defence over a few millimetres of armour." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d7uh0ed" ], "score": [ 112 ], "text": [ "It's important to remember that electricity has been around for as long as lightning and static, and that the electric eel was known long before Europeans named it in the 1700's. They're actually native to the Amazon and Orinoco river basins, as are several tribes of people - and seeing as there are a lot of Amazonian languages, the name would likely be whatever the natives in South America called it. There are also other electric fish, such as those that live in the Nile River - which were first depicted in an Ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BCE, and was called 'angry catfish'. The Mediterranean and European coast of the Atlantic also contains electric fish, the electric ray, which were known as a 'torpedo' - dating back to the Ancient Romans from the Latin word for 'paralyzed' or 'numb'. \n \n Back to the Europeans however, the discovery of the electric eel (which isn't actually an eel, it's a knifefish) came around exactly when the electrical science craze was hitting the world in the 1700's. It was named by Linnaeus, Electrophorus Electricus, in 1766 - long after electricity was discovered.\n To put it in context, the word \"Electricity\" comes from the Greek word elektron, meaning \"amber\". If you rub amber, it attracts dust due to a static charge. This phenomenon was named \"electricus\" by scientist William Gilbert in 1600. The static generator was then invented in 1650, the capacitor in 1744, and the \"battery\" in 1748 - with Ben Franklin's lightning and kite experiment being carried out in the 1750's. So it is likely that most people had an awareness of electricity, if they were aware of the eel." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "eib6n00" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "These are specialised jousting shields. They appear in the late 14th century, and were used into the 15th century (and are still used in modern jousting). This is a time when the knightly shield was fading from the battlefield.\n\nA couple of examples from the Met:\n\n* _URL_1_\n\n* _URL_3_\n\nThese are often called *écranché* by modern jousters, but this doesn't appear to be a term contemporary to their original use. Froissart calls them \"targets for war\", as opposed to \"shields for peace\". By \"war\", he means jousting with sharp lances, rather than them being intended for the battlefield. Note that in this late 14th century Italian picture:\n\n* _URL_5_\n\nthe lance doesn't have a vamplate (the flared conical hand protector in front of the grip seen on some jousting lances). The cut-out allows the shield to sit in front of the hand, protecting the hand from the opponent's lance. While a gauntlet is worn, a sharp lance point - as these shields were used with - can slip along the lance haft under the gauntlet plates. The shield is a useful addition to the hand protection. The wide tips (coronels) used for \"jousts of peace\" don't present nearly as much danger - they're not sharp, and they're much wider and won't slip under the gauntlet plates. The concave face stops the sharp point from slipping off the shield - better to keep it where you know it is, rather than risking a hard-to-predict slip off onto some other part of yourself or your horse.\n\nIn jousting, the goal is to hold the lance steady, and hit your opponent who is riding on a straight and predictable path. The cut-out restriction movement of the lance is not a problem. In war (that is, on the battlefield rather than for \"jousts of war\"), freedom of movement of the lance is important - your target might want to move out of the way, and the lance needs to follow. While we don't have video of Medieval lancers in action, this video of early 20th century lancers training gives an idea of the usefulness of moving the lance: _URL_4_\n\nShields like this are shown used on foot in the *Codex Wallerstein* fightbook:\n\n* _URL_2_\n\nand bucklers made in the shape of these jousting shields (but smaller) are shown in the *Gladiatora* fightbook:\n\n* _URL_10_\n\nThese appear to be in the context of tournament fighting.\n\nIn *Chroniques de France ou de St Denis* (BL Royal 20 C. VII), we see shields like this used in battle, on horse and on foot:\n\n* _URL_0_\n\n* _URL_9_\n\nThis suggests that this type of shield might have seen some use in battle (or perhaps the artist drew shields that he/she had seen in tournaments). From the same manuscript, we have some shields with cut off corners:\n\n* _URL_7_\n\nUnlike cut-out slots, which will restrict the movement of a lance, a cut off corner like these will give freer movement - the corner isn't there to block movement of the lance.\n\nReferences:\n\nOn the tournament targes in the Met: Nickel, Helmut (1995), \"The Seven Shields of Behaim: New Evidence\", *Metropolitan Museum Journal* 30, 29-51: _URL_12_\n\nFroissart on the Tournament at St. Inglevert: _URL_6_\n\n*Gladiatora* fightbook: _URL_11_\n\n*Codex Wallerstein*: _URL_2_\n\nA nice blog post by Will McLean, \"The Neologistic Ecranche\", which pointed me towards the non-jousting appearances of these shields: _URL_8_\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4163/7825/", "https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/22876", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/File:Cod.I.6.4%C2%BA.2_082v.jpg", "https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/27889", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhkCCYnBrWE", "https://i.imgur.com/hfTbcNf.png", "https://faculty.nipissingu.ca/muhlberger/FROISSART/INGLEVER.HTM", "http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4163/7827/", "http://willscommonplacebook.blogspot.com/2009/03/neologistic-ecranche.html", "http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4163/8801/", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/File:MS_Germ.Quart.16_07r.jpg", "http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Gladiatoria_(MS_Germ.Quart.16)", "https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/The_Seven_Shields_of_Behaim_New_Evidence_The_Metropolitan_Museum_Journal_v_30_1995" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dapyk0d" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The idea of kids marrying young isn't entirely accurate. They did marry much younger than today but 13 was still pretty young for the Western World for the past few hundred years or so. [There is an excellent article here](_URL_0_) already on the myth but I'll paraphrase it. Basically, looking at marriage certificates/Church records in the 17th and 18th C in the US the average age to marry for women was anywhere from 20-22 based upon the location and time period. This was pretty consistent up until the 1990's when the average age of marriage jumped from ~21 in the 1970's-1980's to [24](_URL_1_) in the 1990's and continues to go up. \n\nSo the change really was only in the past generation. :-)" ] }

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[ [ "https://historymyths.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/myth-136-women-married-very-young-in-the-olden-days/", "http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005061.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ceog2p6" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "You should be aware of the subjectiveness of you perspective. \n\nJapans actions were largely done far away from western countries (Pearl Harbour and actions in British colonies notwithstanding). German actions are far more in focus in western awareness. That said, the perception of modern Germany is not as negative as you make it seem.\n\nThe perception of the Japanese by their Asian neighbours today is much more resentful than than that of Germanys neighbours. For example, there is very large focus on the war in Chinese fiction:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n*\"Nearly one billion Japanese soldiers or enemies were killed off in TV productions filmed last year at Hengdian World Studios, the studio facilities known as the Hollywood of China, the Guangdong-based Yangcheng Evening News reports, suggesting that Chinese TV audiences like to achieve some degree of catharsis for their anti-Japanese sentiment with a high body count of enemy combatants in historical dramas.\"*\n\nThis resentment is not exclusive to China, and Japan frequently aggravates their neighbours by heads of state visiting shrines to their war dead etc." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20130218000020&cid=1104" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cah6obm", "cahb9t7" ], "score": [ 7, 22 ], "text": [ "There were a lot of new religions that popped up in the Northern US in the early 19th century, in the midst of the Second Great Awakening. Many of them, including Mormonism, were influenced by Alexander Campbell. None gained quite as many followers as the Mormons, although the Seventh Day Adventists popped up a little later and did quite well.\r\rThe biggest reason for the success of the Mormons was the Book of Mormon. To the average reader, the archaic-ish language, complex plot and Protestant teachings in the book made it seem like it could credibly be scripture--Smith was in his early twenties when it was published, how could he have written it? No other church really had new ancient scripture; just sermons or tracts.\r\rHe also solidified the doctrine of baptism first, Holy Ghost second. You could get a person to the point of baptism much quicker, and thus church membership as well. Missionary work was emphasized early on.\r\rAnother thing was probably Smith's charisma. He was very eloquent and had an impressive presence. The movement depended on the unique skills of him, Sidney Rigdon, and later Brigham Young.", "I wouldn't say Mormonism is mainstream even today. Originally, Mormons were persecuted by mainstream Christians and they all moved to Utah to form a Mormon colony we now call Salt Lake City. This allowed them to thrive independently from the rest of American Christianity. Eventually it became possible for Mormons to live elsewhere without being run out of town and they settled in suburbs around major cities. It's still not that common and mainstream Christians still view them with a lot of distrust. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ccrbbdm", "ccrkvzo" ], "score": [ 2, 5 ], "text": [ "Pipe organs can be traced back to ancient Greece. This was an instrument called the Hydraulis and worked through water pressure, it's got a pretty good [wiki page](_URL_0_). What we would consider to be a 'modern' organ started in the 12th Century and designs are still being invented and developed today. The first large organs were installed in modern-day Germany/Germanic regions, which is also where the bulk of the organ repetoire comes from. \n\nPipe organs were popular in churches for a couple of reasons. First, they were louder than anything else. What better way to reach a big congregation than a loud instrument, and what better way to demonstrate the power and glory of the church than with a big wall of sound? The dominant aesthetic of the time in the Catholic Church was to create an overwhelming environment within the church - basically it would be so grand that people couldn't help but be impressed.\n\nSecondly, organs are very versatile. The development of stops and pedals continuously expanded the range and timbre of the organ, meaning that hundreds of sounds can be made by only one instrument. \n\nThird, the organ doesn't have a \"hard cap\" on skill level. This is actually a huge factor in determining which instruments \"make it\" over time. For example, the recorder used to a very popular instrument, but there's really only so much time one can practice the recorder before they are literally unable to improve further. Successful instruments like the flute do not have that trait. Similarly, I don't think any organ player can actually claim to have reached a level so high that they could not conceivably improve. This makes the instrument attractive for both composers and motivated performers. Composers like it because they are freed of many of the limitations of poorly-designed instruments and can write more sophisticated and interesting music. Motivated performers liked it because they could distinguish themselves by being great organ players.\n\n > Why did the Catholic Church invest this much money?\n\nThe main source of income for construction of new cathedrals was through patronage. Nobles would compete with each other to build the biggest, the best, the most beautiful, the most sophisticated cathedrals. Likewise, they could ensure the position of their everlasting soul in heaven by forfeiting their earthy gains to a more noble cause (or they could get away with being tyrannical dictators by paying off the church, it's a matter of perspective). So a lot of these cathedrals, and, by extension, organs were paid for in order to show off to others.\n\n > How did early ones work?\n\nBellows. And the bigger and louder the organ, the more air pressure is required. Some of them required ten people to man the bellows, it's possible there were even bigger organs but I'm not sure. This actually presented a challenge in design because the high air pressure required the use of greater amounts of arm strength just to depress the keys, let alone play highly dexterous passages. Various mechanical aids were developed to overcome this. \n\n\nBonus: Organs were actually an instrument that people would be familiar with outside of the church setting. In Medieval times, portable organs were developed that could be drawn on a cart and set up anywhere, and would be seen at large gatherings or celebrations. One person would play and their lowly assistant would man the bellows.\n", "It's interesting: while organs are found in (mostly Christian) churches almost everywhere in America and Europe, the organs that we see built most often today are, yes, based off of the German/Dutch design.\n\nIn terms of its role in the Catholic Church, it wasn't until the mid-19th century that Germanic organs came into common use. In French, Italian and Spanish regions (where, of course, Catholicism was biggest), you'll find that older organs are actually fairly small in comparison to German ones - and I'm talking 18th century and earlier. Mostly the organ's role in those traditions were these: playing versets between mass verses and parts, during the Elevation, and during the Fraction - in a sense, its role was to tell the congregation what was going on, as the Mass parts were still spoken or sung in Latin rather than the native language of the churchgoers. These organs tended to have a lot of upperwork - higher pitches - and didn't have extensive pedal divisions (which on modern instruments typically provide the bass), although what was there was sometimes very loud, particularly in France and Spain.\n\nGermany was a different story: a big part of Martin Luther's reformation was the hymnody he either wrote or adapted from Catholic tunes to be sung in German. As a result, the organs there became pretty hefty: larger pedal divisions (again, bass!), in general, larger numbers of pipes, and meatier ones, too. They were built to be sung with by a large number of people. Later, as hymnody became more popular in more denominations the organs evolved with it, the German model largely having been the most adaptable model.\n\nOne last interesting style of organ is that found in 16th-18th century Holland. With the Dutch Reformed Church (which I think was probably called something else at the time...) having come out of the Calvinist tradition, the only singing done DURING the liturgy was often the Psalm. As a result, the organs built there during that time were an interesting cross between the Catholic and German models: the same meatiness in tone was there, although the pedal division was fairly thin. The Germans took advantage of the Dutch being next door and incorporated their tonal styles into German organ building.\n\nAND last but not least - yes, older organs worked with bellows. As with modern organs and their blowers, air was pumped into what's called a reservoir - sort of like an accordion - and when a key is pressed and a stop is pulled, air will go into that area and make the pipe(s) speak. There're a couple different ways that can happen too, although I'll have to go brush up on exactly how before I write blindly forth. Most organs don't require a lot of wind pressure to run - modern measurement is in \"inches,\" although there isn't really a comprehensive way to explain what that means exactly. Pipes are voiced - fine-adjusting the way they make a sound - to accommodate the amount of pressure that is produced by the windsource. There are [certain pipes](_URL_0_) that are voiced to take more pressure - otherwise they would overblow and not speak correctly (although there are pipes which are voiced to do that too).\n\nHope this helps! Here are a few more resources you can look up if you'd like:\n\n*The Cambridge Companion to the Organ*, edited by Webber and Thistlethwaite\n\n*The Organ as a Mirror of its Time: North European Reflections*, edited by Kerala J Snyder\n\n*The Language of the Classical French Organ: A Musical Tradition Before 1800*, by Fenner Douglass \n\n\nThese are good (if dense) resources on organ building and their role in different (again, mostly Christian) liturgies. Organ music is another beast! I'd venture to say that the organ has the largest solo repertoire of any Western instrument, with, yes, a large chunk coming from Germany, although France could certainly give them a run for their money. \n\nI am an organ student with a Bachelor's degree in organ and sacred music, and I am working on my master's now. I worked for an organ builder - not for terribly long, but enough to learn how the dang things work. \n\nedit: formatting?" ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_organ" ], [ "http://youtu.be/lvgT-c-0FMs" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dq3rpk6" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "(Did you have a slightly earlier version of this question that included Marie Antoinette? I was sure I saw that last night before I went to bed ...)\n\nI'm not sure it's useful to think of pro-Louis (and pro-Marie Antoinette) sentiment as \"cultlike\", because it's not as though everyone in Europe shared the revolutionaries' opinions on him even at the time, outside of isolated pockets of adoration. Immediately before and during the Revolution, it was by no means certain that the king and queen of France would be executed, and it was not the unanimous opinion of even the republicans of the West that they were monsters. Gouverneur Morris reported to Thomas Jefferson, who was Secretary of State at the time, that\n\n > To a person less intimately acquainted than you are with the history of human affairs, it would seen strange that the mildest monarch who ever filled the French throne, one who is precipitated from it precisely because he would not adopt the harsh measures of his predecessors, a man whom none could charge with a criminal act, should be prosecuted as one of the most nefarious tyrants that ever disgraced the annals of human nature - that he, Louis the Sixteenth, should be prosecuted even to death.\n\nThe last years of the royal couple's (and their children's) lives had a great effect on the way that they would be perceived in the wake of their execution. In October of 1789, a mob of Parisian women invaded Versailles and threatened Marie Antoinette; the royal family was then brought to Paris and essentially imprisoned in the Tuileries Palace. The family attempted to flee in June 1791 (see [my previous response on this](_URL_3_)) but were returned and placed under heavier guard. The Tuileries was itself invaded twice by the mob, and the family was moved to the Temple. The monarchy was abolished and Louis was arrested (and separated from his family) in August 1792, tried in December 1792, and executed in January 1793 following lengthy debate; Louis Charles was then taken away from his mother and sister in July, and in August Marie Antoinette was separated from her daughter and taken to the Conciergerie, where she was very ill and under constant surveillance. In October 1793, she was tried and then executed. Louis Charles was generally secluded and alone, and he became seriously ill and died in 1795. His sister, Marie-Therese, had been in the care of her aunt following Marie Antoinette's move to the Conciergerie in August 1793, but said aunt was executed in May 1794; she was told of the deaths of the rest of her family in 1795 and subsequently used in an exchange of prisoners.\n\nThis is the story of a family that was ripped apart, parents killed and children orphaned and abused at least emotionally (there are a lot of stories about Louis Charles being horrifically physically abused, but there isn't good evidence on the subject; however, at the age of 8 he was either forced to testify that his mother had sexually abused him or made to believe that it had happened, which I'd classify as abuse). Political considerations aside, there is a lot to sympathize with. The fact that Louis and Marie Antoinette both were stoic and dignified throughout their imprisonment, trials, and executions led to a certain amount of acclaim even from their enemies.\n\nEven before the executions, Edmund Burke wrote [*Reflections on the Revolution in France*](_URL_0_) (1790), a pro-Royalist tract that would influence other writers. [Marie Antoinette's trial](_URL_1_) was published in English, along with a glowing biography; you can probably guess what stance [*The Cruel Massacre of the King & Queen of France*](_URL_2_) took, and what kind of anecdotes it contains. The multi-volume [*Letters from France*](_URL_5_) is similar, comparing Marie Antoinette to Mary, Queen of Scots (despite the religious differences between Mary Stuart and the eighteenth century British, she was seen as a highly romantic heroine). A [French tragedy](_URL_6_) of 1794 outright called her a martyr, and an [Austrian biography](_URL_4_) was very snooty about the French people for their actions.\n\nAn early positive account that was extremely comprehensive was Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan's *Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie Antoinette, suivis de souvenirs et anecdotes historiques sur les règnes de Louis XIV - XV*, published posthumously in French and English in 1823. While not everything in it was entirely complimentary, it showed the members of the court and royal family as humans first and foremost. It also rebutted the actual charges against Marie at her trial, which she had been convicted of - draining the national treasury by overspending and sending money to her brother, the Holy Roman Emperor; leaking military plans to the counter-revolutionaries and the foreign countries France was fighting; and fomenting an internal civil war - as well as contradicting the rumors of her infidelity with Axel von Fersen and various of her close friends, and setting the record straight regarding \"the affair of the necklace\". Another important early historian in this vein was Alexis de Tocqueville, who published *L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution* in 1856. His great-grandfather had been guillotined for serving as Louis XVI's defense lawyer, and many other members of the family followed. While de Tocqueville was for the aims of the Revolution, he had personal sympathies for Louis and pointed out numerous ways that the problematic political situation was in part due to his attempts to improve things rather than keeping with the strict authoritarianism of the past.\n\nWhile the historiography of the Revolution itself has generally come down on the side of the revolutionaries as part of a narrative about the struggle of the peasantry and bourgeoisie against the aristocracy and clergy, the typical view of Louis XVI has been that he made mistakes rather than that he was an essentially bad *person*. As a result, he tends to be popularly depicted as an incompetent ruler but a good man, with attention focused on his interactions with his family, particularly during their imprisonment, his dignity, and his love of locksmithing." ] }

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[ [ "https://books.google.com/books?id=bRNcAAAAcAAJ", "https://books.google.com/books?id=QjtfAAAAcAAJ", "https://books.google.com/books?id=ryVbAAAAcAAJ", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4akj6l/during_the_flight_to_varennes_what_mistakes_did/d121oti/", "https://books.google.com/books?id=gNlBAAAAcAAJ", "https://books.google.com/books?id=_wtZAAAAcAAJ", "https://books.google.com/books?id=KlFbAAAAQAAJ" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dlqq2du" ], "score": [ 760 ], "text": [ "Great question. You're absolutely right that the [vast, vast majority of Confederate monuments were erected in the 20th century](_URL_10_), particularly around the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. This coincided with the peak of what we now refer to as the \"Lost Cause\" movement, the notion that the Southern Confederacy was a glorious but doomed accomplishment, a skilled but futile effort buried by sheer numbers and raw material.\n\nAs you note, a large number of monuments were erected at this time not just in the Confederacy, but far beyond its original bounds. Even today, [there are more than 700 Confederate monuments in the United States](_URL_5_). I can't discuss each one in detail, so I'm going to discuss one in particular, one that typifies the monuments erected beyond the Confederacy, one that stands out for sheer distance and dissonance.\n\nI'm talking about **the Confederate monument in Helena, Montana.**\n\nIf you're having a \"wait, what!?\" moment, I understand. Montana wasn't a state during the Civil War. It [wasn't even a distinct territory until 1864](_URL_1_), the penultimate year of the war. No organized units from Montana fought in the war, and certainly there were no Confederate soldiers fighting under a Montana flag.\n\nAnd yet it has a Confederate monument in a public park.\n\nIn fact, it has the northernmost Confederate monument on public land in the United States and the only one within more than a thousand miles of Helena. The nearest other public Confederate monument to it is in Arizona (which [has six](_URL_9_), and thanks /u/Tsojin for the link). \n\nThere's a Confederate memorial park in Washington state, but [it's on private land near I-5](_URL_6_). There's also a Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Washington State, a Confederate Dam and [recreation site](_URL_2_) in Montana, and a Robert E. Lee Campground in Idaho, [according to the Southern Poverty Law Center](_URL_8_). These are all monuments, but of a different kind.\n\nNow, I'm going to reluctantly refer to James Loewen. I don't agree with a lot of what he's written ─ I think he often oversimplifies ─ but he's written some things on this particular monument that I think is worth mentioning. The Helena monument [gets an entire chapter](_URL_11_) in his *Lies Across America*.\n\nHe's also written an essay entitled \"Historic Sites Are Always a Tale of Two Eras\" (which I disagree with, but I'll get to that later.) In that essay, Loewen contends there are two kinds of monuments. There are *sasha monuments*, which help people who were at an event remember it. As an example, think of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. and the way veterans leave artifacts at its base. \n\nConfederate monuments built in the Confederacy before 1910 are *sasha* monuments; the people seeing those monuments would have lived through the war, and you frequently see war memorials in North and South that list the names of the deceased. \n\nThere are also *zamani monuments*, Loewen says. These are monuments \"intended to instruct residents on how to think about the past.\"\n\nThe Helena monument is one of these.\n\nErected in 1916, it was built with fundraising by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the largest and most organized pro-Confederate women's movement in the United States. [Karen Cox's wonderful *Dixie's Daughters*](_URL_3_) explains how the UDC preserved Confederate culture across the United States and contributed to the spread of the \"Lost Cause\" myth. \n\nThe UDC wasn't founded until 1894, and most of its members didn't live through the fighting. Nevertheless, they played an important role because they believed in *vindicating*, not just memorializing, the Confederacy. Through efforts at \"truthfulness\" and other artificial vanilla stylings, they largely succeeded. \n\nCaroline Janney's *Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation*, David Blight's *Race and Reunion* and the anthology *Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art and the Landscapes of Southern Memory* all address how women's groups were at the center of Confederate remembrance.\n\nThere is no question that significant numbers of former Confederates moved west at the end of the war. [Their influence in Montana](_URL_4_) in particular [has been hotly debated among historians](_URL_7_). The issue here is what happened 50 years later. In Montana, as in other places within the West, whites came from different places across the country and around the world. They tended to unite in social organizations linked by a common element. This might be religion (in the Knights of Columbus), brotherhood (the Arctic Brotherhood), or geographic origin, as in the United Daughters of the Confederacy.\n\nIn Helena, as in other places through the north and west, the UDC was a social circle for women with cultural, social or geographic ties to the South. It was a way, in a strange place, to find friends and fellowship. This kind of self-organization created a kind of social power when the group decided upon a cause. In chapters across the country, as far afield [as Boston](_URL_12_) and Helena, this cause was remembering the heroic dead of the Civil War.\n\nIn the January 1917 issue of *Confederate Veteran Magazine*, contributor Ken Robison wrote that the \"Winnie Davis Chapter\" of the UDC had been working to erect the monument since 1903, raising more than $2,000 to make it possible.\n\nIt's also worth noting that Montana was among the Western territories and states that enacted strict racial laws foreshadowing what would come later with Jim Crow. Even as the federal government was enforcing equality (scattershot, to be sure) in the Reconstruction South, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Montana and other western states were forbidding black Americans from entering their territory, owning property, voting, or taking other actions available to white citizens.\n\n[**Continued below**](_URL_0_).\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6u6rtk/why_were_confederate_monuments_raised_in_union/dls51bt/", "http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/lincoln-signs-montana-territory-act-into-law-may-26-1864-223456", "http://www.visitmt.com/listings/general/recreation-area-campground/confederate-recreation-area.html", "http://upf.com/book.asp?id=COXXXS03", "http://www.jstor.org.sci-hub.bz/stable/4517198", "https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-are-still-more-than-700-confederate-monuments-in-the-u-s/", "http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Wash-Confederate-monument-along-I-5-Racist-11821079.php", "http://www.jstor.org/stable/4517243", "https://www.splcenter.org/20160421/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy", "http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2017/08/16/z-arizona-confederate-monuments/570467001/", "https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage-timeline150_years_of_iconography.jpg", "https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zRtFAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=sasha+monuments&source=bl&ots=mvxu0WK8KI&sig=-BaJUMo1BEW-udzty49JbmPUs68&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwix1a_O_N3VAhUsJsAKHTtTAWoQ6AEIPDAH#v=onepage&q=sasha%20monuments&f=false", "http://cwmemory.com/2013/07/21/united-daughters-of-the-confederacy-in-boston/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "chhvgiz" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "As I mentioned in another thread about this time period, we'd have to use sources from a century or two later and work backwards from there. That said, there's nothing from the 17th Century that would indicate that paedophilia would have been acceptable. These are, after all, societies with strong stances in opposition to child abuse, domestic abuse, and rape. Sorry that there's not much to go on here. The record is silent on the matter, which is telling, considering how much the colonists loved to rail against the comparatively liberal sexuality of Native peoples." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ckugnkt" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Eisenhower refused to commit the support of the US and the full support of NATO (since it did not have a specific mechanism to implement joint military action), claiming that intervention was against the principles of national self-determination. Eisenhower also wanted to keep his options open in the Middle East in terms of alliances against the Soviet Union, which Nasser, the revolutionary leader in Egypt at the time, also opposed.\n\nEisenhower admonished French and British governments for their colonial style intervention, but also tried to use NATO as the main vehicle to re-open negotiation in terms of use of the canal, perceiving this as a way of keeping his admonishment of military action in area from damaging the unity between the WWII allies via NATO. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cf5fqg6" ], "score": [ 34 ], "text": [ "[Sgian dubh](_URL_1_) is better translated the \"dark knife\" in the sense of its being hidden for evil purposes. One of the reasons the sgian dubh is worn in the hose is to have it in the open, declaring its bearer to have no evil intentions. It ceases at the point of be a concealed weapon, held in secret for dark purposes. Because of its small size, it was easily hidden, to be pulled out at the right moment for assassination. \n\nA person called [dubh](_URL_0_) (the \"bh\" turns into a \"v\" or soften \"f' sound) because he has dark hair, is of dark complexion, or because he is of a dark character, meaning he is capable of evil deeds. We cannot credit someone with this sort of nickname as indicating an African origin. That would be a stretch.\n\nedit to provide source for sgian dubh." ] }

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

[ [ "http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dubh", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgian-dubh" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ckhx2cr", "ckhybcf", "ckhyzp3", "cki0mlz", "cki1aw1", "cki3q5u", "cki8gtp", "ckiofia" ], "score": [ 87, 21, 66, 8, 35, 19, 6, 5 ], "text": [ "The whole of Octavian's family is portrayed rather inaccurately. \n\nAtia is made out to be morally and sexually loose and very manipulative. She has been historically portrayed as highly conservative. \n\nAs Tacitus puts it, \"In her presence no base word could be uttered without grave offence, and no wrong deed done. Religiously and with the utmost delicacy she regulated not only the serious tasks of her youthful charges, but also their recreations and their games.\" Even if Tacitus's account cannot be trusted, if you look at Octavian's moral legislation and conservative policies, it is hard to imagine that he grew up in anything other than a conservative household.\n\nLucius Marcius Philippus, Octavian's adopted father, doesn't exist in the series. Historically, he was a friend of Cicero and really no friend of Caesar.\n\nOctavia should be married to Marcellus at the time. I won't spoil it but the thing that happens when she's supposed to be arranged to marry Pompey... probably didn't.\n\nOne other major faux-pas is the representation of the Egyptain court in the series. Historically Ptolomei, the rulers of Egypt, were Greeks. They refused to speak or act like Egyptians, which Cleopatra used to her political advantage, speaking Egyptian and styling herself as the reincarnation of Isis. \n\nThese are the things that stuck with me over the years since I've seen it. ", "While the actual plotline isn't particularly accurate, i've always thought the show is probably the most accurate view of ancient rome ever in a film/show. It really captures the 'feel' as apposed to just white marble and togas", "One of the biggest inaccuracies is that especially in the second season, it literally compacts about ten years of the Second Triumvirate into 7-9 months (one character gets pregnant and another character's children don't become adults). To be fair, the producers wanted a more spread out timeline, but neither the BBC nor HBO was willing to pony up the money for a third season, so they crammed a season into the latter half of season 2. However, doing such a contracted historical period means that key details get left out (Antony's failed invasion of Parthia, Lepidus's abortive revolt and fall, Octavian's (more accurately, Agrippa's) military successes) that contextualize the break between Antony and Octavian. \n\nThere's some great threads here on *Rome* and also worth checking out- caveat though, there are spoilers (beyond Caesar dies):\n\n[How accurate is HBO's \"Rome\" series?](_URL_5_)\n\n[In the HBO series 'Rome' set during Julius Caesar's dictatorship and later Augustus' bid for power, the two main characters come to run something called the Aventine Collegium by appointment of Mark Antony. Was this a real thing, and if so what was it?](_URL_3_)\n\n[What do Roman historians (and history buffs) think of the TV show Rome? Is it relatively historically accurate compared to other historical fiction pieces?](_URL_2_)\n\n[Re-watching HBO's \"Rome\", I noticed two of the characters wearing what look like screen-printed t-shirts. Is this at all historically accurate?](_URL_4_)\n\n[Cato accuses Caesar of waging an \"illegal war\" in Gaul in HBO's Rome. Did Romans really have a defined concept of just/legal war or was this phrase anachronistic?](_URL_0_)\n\n[How similar was Mark Antony to how he was portrayed in the HBO series \"Rome\"?](_URL_1_)", "One from the very same premiere: The \"blue Spaniards\" in service of Pompey that steal the eagle to shame Caesar and later kidnap Octavian.\n\nGoing into battle naked and coated in blue woad was something that the Britons did (according to Caesar anyway). No people in ancient Iberia had that custom.\n", "One thing that left a lasting impression on me was the depiction of the Roman army in battle the very first episode. I just went and re-watched it to remember exactly why.\n\nFirst of all, everyone is wearing chain mail armor (lorica hamata), and Montefortino helmet which is historically accurate. You can see a clear difference between the discipline with which the Romans are fighting, including military officers giving orders, and the chaos of the Gallic attack. There are no fancy combat moves - block with a shield, stab quickly with the gladius, retreat into the line. Pullo steps out of the battle line, charges into the enemy line, and starts pulling off individual heroics. After the battle he is shown to be whipped, and told that he was sentenced to death for dereliction of duty. And then Vorenus starts reciting the punishment for various offenses - \"drunkards and brawlers will be flogged, thieves will be strangled, deserters will be crucified\". All the while, Pullo is being whipped in the background in front of the legion who are wincing. It's a chilling and brutal scene, and it is so different from the classic Hollywood depiction that it immediately got me hooked. \n\nEven if it's not accurate in depiction of many events and characters, it's probably the historically most authentic depiction of the era in popular media. And it has its moments, like the one I tried to describe above. I found it very enjoyable.", "I wrote a fairly extended [write up](_URL_0_) for the first episode a while back. In general, they are willing to play hard and loose with the historical details for the sake of drama (and I wouldn't want to live in a world without HBO's Atia) but they really clearly did their homework, and the set design, costuming, props etc tend to be really well done.", "there' were a few instances that made me wince in regards to historical accuracy, the one that really stands out in my memory was the spinning wheel. i don't recall which episode (late season 2 iirc), but one of Vorenus' daughter's was shown using a spinning wheel, which wern't invented for 1200 years. was it really too much trouble to giver her a spindle instead? fabrics and fibre arts so often get overlooked, its infuriating.", "You'll start to get a little irritated that these very small men in the grand scheme of things (Lucius and Titus) end up playing a key part in practically every historical event in every single corner of the Empire. However the show addresses this in one of the first episodes set in Egypt. \n\nThere's a scene where Marc Antony is telling Julius Caesar that Lucius and Titus should be crucified for a pretty heinous bit of treason. Julius demurs and tells Marc something like \"these are the luckiest men in Rome. They must have the gods looking after them.\"\n\nI laughed out loud when he said that. It's a very subtle breaking of the fourth wall and it totally made me stop rolling my eyes about how Titus and Lucius were involved in *everything.*" ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2g1sdx/cato_accuses_caesar_of_waging_an_illegal_war_in/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2bf035/how_similar_was_mark_antony_to_how_he_was/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1f4a1y/what_do_roman_historians_and_history_buffs_think/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vgjrd/in_the_hbo_series_rome_set_during_julius_caesars/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2czwrc/rewatching_hbos_rome_i_noticed_two_of_the/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zozay/how_accurate_is_hbos_rome_series/" ], [], [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/1v0gwy/badhistory_tv_show_review_hbos_rome/" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c8zsspf" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Check out Gallay's [Indian Slave Trade: Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670-1717](_URL_1_), though it does focus a bit more on the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida than the western portion of the South. Also [Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone](_URL_3_) is a great collection of essays on how the effects of colonialism reverberated across the South. \n\nEdit: Haven't personally read Ethridge yet but maybe check out [From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715](_URL_2_) or [The Transformation of Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760](_URL_4_). Also Hudson's [The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1521-1704](_URL_0_)." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.amazon.com/The-Forgotten-Centuries-Europeans-1521-1704/dp/0820316547/ref=pd_sim_b_4", "http://books.google.com/books?id=WwYJXj6PdbAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=indian+slave+trade&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZCdLUd3jNKLv0gGT9oDoCg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA", "http://www.amazon.com/From-Chicaza-Chickasaw-Transformation-Mississippian/dp/0807834351/ref=pd_sim_b_1", "http://books.google.com/books?id=dFNI9935DNwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=shatterzone&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xCdLUfz9Ge-x0AH9_oDwBA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA", "http://www.amazon.com/Transformation-Southeastern-1540-1760-Chancellor-Symposium/dp/1604731842/ref=pd_sim_b_2" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cshqbpc", "csi07wv" ], "score": [ 47, 9 ], "text": [ "I don't believe it could have, as in 1945 the Lost Cause narrative had yet to be fully recognized, questioned, or rejected. In 1945, the Dunning School still held sway, as it would until the 1960s. Historians largely viewed the South as, if not necessarily justified in seceding, then certainly not in the moral wrong. The impact of the slavery issue was minimized in favor of an emphasis on constitutional disagreement and regional power struggle. Many books published during this period, as in the case of Douglas Southall Freeman's magisterial works on Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia, focused on the small war. They concerned themselves with generals, their strategy and tactics, campaigns, battles, high politics, and the like, while effectively glossing over the sordid bits and ignoring the broader picture. Reconstruction in particular throughout this period was viewed as a colossal failure, not because it failed to secure the rights of freed blacks (which Howard Beale called \"claptrap\"), but because it tyrannized, oppressed, corrupted, and degraded the South to the benefit of northern industrialists.\n\nThis view of the war - one in which North and South were effectively neutral in 1860, and the North was decidedly *bad* from 1865-1877 - would not really begin undergoing serious revision until the 1960s. A new wave of historians, including Kenneth M. Stampp and James M. McPherson, influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, shifted the focus away from the generals, battles, and presidents, and back to slavery and black people. For them, slavery was not an incidental; to say so was absurd, and required willful oversight or a focus so narrow as to miss the previous 50 years of American history. Slavery was the issue upon which the country split, and blacks were the critical element in the Civil War. By effectively allying themselves with the Union, by serving the war effort as soldiers, laborers, runaways, and resisters to Confederate authority, they helped to swing the balance, *and northerners recognized this at the time*.\n\nIt's a curious thing that the issue - and the people - whom most historians now recognize as having been at the center of the War, were written out of the narrative for 100 years afterwards. Edward Blum argues that this was intentional and deliberate. In the immediate aftermath of the War, an idea of citizenship based on loyalty had developed and held sway. Blacks, having proved themselves loyal to the Union, were to be favored above supposedly treasonous Rebels, who many viewed as having effectively surrendered their place in the American republic. But as the War faded into memory, and Reconstruction dragged on, accompanied by stubborn white resistance, both legal and illegal, northern enthusiasm for blacks waned. Securing rights to the freemen and reforming the white supremacist South became less important to northern whites than reestablishing a republic built around whiteness. Slavery, and the blacks, had to be written out of the narrative in order to do that. What we got was a picture-book war, full of glory and valor, desperate charges and stubborn defenses, and, above all, stoic sacrifice in the defense of noble ideals *on both sides*. This is the foundation on which North-South reconciliation was built, and it is the rock on which the rights of the freedmen were broken.\n\nBlum, Edward. Reforging the White Republic.\n\nLemann, Nicholas. Redemption: the Last Battle of the Civil War.\n\nMcPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom.\n\nEdit: fleshed out second and third paragraphs.", "The American program of denazification largely grew out of US-based sociology departments and had little to do with perceptions of American history. Instead, it was perceptions of German history, often written by German exiles, that proved to be one of the animating forces behind the shape of the US's denazification program. The Third Reich's hounding out of many intellectuals meant there was a large and very public group of emigres that wrote about the \"German problem\" during the war and groups like the American Friends of German Freedom gave them a visible platform. \n\n One of the more influential texts upon the architects of the Amzone's denazification was the German emigre and political scientist Franz Neumann's book *Behemoth*. Neumann argued that the various power blocs within Germany like heavy industry or Prussian militarism enabled Hitler's dictatorship. *Behemoth* would further contend purging out these individuals from the new Germany would be the ideal way to break up these power blocs. Werner Richter, another emigre and former undersecretary of the Prussian ministry of education in the Weimar Republic, wrote in his 1945 book *Re-Educating Germany* that the denazification process would need to be led by Germans themselves. Other social scientists and psychologists like Kurt Lewin weighed in on the matter and argued that denazification would need to be a scientific and organized process as a means to educate and inculcate a democratic ethos within Germany. These emigres exerted a great deal of influence upon American planners like Talcott Parsons and Richard Brickner. \n\nThe resulting [JCS 1067](_URL_1_) of April 1945 outlined that denazification was to be a thorough process that would break the social base of authoritarianism within Germany. John H. Herz, a political scientist and emigre, pushed for the denazification process to be a staged process, first with special American groups leading a preliminary process which included questionnaires ([*Fragebogen*](_URL_0_) ) followed by German-led tribunals (*Spruchkammer*) defining Germans into five categories (Major Offenders, Offenders, Lesser Offenders, Fellow Travelers, and Exonerated Persons). The denazification process would gradually relax once the major offenders had been winnowed out and lesser offenders could appeal their status. \n\nAlthough the American efforts at denazification were more ambitious and structured than other zones, they were just as short-lived as their contemporaries and denazification in the Amzone often fell victim to its own ambitiousness. Many Germans did not quite understand the *Fragebogen* and the military government had great difficulty in sorting out the data. The local American field officers often lacked working knowledge of the areas they were administering, which sometimes meant they appointed German intermediaries that were unsuitable to conduct a denazification campaign. The administration of the *Spruchkammer* were quite chaotic and their caseloads were too much for the system to bear. Many Germans felt that corruption was rife in these tribunals and this criticism was not entirely unwarranted. Many mid-level NSDAP officials were able to plea their status downwards by sympathetic tribunals or during appeals and the phrase *Persilscheine*, meaning washing the brown out (Persil was a popular laundry detergent, entered into the occupation vernacular for a disingenuous denazification. \n\nThe sheer scale of denazification coupled with the desire to get the Western zone functional also soured many American leaders such as Lucius Clay, the military governor of the American zone, about committing to a thorough denazification. Although the OMGUS authorities pursued a rigorous policy for the first year of occupation, intensive denazification efforts gradually tapered off after 1946. Clay believed that JCS 1067 was fundamentally unworkable and worked to actively subvert it during his tenure as military governor. \n\nThere was one interesting area where the experience of the American Civil War popped up in the debates about Germany's post-Hitler future. A number of German intellectuals and politicians postwar would valorize the efforts of exiled German 1848ers in the cause of to preserve the American union and fight slavery. The historian and cofounder of the liberal *Freie Demokratische Partei* (FDP) Theodor Heuss contended in his book *1848: Werk und Erbe* that there existed a fundamental democratic character to the German revolutionaries, one that directly benefited the United States. Heuss argued that the 700,000 German emigres that fled to the United States from 1849-1855 was \"for American democracy an immediate gain for the United States.\" Such an assertion suggests that the existence of a true democratic spirit among Germans in spite of the dark path Germany took during the century after 1848.The lesson of this approach for Germany in 1948 was that Germany’s natural democratic tendencies could reach fruition now that these external conditions that hindered democracy had been removed. Other German intellectuals during the centennial celebrations of 1848 would also highlight that the immigration of these democratically-minded individuals infused the US with a strong spirit of democracy and would aid the US during its struggle with the Confederacy. \n\n*Sources*\n\nBoehling, Rebecca L. *A Question of Priorities: Democratic Reforms and Economic Recovery in Postwar Germany : Frankfurt, Munich, and Stuttgart Under U.S. Occupation, 1945-1949*. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1996. \n\nMerritt, Richard L. *Democracy Imposed: U.S. Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945-1949*. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. \n\nOlick, Jeffrey K. *In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. " ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=1012&language=english", "http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=2297" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dtie9cn", "dtim38b" ], "score": [ 32, 70 ], "text": [ "As a follow up, I heard a different explanation - that, being good Marxists and so believing that capitalism was ultimately doomed and the eventual victory of communism inevitable, the Soviet leadership saw no need to use nuclear weapons since things were going to go their way in the long run. Anything to back that up?", "I mean, the main reason that the Soviet Union was reluctant to use nuclear weaponry is that during much of the Cold War they were at a [_huge_](_URL_0_) numerical disadvantage to the United States (there was not true \"parity\" until the 1970s-1980s), and even when they weren't, the numbers of weapons were so massive that total destruction of them (and much else) was inevitable. \n\nI have never seen anything that suggested atheism had anything to do with their perception. I am not really sure how one would establish such an argument anyway. There is certainly no body of evidence that I have heard of us where one sees Politburo leaders saying things like, \"But Comrade Khrushchev, the lack of an afterlife must surely constrain us in our otherwise great plans to nuke the United States!\" It is sort of a silly thing to imagine. \n\nThe most interesting question is, does belief in an afterlife make you think that nation-destruction would be acceptable? There is some evidence that Reagan had millennarian inclinations (e.g., [believed that judgment day was around the corner, that nuclear weapons might be involved in it](_URL_1_)), but other than that I can't think of any leaders where you could make much of a case study in that (and in Reagan's case, he had more complicated feelings about the weapons than just that). " ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309063671/xhtml/images/img00000.jpg", "https://books.google.com/books?id=HoefH50Mgg8C&pg=PT183&lpg=PT183&dq=%22the+day+of+Armageddon+isn%27t+far+off.+...+Ezekiel+says+that+fire+and+brimstone+will+be+rained+down+upon+the+enemies+of+God%27s+people%22&source=bl&ots=s5-QHFW8Nm&sig=-9F3eadKAMpcv_h9-k6N71T_tc8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjoneSKpYLZAhWouVkKHdTbCsMQ6AEILTAB#v=onepage&q=%22the%20day%20of%20Armageddon%20isn't%20far%20off.%20...%20Ezekiel%20says%20that%20fire%20and%20brimstone%20will%20be%20rained%20down%20upon%20the%20enemies%20of%20God's%20people%22&f=false" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "clzfucs", "clzgprs", "clzo0lf" ], "score": [ 313, 15, 171 ], "text": [ "The first evidence we have of a hinged door is in Hattusa [Picture of the pivot used for the door and some information about Hattusa](_URL_0_) It is just a socket into which a pivot (log or board of some type) could be placed. This dates to about 1600 B.C.\n\nWe have a bronze hinge from Egypt dating to the 8th century B.C. and hinges are mentioned in the old testament for King Solomon's temple dating to at least 600 B.C. These would be the first evidence we have of what we would consider modern hinges.\n\nIf something needed to be secured before hinges bolts hasps and other such hardware the easiest method would be to make a vault in the ground and then cover it with a rock large enough that it would be difficult to move. Probably something quarried and cut to fit as the door, think Indiana Jones opening the Egyptian vaults (who would have thought they would get something mostly right in that movie.)\n\nFor making homes watertight woven mats or animal skins would be hung over the doors of most homes. This could be tied down or weighted depending on your need. ", "Lot's of movies have massive pivoting stone doors. We such things possible/real?", "I don't really have the time to write a lot about this, but since I wrote a PhD thesis on Greek and Roman doors and doorways I feel compelled to contribute. \n\nFirst of all, \"pivots\" are not the same as \"hinges\". The principle upon which they operate is obviously similar, but I would certainly make a distinction between the two. Using the word \"hinge\" implies that the doors are hung (that is, attached to the jambs). Pivoted doors, on the other hand, rotated in sockets that were cut into the threshold and the lintel. This was by the far the most common method of installing doors in the ancient world. My research only starts in the late Aegean Bronze Age, but I can say for certain that pivoted doors can be found in the Near East much earlier than that. The earliest arrangement that I have seen in person is at Akrotiri, which certainly predates the example from Hattusa discussed elsewhere in this thread (the eruption of Santorini providing a useful terminus ante quem).\n\nHinge-hung doors likely only began to appear much later, but even by the late first millenium BC these were found more commonly on furniture than in doorways. It is worth noting that folding doors (which were almost certainly had appear by the Classical period in Greece and were definitely being used by the Romans as early as the 3rd c. BC) typically incorporated both the pivot system (upon which the primary leaf rotated) and strap-hinges (which connected a second--and sometimes third--leaf to the primary leaf). \n\nUgh, I have to get back to work but if you're really interested in this topic send me a PM and I can tell you (a lot) more about it." ] }

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[ [ "http://romeartlover.tripod.com/Hattusa1.html" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cscjttf" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "Frankly you've got it backward - ICBM's (technically the rocket stages of them) were use in both the Mercury (Redstone and Atlas) and Gemini (Titan II) programs. These were based on ICBM's that were already operational. Their ability as ICBM's had already been demonstrated by their test firings. The Saturn series of rockets used in the Apollo program were designed for that program, and never served or were intended to serve as ICBM's." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "czqrhyl" ], "score": [ 25 ], "text": [ "I can only speak concerning the Old Norse sources on this topic. It is possible that Strabo or one of the other Greek geographers mentions the aurora, I don't know. Perhaps one of the classicists will be able to tell us...\n\nThe Old Norse word for the aurora borealis is *norðrljós*, \"northern lights\". The first occurrence of the term *norðrljós* is in the book *Konungs Skuggsjá* (*The King's Mirror*, known in Latin as *Speculum Regalae*), written in 1250 AD, after the end of the Viking incursions, describing the Northern Lights as seen by settlers in Greenland:\n\n\"But as to that matter which you have often inquired about, what those lights can be which the Greenlanders call the northern lights, I have no clear knowledge. I have often met men who have spent a long time in Greenland, but they do not seem to know definitely what those lights are. However, it is true of that subject as of many others of which we have no sure knowledge, that thoughtful men will form opinions and conjectures about it and will make such guesses as seem reasonable and likely to be true. But these northern lights have this peculiar nature, that the darker the night is, the brighter they seem; and they always appear at night but never by day, most frequently in the densest darkness and rarely by moonlight. In appearance they resemble a vast flame of fire viewed from a great distance. It also looks as if sharp points were shot from this flame up into the sky; these are of uneven height and in constant motion, now one, now another darting highest; and the light appears to blaze like a living flame. While these rays are at their highest and brightest, they give forth so much light that people out of doors can easily find their way about and can even go hunting, if need be. Where people sit in houses that have windows, it is so light inside that all within the room can see each other's faces. The light is very changeable. Sometimes it appears to grow dim, as if a black smoke or a dark fog were blown up among the rays; and then it looks very much as if the light were overcome by this smoke and about to be quenched. But as soon as the smoke begins to grow thinner, the light begins to brighten again; and it happens at times that people think they see large sparks shooting out of it as from glowing iron which has just been taken from the forge. But as night declines and day approaches, the light begins to fade; and when daylight appears, it seems to vanish entirely.\n\nThe men who have thought about and discussed these lights have guessed at three sources, one of which, it seems, ought to be the true one. Some hold that fire circles about the ocean and all the bodies of water that stream about on the outer sides of the globe; and since Greenland lies on the outermost edge of the earth to the north, they think it possible that these lights shine forth from the fires that encircle the outer ocean. Others have suggested that during the hours of night, when the sun's course is beneath the earth, an occasional gleam of its light may shoot up into the sky; for they insist that Greenland lies so far out on the earth's edge that the curved surface which shuts out the sunlight must be less prominent there. But there are still others who believe (and it seems to me not unlikely) that the frost and the glaciers have become so powerful there that they are able to radiate forth these flames. I know nothing further that has been conjectured on this subject, only these three theories that I have presented; as to their correctness I do not decide, though the last mentioned looks quite plausible to me.\"\n\nSomething that you may hear on this subject is based on a passing statement in *Bullfinch's Mythology*, i.e. that the armor of the Valkyries \"sheds a strange flickering light, which flashes up over the northern skies\" making the aurora. There is nothing mentioned in the Old Norse literature on this subject. It appears to be a much later invention.\n\nThe Northern Lights have also been associated with the Bifröst Bridge in later mythological texts. However, in *Gylfaginning*, a part of Snorri Sturluson's *Prose Edda*, the bridge is specifically associated with the rainbow. It is not clear if the aurora was understood to be the same phenomenon or not." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dw0jur0", "dw0l7wk" ], "score": [ 11, 3 ], "text": [ "I mean, sure — you can see the Stalinist purges as being a form of paranoia, about \"wreckers\" and about \"Whites\" and \"Trotskyites\" and \"kulaks\" and even \"engineers\" (as a separate social class that didn't always see themselves as \"Soviet\") and so on. From the end of the Russian Civil War (1922) until the dead of Stalin (1953) there were waves of purges, persecutions, and so on. It is so core to the early Soviet experience that it is strange to have to bring it up; it was _far_ more extreme, bloody, consequential, and extensive than McCarthyism.\n\nIf you are asking, did they ever suspect their members of government were Western spies? My feeling, and it would be good to get others' views of this, is that this is not quite the framework in which they saw things. The Stalinist fears were more along the lines that internal elements were trying to degrade the system in a way to advantage some kind of shadowy non-Soviet powers, not so much the \"Americans are trying to infiltrate\" framework. The absolutely worst-treated were not people who were suspected to be capitalists or democracy-advocates or spies, but people suspected of belonging to rival Communist groups (e.g. Trotskyites or Mensheviks) or people who were suspected with harboring generically anti-Soviet attitudes.", "Oh yes, but not called democratic, just different terminology. There's a ridiculous amount of literature that goes over this; I like A Biography of No Place by Kate Brown, as it very accessibly shows how the Soviet system went from an idealized (and perhaps even innovative, if you consider the time period) nationality policy, to the Stalin era.\n\nNot that distrust of foreigners/spies/what have you was unique to the Soviet time (although it was unique in how systemized/professionalized it all was, as well as the basis/justification on ideology), but you specifically asked about the USSR." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "coklu4n" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Natural resources and prestige.\n\nFrance wanted the metals (copper, zinc) found in SE Asia, plus natural rubber was still a well-used product, and the French car and tire industry (Michelin, anyone?) \n\nIn addition, after its collapse and capitulation in WWII, it's collaboration by its Vichy government, France was at a low point in national morale. The restoration of its colonies taken by the Japanese in conjunction with being named to the UN Permanent Security Council, as if they were actually a world power on the lines of postwar USA, USSR, China or Britain, helped greatly to bring about that healing." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c7injui", "c7iogtr", "c7ip5zp", "c7iq5p8", "c7iqchm", "c7irs7e", "c7is96y", "c7it095", "c7ita4t", "c7ivg64", "c7j2zzg" ], "score": [ 9, 10, 19, 24, 13, 18, 38, 6, 11, 2, 3 ], "text": [ "Since this is a bit relaxed as far as rules go, let me posit:\n\n**All of them are overestimated.**\n\nI don't want to start a flamewar, but I think it does the history as a discipline (located in the realm of *humanities* no less!) a disservice to endlessly debate, swoon and idolise military affairs and personnel. As Spock said:\n\n > As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create.\n\nI'd like more historians - especially in this subreddit, but also in academia - to debate the people and forces that created, not destroyed, to lift their gaze up from the momentary events of violence, and focus on the long-term developments of humanity itself.", "I think Roman military history has been dominated for too long by the Three Sylibants: Caesar, Scipio, and Sulla (OK, actually Marius but then I wouldn't have the trifecta). This is, admittedly, where we have by far the most detailed information, and I understand why the Caesarian legion dominates the discourse. In many ways, the operations of Corbulo and Agricola are far more interesting, and show a very different modus operandi, one requiring more logistical and diplomatic acumen.\n\nBut in the spirit of Trivia, I think the best (or rather most successful) Roman general was Sulla and the most underrated and overrated simultaneously is Pompey.", "[Phyrrus of Epirus](_URL_0_) is an extremely underrated general. He managed to get himself crowned King of Epirus, a small and poor domain in Western Greece, he invaded Italy and defeated the Romans in every battle he fought, despite having a smaller army. He was invited to become the King of Sicily by the city states there, and defeated several Carthaginian armies. When the Romans invaded his holdings in Italy Phyrrus returned there and fought the Romans yet again. After an inconclusive battle Phyrrus concluded that he couldn't hold Italy, and returned to Epirus, only to invade and conquer Macedonia soon after. He was killed in street fighting within the city walls of ~~Sparta~~ Argos (thanks to u/Plastastic) after he attempted to invade the Peloponese. Hannibal ranked him as the second best general in history, after Alexander the Great, and the modern term \"phyrric victory\" comes from his campaign in Italy (where he won all of his battles, but lost so many of his men in the proccess that it was effectivly a defeat. Although he was a great general, he was a terrible politician. He was originally invited to Sicily to protect the Greeks there against the Carthaginians, and in the process of his administration he angered the greeks so much that they allied with Carthage to drive out Phyrrus", "I would have to say Belisarius. For those who don't know him, Belisarius was a Byzantine general from the 500s. He orchestrated and planned most of Emperor Justinian's plan to reconquer the Western Roman Empire, which included fighting the Vandals and the Ostrogoths, claiming most of Italy and North Africa. Later in life he defended Constantinople from the Bulgars. As a historic figure, I would certainly consider him one of the \"last of the Romans\". ", "Not underrated within the field of history, but within the popular conception of history: Michel Ney.\n\nEveryone (in popular culture) credits Napoleon alone with his feats, but the \"bravest of the brave\" was key in so many of the major battles of the period, and perhaps in large part responsible for enough soldiers coming to Napoleon's side when he returned for the Hundred Days.\n\nThe man was so loved amongst the army that, after his emperor fell the second time, he, unbound and unblinded, had to give his own execution order.\n\n > \"Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I protest against my condemnation. I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her... Soldiers, Fire!\"", "Much like football managers it's easy for generals to look amazing when they aren't as good as they seem. \n\nA good example is Barclay de Tolly, we often seem to praise him as a general for not fighting. His greatest military success was retreating. Granted, I'm exaggerating to prove a point. It was a strategic retreat. His tactics were later vindictated after Borodino.\n\nLets have some fun here, Wellington was not as good as people like to think. The opposition he faced was all relatively insignificant. He was lucky, even he acknowledged his luck; although this was referring to his lack of injury rough out his service. If we look at Wellington through the romantic lens that pits him against Napoleon in a great battle of wits, the two of them only fought against one another once, at Waterloo. The deciding factor at Waterloo? The Prussians, an independent force.\n\nIndeed, Wellington almost lost Waterloo with his own forces, the cavalry. I'm not going to blame the decisions of his cavalry commanders on Wellington. I am going to point out that he never was able to use his cavalry to any significant degree. Here comes the football analogy, much like how at the moment Alan Pardew seems to be unable to utilise his midfield. \n\nOn the other hand, Wellingotn did exceedingly well with the infantry. His manoeuvring at Waterloo was genius, the flanking manoeuvre destroyed Napoleon's last gamble. Despite his ability as an infantry commander, Wellington was lucky, most of the Peninsular War occurred whilst Napoleon focused upon Eastern and Central Europe. Indeed, when Napoleon resolved to defeat the British in the Iberian peninsular Wellington was conveniently recalled to Britain. A stroke of fortune that led to the death of John Moore.\n\n**EDIT:** I'd like to argue that John I of England is a constantly underrated general. I subscribe to the view that he was presented with forces that he could not possibly hope to withstand. He didn't make these forces any easier to deal with by his own actions but he was tasked with trying to hold a disintegrating 'empire' together. It was an impossible task.\n\nHe was, according to Gillingham (a staunch critic), an expert on forced marches. Indeed, John effectively practiced a sort of crude blitzkrieg tactic, most clearly demonstrated with his victory at Mirebeau. \n\nOn the other hand, John wasn't good at pitched battles, losng the Battle of Bouvines despite numerical advantage (for a good view of lesser numbers beating greater odds, see the Battle of Agincourt). It doesn't help that John is compared to his brother Richard, who was incredibly intelligent, charming, politically popular and savvy and good at winning battles. Richard of course had the benefit of dying successful, *\"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.\"*\n\n**EDIT 2:** I want to throw in a quote from Gillingham about John, *\"The most consistently overrated king in English history.\"* An incredibly hilarious quote, considering that John probably gets more abuse than any other English monarch.\n\n**EDIT 3:** Gerard de Ridefort, a Grand Master of the Knights Templar that holds the distinction of being so stupid and tactically inept that Saladin was happy enough to release him. His highlights include charging an army of estimated thousands with 120 knights, 4, including himself, survived, convincing a garrison to surrender themselves in exchange for his freedom, then getting himself captured again.\n\n**EDIT 4:** Saladin. Incredibly overrated. He was a good politician, I won't argue against that . Much of his success was based upon the fundamental inability of the European military tactics to adjust adequately to the tactics used by the Turks and Arabs. Or perhaps to rephrase that, the easy adaptation by the Arabs and Turks to the armoured charge favoured by the Franks. Tactics such as feigning retreat, causing the Franks to give chase only to be trapped and massacred. Quite simply, knights don't work we'll in the Levant.\n\nIndeed, Saladin took gambles, such as bypassing enemy forces before the battle of Montgisard. This gamble almost resulted in the death of Saladin. It was a crushing defeat for Saladin. The imagery of Saladin's escape is quite entertaining, he reportedly threw off his mail shirt and jumped onto an escaping camel.\n\nFurthermore, when Richard I of England looked to be about to take Jerusalem Saladin may have planned to abandon the city, as he reportedly wept the day that Richard retreated. Although whether this was due to fear of inevitable death after or during the battle or possibly abandoning the Holy City I don't know. \n\nSimilarly, he captured Jerusalem through diplomacy. Not battle. In short, Saladin was a gifted politician and diplomat but it was easy enough for him, seeing as he had numbers, the Franks did not. Saladin's soldiers were adapted for conflict in the area, the Franks were not. I will concede that his bait that resulted in the battle of Hattin was very well executed. I personally feel that his crushing victory there was more a factor in the lack of quality if his opponents. The kingdom of Outremer was lacking in men of sense, Guy de Lusignan, Reynald de Chatillon and Gerard (see above) were all poor commanders given to making rash decisions. Indeed, possibly the two most gifted commanders of the Levantine army, Balian of Ibelin and Raymond of Tripoli fled the battlefield.\n\nSaladin had it easy when attempting to capture Jerusalem.", "Underrated generals immediately brings to mind [Nathanael Greene](_URL_2_), who commanded the forces in the south during the American revolution. After a series of defeats in the south, culminating in a crushing rout of the rebel forces under Gates at the battle of Camden, Greene was sent by Washington to command the forces in the south. By this point the British under Cornwallis had taken Savannah and Charleston and effectively destroyed the American's southern army. They controlled the southern states and were making preparations to march north. \n\nInstead of facing the British directly, Greene splits up his forces and begins [a brilliant fabian campaign](_URL_1_), forcing the British to leave the loyalist-dominated coast and chase him through the backwoods Carolinas. Greene never \"won\" a battle in the tactical sense, but gave the British a series of pyrrhic victories - Cornwallis won ground he could not hold at the price of casualties he could not afford, while his supply trains grew ever longer and more vulnerable. His weakening supply trains forced him to raid every plantation he came across, increasing local resistance. \n\nIn March 1781, after strategically retreating across the breadth of Northern Carolina, Greene's forces turn and prepare to fight at [Guildford Courthouse.](_URL_0_) After 90 minutes of fighting Greene retreats again and Cornwallis takes the field, but at the price of 1/4 of his men - 93 killed and 413 wounded out of an army of 1,900. Cornwallis declines to pursue Green and instead withdraws to Wilmington, on the coast. He then marches for Virginia, hoping to link up with the superior British force there. Meanwhile, Lafayette and Washington are moving south. Thus began the Yorktown campaign, which would lead to the eventual British surrender in October 1781. \n\nWhile Cornwallis moved into Virginia, Greene's forces went south and continued to fight the British forces that had been left behind, reconquering all of South Carolina except for Charleston by the end of June. \n\nAfter the war Greene refused the post of secretary of state, retired to an estate in Georgia, and died of sunstroke in 1786. \n\nNo other American general in the war as fully realized the need for a different kind of warfare, or enacted it as successfully. He reversed the greatest British accomplishment of the war, the conquest of the southern states, by effectively coordinating a poorly organized group of partisans, militiamen, and regulars, and by carefully picking his battles. While a mediocre tactician, he was fully aware of this shortcoming, and effectively utilized subordinates such as Daniel Morgan and Francis Marion when tactical cunning was needed. \n\nGreene is under-appreciated for several reasons - he died very soon after the end of the war and had little role to play in the formation of the young republic. Also, he had no glorious battlefield victories to his name, nothing on the order of Trenton or Yorktown. Finally, the northern theatre of the war continues to receive most of the attention from textbooks and general histories. So that's Nathanael Greene, probably the most under-appreciated American general. \n\n(apologies if someone has already mentioned him, I typed this intermittently over several hours) \n\nedit: fixed dates", "[](/flutterblush)I have always found Charles Martel to be a fascinating general. We can argue for days on whether the Battle of Tours had actually stopped the Islamic push into Europe, but he clearly set a path that Charlemagne would inherit two generations later.\n\nSome might even say that he helped lay the foundation for the developing concept of feudalism with how he organized his support base. \n\nI won't pretend that I can go toe to toe with any of you, but I'd be fascinaited to hear your input on the matter.", "[Subutai](_URL_0_) does not get all the press he should mainly as his boss sort of over shadows everything. If they are covered at all in Western society history classes.", "underrated is [Hans von Seeckt](_URL_0_), top german officer for the formative years of the reichswher, who almost no one has heard of. but the army he built was the army that became the Wehrmacht, which routinely either triumphed over or at least inflicted dramatically disproportionate casualties on materially superior forces. Limited by the Versailles treaty, he recruited only the best, kept them for long term service, and trained the shit out of them, and it showed.", "I've always been fascinated how the average person tends to throw generals to the wayside and forget them because they are defeated. A brilliant general can suffer one crushing defeat and lose the war, and suddenly he's not remembered as a great general; just the loser.\n\nOne of my favorite examples of this is Philip V of Macedon. This is a man who ascended to throne of Macedon at the age of *seventeen* following the death of his uncle, the regent-king Antigonus III Doson. Macedon had mostly stabilized by the time he ascended to the throne in 221 BCE, but it was still not as powerful as it had once been: power grabs, particularly by the Achaean League in the Peloponnese, had wounded Macedon's standing. So basically Philip came to the throne when Macedon was vulnerable but resurgent, yet with the sudden death of Antigonus III the rest of Greece did not know what to expect from Philip or Macedon; the Aetolian League certainly thought that he would be easy picking, as did the Dardani and other northern tribes.\n\nIn his first four years of kingship, Philip not only managed to defeat the tribes of the north and secure Macedon's borders there, but also managed to lead the Greek alliance against the Aetolians. The Aetolians were pretty reviled throughout much of Greece, and it is quite clear that they thought Macedon would be easy picking for them, being under the leadership of a young, inexperienced general-king such as Philip. That didn't work out so well for them, and in the Social War Macedon managed to repeatedly defeat the armies of Aetolia, Sparta, and Elis.\n\nPhilip then came into conflict with the Romans after he made a pact with Hannibal. For ten years, from 214 to 205 BCE, Philip and his allies the Achaeans fought the Romans and their allies the Aetolians, Sparta, Elis, and Pergamum. Neither side was able to score a decisive victory in this war, though, and in 205 they finally concluded a peace.\n\nPhilip spent the next four years making grabs throughout the Aegean and Asia Minor, especially in 202-201. Although there is still scholarly debate over whether it actually existed, Polybius alleges that Philip and Antiochus III signed a secret treaty to divide up the holdings of the Ptolemaic Empire after the death of Ptolemy IV. We have evidence for Philip taking territory throughout Asia Minor, mostly at the expense of Egypt but also at the expense of Pergamum and Rhodes.\n\nUnfortunately for Philip, in 201-200 he came into conflict with the Romans yet again. One of the consuls for 200-199, P. Sulpicius Galba, had been a man who was consul in 210 as well and had fought Philip then, so he figured he knew what he was doing. That would not be the case: in 199, after a period of the two armies avoiding each other, Philip and Galba came into contact and, after a series of skirmishes, Philip's army managed to break Galba's and cause severe losses.\n\nA similar situation played out for Philip throughout 199 and 198 - in most medium- to large-scale engagements, Philip's army would either draw or outright win the battle. It was to the point where there was actually debate in Rome on whether a Roman formation could even break a Macedonian phalanx. Unfortunately for Philip, the answer was yes. In 197 the Roman commander T. Quinctius Flamininus and his allies won a massive victory at Cynoscephalae, which broke the back of the Macedonian army and its logistical base; Philip was forced to sue for peace because he could not replenish his army or resources for another major battle.\n\nPhilip went on to be a great ally of Rome throughout the 190s and a great king for Macedon. Under the eye of Rome the entire time, he re-consolidated his power in Thrace and central Greece. When Rome came into conflict with Antiochus after 194, and indeed when they went to war in 192, Philip proved his worth by leading his army as an escort for the Romans through Thrace to the Hellespont, where they would cross into Asia Minor to take the offensive. Philip's knowledge of the territory and his army's protection allowed Rome to make it across the straits virtually unharmed, something they were not so lucky to have later on their way back.\n\nPhilip was an extremely competent general who understood battle and war, and he had the level of daring that can make or break a great general. His victories against Rome in 199-198 show us that he was capable of defeating the Romans, but it is all overshadowed by his defeat at Cynoscephalae in 197." ] }

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[ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zq1d7/tuesday_trivia_infamous_nonmilitary_attacks/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12ccpl/tuesday_trivia_a_wizards_spell_allows_you_to_make/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ylame/tuesday_trivia_famous_adventurers_and_explorers/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/117da3/tuesday_trivia_best_askhistorians_suggestions/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xfviw/tuesday_trivia_what_is_the_most_interesting/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/146f98/meta_polltype_questions_to_be_removed_in_future/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/zbt9a/tuesday_trivia_stupidest_theoriesbeliefs_about/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13vncq/tuesday_trivia_whats_the_most_defensible/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10gh29/tuesday_trivia_strangest_and_most_interesting/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yyygy/tuesday_trivia_most_unusual_deaths/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10to32/tuesday_trivia_historys_greatestworst_criminals/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/y752q/tuesday_trivia_great_nonmilitary_heroes/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xtuht/tuesday_trivia_historys_great_underdogs/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13imgt/tuesday_trivia_unlikeliest_success_stories/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/102s6u/tuesday_trivia_natural_disasters/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/11kqer/tuesday_trivia_youre_introduced_to_strangers_for/" ]

[ [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhus_of_Epirus" ], [], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Guilford_Court_House", "http://www.awesomestories.com/images/user/7a36f9d3d2.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathanael_Greene" ], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subutai" ], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_von_Seeckt" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cxre06l" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "This is an incredibly difficult question to answer in a simple way, because, just like anyone, there are a lot of different names for different places. If you are from Wicker Park, do you call your homeland Wicker Park? Or Chicago? Or Illinois? Or America? Is the focus the same if instead you are from, say, Greektown or Skokie? How the conceptualisation of place as it pertains to identity is dealt with is highly variable based on a number of factors, so you're not always going to get the same answer from the same person on the same day.\n\nIf, however, we're just saying \"Our group is from this place and this place is called X\" in the most basic sense, then this is easier to answer, but the answer is long, because it ultimately means providing a list of all known endonyms for Aboriginal groups throughout the continent.\n\nThe data *does* exist though; There are records of aboriginal place names in Australia going back as early as there were people writing them down. In the 1780s, Europeans had already begun documenting the endonyms of the places they found themselves in. There are whole lists that were kept, documenting all the different native names. How all these names came to be is also equally variable. Different languages had different methods, and within a single language group some might be of unkown origin while other are descriptive (\"wet marshland\") and others are common nouns (e.g. a kind of lizard found in the area).\n\nUnfortunately there is not, to my knowledge, an easy way to paste such a list of all the place names into a Reddit comment. Take a look at Wikipedia's [list of Australian place names of Aboriginal origin](_URL_1_) to get an idea.\n\nYou may also find the Australian Museum website of use. They have resources such as [this list of Aboriginal place names around Sydney](_URL_0_). That's actually the same data collected by the person who wrote the Sydney/Port Jackson chapter for the 2009 book cited below.\n\n**tl;dr:** [check it out](_URL_0_).\n\n**Disclaimer:** I'm not focused on Aboriginal languages or Australian history, so you may find more detailed answers from others here. I'm just a linguist who happens to live in Australia from time to time, and also I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night (Is that commercial still being aired? I don't know. I'm out of touch).\n\n**Sources:**\n\n* Hercus, Hodges and Simpson (2002) *The Land is a Map: Placenames of Indigenous Origin in Australia*\n\n* Koch and Hercus. (2009) *Aboriginal Placenames: Naming and Re-Naming the Australian Landscape*\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://australianmuseum.net.au/place-names-chart", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_place_names_of_Aboriginal_origin" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cn187jt", "cn1awp2" ], "score": [ 51, 31 ], "text": [ "Indian Emperor Ashoka waged war to subjugate Kalingana. After he witnessed the destruction that the war brought, it is said that he felt extremely remorseful. It is also said that because of this war, he converted from Hinduism to Buddhism and vowed to never bring such destruction again. His conversion allowed a widespread conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism in India and its surroundings. \n\nWhen it comes to Buddhist doctrine, generally violence in any form is against the Buddhist doctrine. But also in some sutras there are examples that would justify violence as well. Below is a story that is widely told when one studies Buddhism:\n\n*\"The Upayakausalya Sutra tells the story of one of the Buddha’s former lives, where he is captaining a ship carrying five hundred merchants. One night, ocean deities come to him in a dream and identify one of the passengers as a bandit who is planning on killing the merchants. Buddha evaluates three possible actions: do nothing and allow the bandit to kill everyone; inform the merchants, who would kill the bandit and incur evil karma for murder; or kill the bandit himself.*\n\n*The Buddha dwells on this ethical dilemma for seven days, trying to decide who should be murdered—apparently just locking up the bandit was not an option—and eventually decides to murder the bandit himself. In keeping with the principle of compassion, this is framed not as retribution for evil, but as compassionately sparing the bandit the horrible karmic consequences of mass murder, and allowing him to be subsequently reborn in paradise.\"*\n\nWith a few short examples, I wanted to toss the discussion to this question and I am also interested, if there was any violence by using Buddhist sutras as an example. I can easily see the usage of the above mentioned \" violence for a greater good\" to be distorted and used for political reasons. ", "I don't know about China or India (or other predominantly Buddhist areas), but in Japan Buddhism being used for violence is characteristic of its history. You brought up the Ikko Ikki example, which is good, but that was more so fundamentally peasants in the Kinai provinces (those surrounding the capital Heian, modern day Kyoto) trying to break away from their lords' influence, and they had a unifying Buddhist doctrine. The Ikko Ikki revolts were in the 16th century, but Buddhism had been used for violence since its adoption in Japan in the 6th century. \n\nAt the time of Buddhism's introduction, Japanese rulers were already utilizing Shinto, the native religion, to control their people. Buddhism had entered Japan but was not a state religion. The Soga clan, a clan with political power, promoted the adoption of Buddhism as a state religion, citing the success of Chinese emperors with it. Basically they wanted also as a way to unify and control their people. But many were opposed to it. This is because the opposing clans were native and didn't want to anger native gods while the members of the Soga clan had Chinese ancestry. In the end they all killed each other until the Soga clan rose victorious and oversaw the adoption of Buddhism as the state religion. But interestingly enough, they only used Buddhism in their own estates to benefit themselves and give the clan more prestige. This went on until the empress decided they were giving themselves too much power and directed a coup d'état to depose the Soga clan from their powerful political position and to make Buddhism a true state religion. So I guess it makes sense that since Buddhism had a violent introduction in Japan with heavily political intentions that this trend would continue throughout its history. \n\nThe Buddhist churches of the Heian period were notorious for fighting each other and attacking the imperial palace. They functioned so politically because the churches were given lots of tax-free land, so they developed armies composed of the people that went to the church in order to protect their interests and fight other sects or the emperor to gain more wealth. This was a time of imperial weakness, and the Buddhist sects knew they could take advantage of it. One sect would often go ransack the capital when it gave its competing sect an advantage. The Buddhists would win with their religious influence. Often imperial armies were afraid to attack the Buddhist army for fear of divine retribution. One interesting tactic the Buddhists used was to just have two monks bring down a palanquin to the capital and set it on the ground and walk away. It was claimed that the palanquin was sacred and housed the spirit of a deity and the longer it stayed in the capital, the angrier it would get. Buddhists could often get the government to concede to their demands through this tactic. \n\nSource:\n\n*Cambridge History of Japan*" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "clvmxca" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "This question needs some elaboration of assumptions because I think it is problematic conceptualization:\n\n1. Where do you think the economic center of gravity was prior to 1450? IE where did it shift *from*? What are the key economic indicators of this 'shift' for you?\n\n2. What countries/regions do you include in NW Europe during this time?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cw1b21d" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "If you're talking Precolumbian and are in the US, anthro for sure. All the research will be archaeology, which is essentially anthropology of the past. If you've got more specific questions, I and the other Americanists can certainly help." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ccuiwec", "ccuj6ec" ], "score": [ 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Just a small note, Jidai means period, so it's actually redundant to say SenGoku Jidai period.", "This is way outside my area of expertise, but some publicly accessible search engines are [WorldCat](_URL_2_) and [JSTOR](_URL_0_) - if you have access to a university library. If you are looking for Japanese language places, I got nothing for ya.\n\nIf you are looking for primary sources from the period, William de Bary's series on asian sources is always a good place to start. [Here](_URL_1_) is the one for Japan." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.jstor.org", "http://books.google.com/books/about/Sources_of_Japanese_Tradition.html?id=eY5NhC1DXY8C", "http://www.worldcat.org" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f2yofgx", "f2zlhbe" ], "score": [ 9, 2 ], "text": [ "Hello, I think I can give a pretty decent answer for you. You are asking about Viet Nam War (Second Indochina)-era relations, but I think I should give a bit of background on the relationship between the Khmer (Cambodians) and Kinh (Vietnamese) since old history played a role in the interactions during the Indochina Wars. For this background, I will be primarily using *Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries* by Li Tana. If you want to dive more into Viet Nam's expansionism or southern culture in general, I highly recommend this book, or at least a general Vietnamese history, such as the recent one by Christopher Goscha. \n\nActually, Goscha has said that the modern Viet Nam is a product of Vietnamese colonial dominance, just as they were colonized by the French. This is because during the time period that Li's book covers, Viet Nam defeated, for good, the competing empires of Champa and Angkor, securing the Mekong Delta for themselves. It didn't stop there. Up until the point that the French invaded Viet Nam in 1858, Viet Nam had been gaining more and more territory in what is now modern day Cambodia and Laos. In addition, Siam was conquering Angkor's territory from the west. Angkor was slowly being squeezed out of existence, and in fact the French, by coincidence, \"saved\" (in terms of politics; obviously colonialism was and continues to be devastatiing to Cambodia) Cambodia by invading the region and putting a halt to Vietnamese expansion, which had actually gone north into Qing territory as well. In any case, since this conflict, Cambodia has maintained a rather aggressive stance regarding Viet Nam and Vietnamese people, one that still exists to this day to a fairly fanatical degree, frankly. \n\nThat being said, during the time of revolution and the Indochina Wars, Cambodia was on decent terms with Viet Nam. Prince Sihanouk was in fact educated in Sai Gon and his two most noteworthy friends during that early period were Vietnamese and Chinese. For nearly 30 years, Sihanouk was the dominant political figure in Cambodian politics, and along with it came a relative accepting view of the Vietnamese communists, who were of course in the same party as the Cambodian ones. There were a few reasons for this, a major one being his hatred for colonialism (despite him being a Francophile) and in particular his hatred of Bao Dai, the final emperor of Viet Nam and head of state of the Associated State of Viet Nam, which had been organized by the French to challenge the communist Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. Sihanouk saw the government based in Sai Gon as colonialist in nature, and Bao Dai as a puppet. He also was a bit more sympathetic to the communists because of their oppostion to the West. In any case, he was also determined to do two things, both of which led to his eventual downfall: 1. Keep his hold on Cambodian politics and the imperial order and 2. Keep Cambodia neutral at all costs. These were not very popular positions among either hardline leftists (such as Saloth Sar, aka Pol Pot) or rightists (such as Son Ngoc Thanh), though as I said above he was definitely on better terms with leftists. His positions were also unpopular witht he US, both because of his leftist views but also because of his antagonistic relationship with the US, which included allowing DRVN soldiers and NLF fighters to cross into Cambodian territory on their way to the south. He did not like the US and felt they were trying to colonize the region, a view actually shared by prominent Vietnamese leaders, including Madame Nhu in Sai Gon. Anyways, basically Cambodia and Viet Nam had a strained but decent relationship during the revolutionary period and first two Indochina Wars because their goals were aligned.\n\nThe Vietnamese invaded Cambodia much later, in 1978. This was due to the Khmer Rouge deciding to attack Vietnamese villages, essentially invading deep into Vietnamese territory, as well as targeting ethnic Vietnamese during the genocide in Cambodia.Viet Nam decided to counterattack and remove the Khmer Rouge from power. Whether or not this action was humanitarian in nature is debatable, but in any case, Viet Nam held effective control of Cambodia until 1991. Still, such was the hatred of Vietnamese people that many, including Sihanouk himself, argued that the Khmer Rouge was still the legitimate government of Cambodia, despite the genocide. This is still the case in modern Cambodia, the denouncement of anything Vietnamese (including linguistic and cultural/ethnic/etc ties), even if the Vietnamese, whether intentionally or not, \"saved\" Cambodia from self-destruction. \n\nSources:\n\n*Sihanouk: Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness* by Milton Osborne\n\n*Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot* by David Chandler\n\n*Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries* by Li Tana\n\n*Vietnam, A New History* by Christopher Goscha", "_URL_0_\n\nSimilar question here with a slightly different answer." ] }

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[ [], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/bpv33s/why_did_vietnam_invade_cambodia_to_topple_pol_pot/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c5yy3ja", "c5yytbz", "c5yywyz", "c5yzyns", "c5z08pl", "c5z0q5a", "c5z0x0a", "c5z7bwn", "c5zhxft" ], "score": [ 45, 29, 19, 6, 2, 8, 3, 2, 2 ], "text": [ "There was no elaborated writing culture among the Germanic tribes. They mostly used Runes beginning in the 2nd century CE, but those runes were often just used as magic symbols or for short charms. They couldn't be used to write elaborated texts like Tacitus *De origine et situ Germanorum liber*. \n\nA culture of the written word was first established in a broader sense (outside monasteries) by Charlemagne in the 8th/9th century, so independent reports from the Germanic tribes about Romans do not exist.\n\n", "first of all, Greeks were the furthest thing you could get from barbarians. The word itself means \"not Greek\".", "What is unusual is that almost all Druids were completely literate, intelligent men. But for some reason they preferred an oral method of recording things.", "Disregarding the Greeks, because they were arguably more \"civilized\" than the Romans were, it is difficult to tell what the specific feeling towards Rome were considering the lack of proper records on the part of \"barbarian\" groups. but if the fall of Rome shows us anything, it is that at many German groups has great admiration for what the Romans had achieved and sought to emulate it in their successor states, the ultimate version of this tribute being Charlemagne's \"Roman Empire\". \n\nAs for the Arabs I'm not sure I would consider the Arabs in totality to be \"barbarians\" as there was even the Arab Emperor Philip.", "A nice Book on Tape from the Learning Company on this topic is 'Rome and the Barbarians'. \n\nYea yea its a book on tape but its a really solid and fast overview of a very complex topic. I think there are some chapters in there specifically about this reverse perspective.", " > but to be frank\n\nWhat's going on here...", "It's a very interesting topic. Do *peregrini*, resident non-citizens or provincials count as 'barbaric'? The Empire was Romanized to different extents at different periods in different geographical areas, so the line between Roman/barbarian is very blurred. Roman citizenship was aspired to, and their grants (to nobles, soldiers, etc.) were often inscribed and paraded, so it is clear that being a Roman citizen was a great source of pride (as well as a tax benefit!)\n\nFurthermore, after an edict by Caracalla in AD212, everyone was given citizenship - did they instantly stop being provincial in custom? Is barbaric only applicable to those outside the Empire? What about new arrivals, immigrants, newly conquered subjects, freed slaves? \n\nThis is a little bit of a tangent, but like I said, it's interesting to explore.", "You might want to read some Josephus, especially *Wars of the Jews*. He was a Jewish guy, but writing for the Romans so he had to make the Romans and the Judeans not look too bad. He essentially blames everything on a few radical Jews and a few bad Romans, so one could infer that the popular representation in Judea was that the Romans in general were brutal and corrupt.\n\nOutside of that though, the Jews in the Roman empire seem to have not liked Romans too much, seeing as they rebelled several times. The impression given by reading other texts is something along the lines of \"we want them to go away but leave their stuff\".", "First, since many barbarian tribes did not have a written language, most sources on barbarians are from the Roman perspective. This makes it difficult to tease apart Roman propaganda from the truth. \n\nThe fact that many Germanic tribes conducted looting raids into Roman territory under opportune circumstances, accepted Roman gold and gifts, sought trade with the Romans, and when they were defeated in battle and were willing to be resettled wholesale, this should tell you something about their attitudes. Moreover, it was not only in defeat at Roman hands but in times of peace or great external threat (like the Goths) that barbarians sought to be allowed into the Roman Empire, to become Romans (materially, culturally, and politically). Even until the final years of the Western Empire, the various Germanic tribes living in the former Roman provinces sought to be a part of the Roman political process; Roman senators alike jostled with one another for positions in the government, even during the final years. This should give you some idea on how strong romanitas (i.e. romanness) affected proper Romans and barbarians alike.\n\nWhen the western imperial government collapsed and the West was ruled by Germanic tribes, the Germanic elite acknowledged, adopted, and emulated what they considered to be a superior lifestyle and culture. The Roman senator Sidonius Apollinaris, who lived during the 5th century and witnessed the political collapse of the western government and the removal of the last emperor, [wrote to his colleague Syagrius remarking](_URL_0_):\n\n > You can hardly conceive how amused we all are to hear that, when you are by, not a barbarian but fears to perpetrate a barbarism in his own language. Old Germans bowed with age are said to stand astounded when they see you interpreting their German letters; they actually choose you for arbiter and mediator in their disputes. You are a new Solon in the elucidation of Burgundian law; like a new Amphion you attune a new lyre, an instrument of but three strings. You are popular on all sides; you are sought after; your society gives universal pleasure. You are chosen as adviser and judge; as soon as you utter a decision it is received with respect. In body and mind alike these people are as stiff as stocks and very hard to form; yet they delight to find in you, and equally delight to learn, a Burgundian eloquence and a Roman spirit. \n\nWith regards to the various Persian powers, they were Rome's most feared enemy, an equal power. There were several instances where it was Rome who was paying tribute to the Persians." ] }

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[ [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [], [ "http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/sidonius_letters_05book5.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d6r8iih" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "This is a complicated question to answer, as the RN used a different system for feeding its sailors during WW1 than many of its sailors would experience 20 years later. In WW1, the RN was still on the old system of Standard Messing (technically the Standard Ration and Messing Allowance). Under this system, crews were divided into messes. Each mess was then provided with a standard ration, which usually included rice, flour, potatoes and vegetables, and a sum of money (the Messing Allowance). With this money, they could purchase anything else they wanted, either from Admiralty stores, or from the civilian market. The food was cooked by the individual messes, with two men from each mess serving as cooks on a rota basis. This meant that food quality was highly variable across the RN, depending on where the ship was stationed, and the culinary abilities of the men in the mess. A ship stationed in South Africa would have access to a very different set of foods to a ship stationed in India, New Zealand, or the UK. Similarly, a mess which contained men who were used to cooking would be eating very different food from those that contained only men with very little experience. However, the Admiralty did try to level out these imbalances, establishing supply depots at its bases, and providing sailors with recipes and cooking advice. The Standard Ration and Messing Allowance system was used throughout WW1. It would still be used on ships built in this period, and on destroyers, throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s. The daily standard ration from 1913 can be seen [here](_URL_0_). Over the period, the standard ration changed somewhat. The increased provision of refrigeration meant that fresh meat could near completely replace the need to use salt beef or pork. From 1942, dehydrated vegetables would become more prominent, replacing fresh or frozen ones, but the amount of food in the ration was similar. \n\nCorvettes, minesweepers and small craft used a very similar system, called the Victualling Allowance (this was also used by submarines in WW1). These vessels were too small to have their own accounting officer, who bought and provided provisions for the ship. Instead, they were provided with a sum of money to buy provisions from the accounting officer at the base from which they sailed. They were also able to buy from non-naval sources, giving more flexibility in their diet. Cooking was still done by the members of the mess.\n\nHowever, from the entry into service of HMS Hood, the RN's newly built capital ships and cruisers used a different system. Known as General Messing, it was a much more centralised system. Rather than each mess buying and cooking food individually, the supplies were purchased by the ship's Accounting Officer. The food was cooked by specialist cooks in a central galley. The cooks from the messes were reduced to simply carrying the food from the galley to where the messes ate. Most ships did not have cafeterias, with the men eating in their quarters or at their stations. The newest ships, and those lend-leased from the Americans, did have cafeterias where the men could eat. The larger submarines built in the 1920s and 30s also used this system. It meant a much greater standardisation in food quality across the ship - now, the entire crew was guaranteed to be eating something made by somebody who knew how to cook. However, it still suffered from the same issue of geography as Standard Messing. Ships operating from ports where little or substandard supplies were available had to compromise on their provision of food. This was mostly a wartime problem, and only really a problem in places like Malta. Even then, crews were able to supplement their rations through official and unofficial means - 10th Submarine Squadron, operating on Malta, kept pigs at their base, while fishing, black marketeering and scrounging was common throughout. \n\nThe RN's provision of food was somewhat interrupted during both wars, as compared to peacetime. The desire to reduce the amount of shipping carrying food to Britain meant that ships operating from British ports had a lesser variety of options, and those options were frequently less appealing; sausages were often bulked out significantly with bread, fish choices tended towards the more easily caught than the familiar, and flour was often wholemeal rather than the usual white. However, the RN was always a high priority for food, and tended to get the best of what was available." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.pbenyon.plus.com/KR&AI_1913_Vol_II/Victualling.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e6309dk" ], "score": [ 18 ], "text": [ "Not to discourage any further answers but you'll probably enjoy this older post:\n\n[To what extent were the Romans in contact with Sub-Saharan African peoples?](_URL_0_) and [On race in the Roman Empire](_URL_1_) by /u/cleopatra_philopater." ] }

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[ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romans_in_Sub-Saharan_Africa" ]

[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7q8l57/to_what_extent_were_the_romans_in_contact_with/dsr93nc/?st=jci3t7ym&sh=735459e9", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6s918x/given_the_recent_furore_concerning_dr_mary_beard/dlb36xx/?st=j6i9x7qd&sh=3a7e9ee3" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cvyt0nr" ], "score": [ 11 ], "text": [ "Do you mean in English or in any language? The OED records the earliest usage of \"Turkey\" in English with Chaucer c. 1369: \"Ne sende men in-to Walakye,..To Alisaundre, ne in-to Turkye.\"\n\nAs the word itself originates with the Turks themselves it is of course much older but didn't necessarily apply to either the Ottoman Turks or to Anatolia." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d7quxf8" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Éamon de Valera has a complicated reputation. A number of my Irish friends tell me that de Valera only stayed in power so long because he was one of the only power-brokers who survived both the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. The fact is that his reputation changed over time because of his actions during his political life. Walking through his career from the start of the Rising through his domination of Free State and Republic politics reveals a somewhat self-interested politician who could be quite slippery towards both his colleagues and his stated ideals. \n\nIn 1914, after John Redmond decided he wanted the volunteers to join the First World War in hopes of showing Ireland's loyalty to Britain, de Valera walked out with many members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). The Volunteer split gave de Valera an opportunity to work his way even further into the organization's inner circle. The remains of the separatist Irish Volunteers was numerically small; for example, Dev often found himself drilling as few as seven men in the fields near Donnybrock. The smaller numbers overall combined with the fact that he was seen as dedicated and willing to do the drudge-work catapulted him into a leadership position. As Liam Tannam of the Volunteers noted in his witness statement years after the Rising, that \"even with that small number, de Valera carried on as if he had a full company and solemnly issued orders to form fours with the seven men.\" \n\nIn 1916, the general public typically viewed the Irish revolutionaries with disdain. It is important to remember that the majority of Irish people were against the Easter Rising; in fact, Dubliners often threw things and spat at the revolutionaries as they were being carted away after their arrest. Dev commanded the Boland's Mill Garrison, which had the distinction of being the only garrison to refuse women's service. Other than that, it was pretty typical. De Valera was noted to go without sleep because he was afraid his men would desert or fail in some way. De Valera would not have been popular among the populace at large; however, within the Irish Volunteers/IRA, his reputation was better. Despite all of his flaws, his dedication to the cause inspired a lot of respect and some loyalty. He was never as charismatic as Conolly or Pearse, but at the end of the day, he was one of the only two leaders not to be executed because of his American citizenship. This meant that when he emerged from prison, he would be the almost defacto leader of the IRA.\n\nWithin prison, he had continued to gain prominence among IRA circles, most of which were imprisoned in the post-Rising crackdown. He gained so much popularity, in fact, that he became a TD (member of Irish Parliament) immediately upon his release from prison. By this point, popular opinion had shifted due to the executions of the 1916 revolutionaries, so the masses were no longer as hostile as they had been. Dev's Catholicism, which he continued to cultivate in prison, helped him to win over rank-and-file IRA men as well as the wider populace. The general public was better able to relate to his beliefs than the more esoteric ideas of the Celtic Revivalist leaders or the various socialists in the Irish Citizen Army. During the Irish War of Independence, Dev was the unquestioned political and military leader of the IRA. He was generally well-regarded by his peers up until the events leading to the Irish Civil War.\n\nDuring the Civil War, Dev more clearly revealed his opportunism and his contemporaries recognized this. Prior to the opening of the Civil War, de Valera refused to meet with Lloyd George himself. The consensus by many of his contemporaries and historians is that he he knew he could not bring about his promised republic and did not want to be caught holding the bag. Collins noted Dev's refusal to give clear instructions to his delegates for the negotiation, \"From Dublin, I don't know whether we're being instructed or confused, the latter I would say.\" It is true that he also snubbed Michael Collins before and after that fateful meeting with Lloyd George. There was tension between the two men, but the real divide came in January of 1922, when de Valera led a walkout during discussion on implementing the Anglo-Irish Treaty. A number of IRA men were loyal to Collins and saw Dev's move as purely opportunistic. Even W. T. Cosgrave who was one of Dev's servitors during the war of independence (one joke claimed that \"he believed the sun shone out of Dev's arse\") sided with Collins and Griffith in support of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The Free State Pro-Treaty faction was composed of a number of men who had once been loyal to de Valera; the majority of the IRA backed Collins. Michael Collins had once been loyal to de Valera and considered him a close friend, but the split over the Treaty destroyed that relationship and others forged during the Rising and aftermath. Dev was deeply upset over Collins' death, which he probably didn't order, but he didn't weep for long. Instead he met with Richard Mulcahy, leader of the Free State military forces, and began to ensconce himself in the very system he had led a insurgency against.\n\nDe Valera continued to hold political offices, gaining power over the Dáil Éireann and eventually becoming the President of the Executive Council (Prime Minister) of the Irish Free State in 1932. The Civil War was not discussed in Irish public life and in many ways, the bulk of the Irish public was just trying to move on from the tumultuous period of 1916-23, but some of the divisions remained well into the 1950s. De Valera still had a lot of political currency amongst the former anti-Treaty insurrectionists, but while in office, he lost that good will as well. Firstly, many of the anti-Treaty men and women were still committing espionage and other disruptive acts against the government. Dev's response was to put them many of them in prison. This helped develop a reputation for a draconian attitude to his former supporters. He also alienated a number of intellectuals and women with is 1937 Constitution, which gave Catholicism an extremely strong hold over Ireland (that wouldn't be broken until the early 1990s) and literally enshrined women in article 41:2 as \"wives and mothers\". Once in power, his rhetoric and his laws painted Ireland as pastoral and thoroughly pre-industrial, which further alienated later generations of Irish intellectuals who saw this as backwards. John Montague and other Irish poets often lamented Dev's policies and self-imposed cultural isolation, a theme that would be picked up by later Irish writers like Roddy Doyle or ironically subverted by sitcoms like *Father Ted*. The irony was that Dev never actually declared the republic he had been promising for decades; it was his successor for the office of Taioseach, John A. Costello, who made that declaration and forced the UK to recognize the Irish Republic in 1949. His departure from office as Taoiseach signaled his loss of popularity and the fact that the Irish people were tired of him never delivering the republic. He was out of public favor in 1948, though he maintained some political power afterwards due to the long shadow he had thrown over Irish politics.\n\nDe Valera did not provide much of a political or economic legacy to build on. His dogmatic position on Irish neutrality led to his faux pas of giving the German envoy Hempel condolences on Hitler's death, which further tarnished his reputation. De Valera also continued to periodically anger his former comrades until his death in the 1970s. For example, Maire Comerford (a former anti-Treaty proponent during the civil war, who had written for de Valera's paper the *Irish Press* in the 1930s) confronted de Valera at the 1966 Commemoration of the 1916 Rising. She angrily asked him if he was shocked that the republic had been betrayed, echoing Dev's words during the walkout, and he responded that it was a pity that \"some people believed their own propaganda; and some people believe it still.\" This exchange sums up Dev's pragmatism that fused with his political self-interest. Irish Historians are mostly condemnatory of de Valera for this reason. See, for example, the shade thrown at the book *Judging Dev*, which attempts to rehabilitate his image, in [this review by *History Ireland*](_URL_0_). Ultimately, the general public was indifferent to de Valera by the time of his death, though he still had some veneration as one of the nation's founding fathers. \n\n*Sources*\n\nBowman, John. *De Valera and the Ulster Question, 1917-1973*. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. \n\nCoogan, Tim Pat. *Eamon De Valera: The Man Who Was Ireland*. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. \n\nFoster, R. F. *W.B. Yeats: A Life, Volume II: The Arch-Poet*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. \n\nMcGarry, Fearghal. *The Rising: Ireland : Easter 1916*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. \n\nWills, Clair. *That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War*. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007\n\n\n\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/judging-dev-a-reassessment-of-the-life-and-legacy-of-eamon-de-valera/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ckgnabh" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Ok, so here's a basic rundown. The most typical material was parchment/vellum, so that's what I'm describing (ignoring the semantic debate between the two terms).\n\n**Making Parchment**\n\n(1) Get animals to skin (calf/goat/sheep)\n\n(2) Skin animal (flaying)\n\n(3) Soak in water for about a day\n\n(4) Place in lime/alcohol solution for a few days to remove hair and flesh\n\n(5) Rinse in water again for a few days\n\n(6) Attach wet skin to wooden rack and stretch it by taking pebbles, wrapping those pebbles in the edge of the skin, then tying ropes around the pebble/skin, and attaching those ropes to wooden pegs that can be turned and tightened. Like [this](_URL_0_). The pegs would turn like you would tighten a string on a guitar or violin.\n\n**Note**: Nails cannot be used to do this because it rips the skin on the rack - Wikipedia is wrong, yo.\n\n(7) Scrape skin with a lunellum to remove whatever is left of the hair and flesh as the skin dries (crescent shaped blade with handles on both sides)\n\n(8) Tighten the pegs as needed\n\n(9) If holes appear in the skin and aren't too big, they can stay, or if the manuscript is not going to be very important the scribe will work around them. Big holes, or skins to be used for important manuscripts, are stitched up using gut or thread. Like [dis](_URL_2_)\n\n(10) The parchment maker continues to scrape the hide to desired thickness. In order to prevent the hides from becoming stiff, he pours hot water onto it to keep it moist until he is done, and so that he does not stretch the hide too much while its dry, which would rip it.\n\n(11) Once it is totally dry, you done son.\n\n_____________________\n\n**Writing a Manuscript**\n\n(1) Parchment is not square, it's whatever shape the animal was, so you have to cut it to whatever size you want.\n\n(2) You have to decide how you want to organize the leaves (pages). Except in Britain, parchment looked different depending on if you look at the hair side of the skin or the flesh side. The flesh side was a little whiter, hair side a little browner. Things look good when they match, so you needed to order your parchment leaves so that flesh side was facing flesh side and hair side was facing hairside.\n\n(3) Decide how many times to fold your parchment. A parchment leaf that makes one page is called a folio. If it makes two pages (one fold) it is a bifolio; four pages (two folds) quarto; eight pages (three folds) octavo. The standard was bifolio.\n\n(3.5) For a bifolio, create a stack of four leaves. The first leaf is flesh side up, the second flesh side down, the third flesh side up and the fourth flesh side down. Now when you fold the parchment in half, The pages go 1. flesh; 2-3 hair; 4-5 flesh; 6-7 hair; 8 flesh. This grouping is called a quire and 8 was the standard number in the Middle Ages.\n\n(4) You want to write straight, so you have to line you paper. You do this by pricking the edges of the leaf with your knife at regular intervals, then drawing a line with plummet (precursor to graphite) or drypoint (scraping a line with your knife).\n\n(4.5) You can do this before or after folding your parchment. If you do it before you only have to mark either side of the leaf. If you do it after, and are doing a bifolio, you have to prick both the outside and inside edges of the parchment - imagine little dots going up and down the outside and inside of the pages of a book outside of the text.\n\n(5) Make your ink!! The most common type of ink was iron-gall ink, which was black, but usually fades to a rust color after 1,000 years. You can google how to make it, but it involves wasps.\n\n(6) Grab yourself a quill or reed pen (quills were better and the preferred feather was from the right flight feathers of a goose because they swooped away from your hand)\n\n(7) Actually start writing. If there are no images, you're set, just go. If there are images, fancy capital letters, etc., you have to leave room for them, or trace an outline to be completed later. \n\n(8) Finish the illustrations and capitals, this is sometimes outsourced to another shop.\n\n(9) Put the quires in order, this is usually organized by marking the bottom right corner of one leaf with the first few words of the one that followed it (no pages numbers until the Renaissance, usually)\n\n(10) Through the middle crease of the quires, sew vertically to hold them together. (this is optional)\n\n(11) Using a small wooden rack that looks kind of like a vice, take all your quires -- in order!! -- grab some strips of leather, or extra parchment, and sew through the folded quires, attaching them together via your strips of leather. Smash together and tighten.\n\n(12) Your leather strips were longer than they needed to be right? Good. Now grab two pieces of wood, a little bigger than the parchment, and make grooves in them that line up with the leather straps. Glue those mamma jammas down.\n\n(13) Cover the whole outside with leather to hide the grooves\n\n(14) Glue the extra on the inside cover.\n\n(15) Glue the first and last sheets of parchment to the inside cover to hide that ugly leather hangover.\n\n(16) Fancy clasps are optional.\n\n \nNow you've made a book!\n\n\n\nThe best resource on the subject is Timothy Graham's *Introduction to Manuscript Studies.* A more immediate resource is [here](_URL_1_)" ] }

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[ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1krpwh/how_would_a_medieval_or_ancient_scribe_go_about/" ]

[ [ "http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CeIQGvGBVPw/UwkXV05W1pI/AAAAAAAAAKc/e9VhLSCccpA/s1600/sheepHideStretched.jpg", "http://web.ceu.hu/medstud/manual/MMM/frame3.html", "http://38.media.tumblr.com/0bac133996442941feb35edecc7316c9/tumblr_mvhwmjUMdA1soj7s4o1_500.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ez91g06" ], "score": [ 14 ], "text": [ "**Capital Punishment in Imperial Russia**\n\nRussia has always had a complicated relationship with capital punishment and the existence of the practice itself has hardly been consistent throughout the nation's history. The short answer to your question is that by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the death penalty was not very commonly used in Imperial Russia; the preferred sentence for most crimes that had been historically considered capital offenses was either internal exile, such as the fate which befell many of the future Bolsheviks, or simply press-ganging criminals into hard labor camps.\n\nThe reasons behind this have to do with the strength of the Orthodox Christian Church (which views the death sentence as a sin in all cases other than as punishment for murder), the desire to modernize the country and eliminate the perception of Russia as a medieval backwater, and the various levels of enlightenment by the ruling Romanov monarchs; Empress Yekaterina II the Great wrote the following in her 1767 *Наказ* (pronounced: *Nakaz*, translated: *Instruction* or *Decree*):\n\n\"Is the punishment of death really useful and necessary in a community for the preservation of peace and good order? \\[...\\] Proofs from fact demonstrate to us that the frequent use of capital punishment never mended the morals of a people \\[...\\] The death of a citizen can only be useful and necessary in one case: which is, when, though he be deprived of liberty, yet he has such power by his connections as may enable him to raise disturbances dangerous to the public peace.\"^(\\[1\\])\n\nContrast this with her predecessor Pyotr I the Great, who ruled from 1682 to 1725, as described by Stanford professor Nancy Kollmann:\n\n\"While touring Western Europe in 1697, Peter the Great witnessed a public execution in Amsterdam's town square. Deeply impressed by the pageant and the horror it generated among ordinary people, he brought the idea back to Russia, promptly dispatching hundreds of rebels with a series of mass public executions.\n\nAt the same time, Russian tsars from Peter onward gradually reduced the use of capital punishment, preferring to use criminals as free labor. In 1754, Russia abolished the death penalty for everything except treason, long before European states did away with capital punishment.\"^(\\[2\\])\n\nYekaterina's stance was generally supported (though of course, not without many exceptions) for the remaining years of Romanov rule after her death. From *Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia*:\n\n\"Until 1906 \\[...\\] Russia had one of the lowest execution rates among major European countries; it also abolished corporal punishment and undertook to develop modern prison facilities \\[...\\] The anarchist P.A. Kropotkin went so far as to argue that Russia's penal system, in general, was the most humane.\"^(\\[3\\])\n\nThat caveat there about 'before 1906' is because Nikolai II increasingly *did* have to rely on executing revolutionaries as they gained a larger and larger base of popular support-- Vladimir Lenin's older brother Aleksandr Ulyanov was executed for attempting to assassinate Emperor Aleksandr III (albeit in 1887) for example.\n\n**Exile as it Applied to Stalin Specifically**\n\nBecause of the vastness of Siberian Russia (the empire occupied 1/6 of the planet's surface) exiling criminals, especially social criminals such as revolutionaries, to the wasteland was not such a foolish endeavor as you might think. Stalin spent a total of almost 15 years in exile and revolution is a young person's game for the most part. In 1907 the vast majority of the Bolshevik party (75%) was under the age of 30-- Stalin was 29. So while he was certainly a part of that majority, he was already approaching outlier status^(\\[4\\]). That also means that by 1917 Stalin had spent the majority of his adult life to that point in exile, or on the run from the exile he had escaped. His first banishment sentence was handed down in 1903 (when he was just 25). Thus, when the Bolsheviks finally seized power, Stalin was not only 39 years old, he had also missed a number of crucial events which had set the stage for the Bolshevik seizure of power:\n\n* The Bolshevik-Menshevik split (1903) occurred while Stalin was exiled in Novaya Uda.\n* The formation of the first Bolshevik Central Committee (1912) occurred while Stalin was exiled in Solvychegodsk.\n* The outbreak of the First World War (1914) occurred while Stalin was exiled in Kureika.\n\nThus, Stalin was able to act as a kind of living martyr for the Bolsheviks-- he was appointed to the aforementioned Central Committee *in absentia* as a show of solidarity for a comrade serving his time in service of the revolution. So while now, it is quite easy for us to look back and say, 'golly, had they just shot Stalin after he was convicted of murdering informants, instigating mass social unrest, or holding up stage coaches, the world would have been much better off!' In all actuality, the only reason it proved to be a mistake was because the chips ended up falling in such a way that Stalin's exile almost worked to his advantage because he was able to comment on party affairs and forge party alliances without suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as many socialists who fell from favor for their own writings did at the time; for example consider Stalin's writing in *Briefly on Disagreements in the Party* which he wrote in Georgia while on the lam where he does just that:\n\n\"Our 'Mensheviks' are really too tiresome! \\[...\\] They heard that there are disagreements in the Party and so they began harping: whether you like it or not we shall talk about disagreements, always and everywhere; whether you like it or not we shall abuse the 'Bolsheviks' right and left! And so they are hurling abuse for all they are worth, as if they are possessed. At all the crossroads, among themselves and among strangers, in short, wherever they happen to be, they howl one thing: beware of the 'majority,' they are strangers, infidels! Not content with the 'habitual' field, they have carried the 'case' into the legally published literature, thereby proving to the world once again \\[...\\] how tiresome they are.\"^(\\[5\\])\n\n**Further Reading**\n\n\\[4\\] Chase, William and Getty, J. Arch; [*The Moscow Bolshevik Cadres of 1917: A Prosopographic Analysis*](_URL_2_)\n\n\\[3\\] Daly, Jonathan; [*Political Crime in Late Imperial Russia*](_URL_1_) *(2002)*\n\n\\[2\\] Kollmann, Nancy; *Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (2012)*\n\n\\[1\\] Romanov, Ekaterina; [*The Instructions to the Commissioners for Composing a New Code of Laws*](_URL_0_) *(1767)*\n\nSmele, Johnathan; *Crime and Punishment in Russia: A Comparative History from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin (2018)*\n\n\\[5\\]: Stalin, Jospeh; [*Briefly on Disagreements in the Party*](_URL_3_) *(1905)*" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.ctevans.net/Nvcc/HIS241/Documents/Nakaz.pdf", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/343368?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://www.jstor.org/stable/24649657?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents", "https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1905/05/x01.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cn48jk9" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "It means that instead of pulling back on the bowstring the archer would push outward with his left hand, keeping the bowstring in its drawn position. By pushing the actual body of the bow forward with his body and not bothering with pulling back the draw you can partially compensate for the rather absurd draw weight of a longbow. I don't know whether this model is accepted or not because I'm no medievalist, but it certainly seems plausible and helps account both for the ability of English bowmen to fire those things and helps explain one of the many reasons why it would have taken a lifetime of training to learn and keep yourself in practice. As I believe /u/Rittermeister says, the longbow is less like a big bow and more like a human ballista" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c9z9nx4" ], "score": [ 24 ], "text": [ "The [memoires](_URL_0_) of the well-known French army surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey mention the use of gunpowder as seasoning." ] }

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[ [ "http://books.google.nl/books?id=1-wRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR22&lpg=PR22&dq=Memoirs+of+military+surgery+larrey+gunpowder+lobau&source=bl&ots=6buxR4xb76&sig=SElUJc1uGV6mUAp-9uq5tBqwF7A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Q6CTUYj-Bcmq0QWNqIGwBQ&sqi=2&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=Memoirs%20of%20military%20surgery%20larrey%20gunpowder%20lobau&f=false" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fg7hx7c" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Yes, plenty of them. These older answers might be of interest: \n\n_URL_2_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33qpi1/why_didnt_or_did_they_viking_ships_have_roofs_or/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ac977f/how_did_the_vikings_not_die_of_exposure_while/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/956yc2/what_made_norse_longships_different_from_other/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ch98zf9", "ch9gh52" ], "score": [ 174, 9 ], "text": [ " > In american english Billion and Trillion means something different than in british english\n\nWhile this \"fact\" is often repeated, it's worth noting that this has not been true for several decades: Britain has used the same system as the United States for more than a generation, and it's the same in Australia and New Zealand.\n\nFor example Wikipedia states that common use of the \"short scale\" in the UK grew steadily for \"several decades\" prior to 1974 when the government finally made it official. So, throughout the majority of the 20th century the public has used the same scale as the United States.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAs others have said though, outside of the English-speaking world the long scale is often still used in Europe.", "You might want to crosspost to /r/linguistics or /r/asklinguistics for an answer from someone who studies historical linguistics." ] }

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[ "http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion", "http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliarden" ]

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

{ "a_id": [ "dg1vmoq" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "This is an excellent question, the answer to which is embedded in definitions - and more importantly the PERCEIVED definitions - of various terms including gods/God. The difference between the \"book\" religions that diffused from the Middle East and the indigenous belief systems they encountered was profound, making references to the spirits of both constructs as \"gods\" problematic.\n\nBy analogy, it must have seemed appropriate to Northern Europeans to use the indigenous terms related to the English word \"god: to apply to the powerful local spirits and then to apply that same term to the Christian deity, but there were profound differences. Some of the local spirits were perceived to be extremely powerful, but omniscience and omnipotence was not normally among their attributes. Believe conceived of them as navigating a supernatural realm where they may have been dominant, but they needed to work with the realities of competitive supernatural players.\n\nBy analogy, we may want to think about how the medieval world (or more modern traditional European Christian practices) conceived of St. Peter or the archangel St. Michael when interacting with Satan. None were gods, but they wielded considerable power - and they could be thwarted under the right circumstance.\n\nThe idea of the single, all-powerful \"God\" was a unique intrusion into the supernatural world as conceived by pre-conversion Northern Europeans. They may have had a vague understanding of a powerful prime mover, but their entity, if it existed at all, was removed from the world, unapproachable and largely if not entirely passive. That and the fact that Christianity wielded a written document made Europe susceptible for conversion: the idea that priests could bring a book that described in clear written terms how there was a pathway to reach the prime mover, who was far superior to the local spirits must have been incredibly persuasive. As a linguistic shorthand, the indigenous spirits were often called \"gods\" but Christians were just as likely to refer to them as demons. The use of the term \"god,\" however, blurs distinctions that are best made when considering the pre-conversion belief system and the Middle Eastern religion it confronted at the time of conversion." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "chua0i2" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "When you say Aramaic was 'the language of their Empire', it was only ever so in certain contexts.\n\nIt was not the official language of the Empire in the sense that it was the language of the court, or that you would automatically expect any one Persian to speak Aramaic, or that subjects of the Empire were required to speak as a matter of course. Where Aramaic was widely used in the Empire was in administrative texts, and in certain regions as a lingua franca.\n\nAramaic was mostly commonly used in the Levant and Mesopotamia as a day to day language. This was due to a historical growth in its useage in these areas in a slow process after the end of the Bronze Age- the spread of Aramaic eventually displaced that of Akkadian in both Assyria and Babylonia, for example. Originally the language was associated with a specific people, the eponymous Arameans, but by the time that the Persians conquered Mesopotamia and the Levant this was no longer the case. In both the late Assyrian Empire and the Neo-Babylonian Empire that followed it Aramaic and Akkadian were used as administrative languages side by side. Importantly, Aramaic was usually rendered with the Aramaic alphabet with ink, as opposed to Akkadian cuneiform which was written into clay tablets with a stylus.\n\nWhen the Persians took over Mesopotamia they inherited its administration. Akkadian continued to be used in Babylonia and Assyria specifically for local administration. Indeed, in many regions of the Empire local languages and scripts were still used for purely local affairs. But much of the Achaemenid Empire did not use the same script, and a number of areas had no immediate tradition of bureaucratic governance. We cannot talk with precision about the specific Persian decision, for we have no specific evidence about why they adopted Aramaic as a wider language. However, the strong suggestion is that its association with a swiftly-learned alphabetic script made it ideal for an expanding Imperial bureaucracy and communication network, as opposed to scripts like Akkadian cuneiform which required years to master and involved hundreds of individual characters. Key to understanding the presence of Aramaic is that it was almost exclusively used in imperial-level administrative contexts; communication between satraps and their governors, between satraps and the king, between different administrative officials, records of troop movements and of logistics. \n\nNotably, Persia itself is an example of a region where Aramaic was only used in specific contexts, for we actually find enormous quantities of Elamite cuneiform documents in the Persian capital of Persepolis. This illustrates how Aramaic should be seen in terms of the Achaemenids specifically utilising it- it enabled communication and bureaucracy for the Empire itself, but often did not replace local languages already rendered with scripts." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dm96g6g" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "You're asking 2 separate questions here:\n\n1. Where did fleeing troops go?\n\n2. Were those who fled punished?\n\nWe know a fair bit about this in Classical Greece, so I'm going to answer both. If you're looking to join this ride, bear in mind that the rout is a dangerous place, so I hope you've brought a horse or a Sokrates:\n\n > Here [at the disastrous battle of Delion in 424 BC] I had an even finer view of Sokrates than at Potidaia. (...) There he stepped along, as he usually does in the streets of Athens, \"strutting like a proud marsh-goose, with ever a side-long glance,\" turning a calm sidelong look on friend and foe alike, and convincing anyone, even from afar, that whoever cares to touch this person will find he can put up a stout enough defence. The result was that both he and his companion got away unscathed: for, as a rule, those who act this way in war will not be touched. \n\n-- Plato, *Symposion* 221a-c\n\n & nbsp;\n\n**Where did they go?**\n\nThe answer here is obvious: they fled somewhere safe. \n\n > Some made for Delion and the sea, some for Oropos, others for Mount Parnes, or wherever they had hopes of safety.\n\n-- Thucydides 4.96.7\n\nArmies liked to fight close to their own city walls, which would provide refuge in case of defeat:\n\n > The Argives thought that they could not have a fairer field, having intercepted the Lakedaimonians in their own country and close to the city.\n\n-- Thucydides 5.59.4\n\nIt was not even necessary for a broken force to flee *within* the walls, since the people left behind in a city could ward off enemies by shooting missiles and throwing stones from their high position on the city's fortifications. In this way, an army huddled at the foot of a city wall was effectively safe:\n\n > In many other instances those who have pressed a pursuit too close to a city's wall have come off badly in their retreat, and in this case also [at Olynthos in 381 BC], when the men were showered with missiles from the towers, they were forced to retire in disorder and to guard themselves against the missiles.\n\n-- Xenophon, *Hellenika* 5.3.5\n\nIf the army was not near its own city, but in friendly territory, allied fortified positions were fine too:\n\n > Meanwhile the Ambrakiots and the troops upon the right wing defeated the contingent opposed to them - they being the best fighters in those parts - and pursued it to Amphilochian Argos. Returning from the pursuit, they found their main body defeated; and hard pressed by the Akarnanians, with difficulty made good their passage to Olpai, suffering heavy losses on the way.\n\n-- Thucydides 3.108.2-3\n\nIf the army was campaigning further afield, the obvious safe ground to aim for was the camp from which it had marched out to fight that day. The Greeks usually built their camps on defensible positions, and often made rudimentary fortifications to protect them.\n\n > Yet despite the fact that many had fallen and that the Spartans were defeated, after they had crossed the trench which happened to be in front of their camp they grounded their arms at the spot from which they had set forth. The camp, to be sure, was not on ground which was altogether level, but rather on the slope of a hill. \n\n-- Xenophon, *Hellenika* 6.4.14\n\nIf there was not even a camp to retreat to, the fleeing men, in their desperation, could run to the proverbial hills:\n\n > Thus the Athenian army was all now in flight; and such as escaped being killed in the battle by the Chalkidian horse and the peltasts, dispersed among the hills, and with difficulty made their way to Eion. \n\n-- Thucydides 5.10.10\n\n > As for the Argives, they did not await the attack of the forces of Agesilaos, but fled to Mount Helikon.\n\n-- Xenophon, *Hellenika* 4.3.17\n\nWhile there are only a few examples of troops rallying and rejoining the fight, it is understood that those who had fled to safe ground regained some measure of cohesion. The safety of their position and the presence of their comrades would have put an end to their panic and reminded them of their duties. It would also have made it obvious that their only hope of preventing further disaster was to stick together with whoever remained. In the surviving accounts, those who reached the safety of a city wall or camp would usually request a truce to collect their dead; this ritual implies that some semblance of an army had reformed, which could speak with one voice, rather than as a bunch of little groups of survivors who had abandoned all pretense of collective action. Indeed, there are a few examples of Greeks (invariably Spartan or Spartan-trained) retreating from battle in good order. No doubt the ideal was for an army never to lose its sense that it was an *army*, even in defeat. The scattering of the routed Athenians at Amphipolis and Delion demonstrates the severity of their defeat; they were so badly beaten and so viciously pursued that they struggled to reform as an army.\n\n**continued below**" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cij4i4q", "cij9ecv" ], "score": [ 20, 2 ], "text": [ "The River Largue used to mark the boundary between France, German Alsace, and Switzerland. Basically the French occupied one side of the river and the Germans the other, and didn't really mess with each other too much. The Swiss had several watchtowers and various buildings to monitor any action and ensure it did not spill over into the Swiss border. However, the fighting was not heavy south of Verdun, and thus there was little action besides watching each other. World War I is strange in how normal life was in some areas, and how warring it was in others.\n\nIt did not look like the coast in Northern France, where barbed wire literally ran out to the beach. It was much less fortified and inhabited. ", "Why didn't they launch large offensives near the Swiss Border where the opposition was less fortified? As both sides were clearly trying to break the stalemate for years, wouldn't have this been an easier option?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ccmzl46" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "It's a [trick question](_URL_0_).\n\nEdit: Provincial flags are a modern concept - provinces didn't recognize a value for them earlier. Before their invention there were three options for contexts that now feature a provincial flag:\n\n1. The province's coat of arms on a Blue Ensign (\"armorial banner\"), not used very much\n2. The personal standards of the lieutenant governors, only permitted for use in official contexts\n3. The federal flag and the Union Jack\n\nNova Scotia was originally granted a flag as a colony, but the flag wasn't actually recognized as the official provincial flag until 2013 (because doing so had been overlooked). Quebec was the first province to have an official flag, introduced as a nationalist symbol in 1947. BC attempted to adopt a flag for their 100th anniversary in 1958, but it took 2 years longer than planned to get a good design sorted out. All the other provinces followed suit in the next few years." ] }

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[ "http://www.gov.pe.ca/infopei/index.php3?number=1599" ]

[ [ "http://fraser.cc/FlagsCan/Provinces/PEI.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cdghf9m" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "A little later than the 1880s, but you may find it interesting to read about [Abie's Irish Rose](_URL_0_), a 1920s play about a Jewish-Irish Catholic intermarriage in which the ways Jews and Irish people saw each other was mined for laughs. Not only is the play itself a good source of the stereotypes and preconceptions that were perceived to be common in interaction between the two groups thrown together in the American melting pot, but the phenomenal success of the play and its lasting cultural impact (spawning a radio series and a film adaptation as well as several plays/movies on the same theme), despite the fact that critics condemned it as hoary and trite, also suggests that it was an interesting and relatable subject for many Americans at the time." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abie's_Irish_Rose" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cxvjrm2" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "As others have noted, the sources we rely on come from the elites of the empire and they loathed Nero - obviously we're getting a biased view of him. We know he must have had *some* popularity since several 'false' Nero's popped up after his death - you don't pretend to be someone's who's unpopular. But it is noteworthy that both false Nero's came from Greece which suggests greater popularity there - not surprising considering his love of things Hellenic and lifting taxes during the Isthmian Games. And following the Great Fire of 64 CE, he opened up public spaces to house the homeless and started the rebuilding of Rome. His frequent spectacles were quite popular with the people of Rome. \n\n\nBut if even half of the anecdotes we have of him are true then he was a pretty piss-poor emperor, especially if we compare him to Claudius who took concrete steps to improve the quality of life for the citizens of Rome (e.g. building the portus, legislation to encourage more shipping, winter sailing, etc...) Instead we see him more concerned with chasing his dream of being a chariot driver or a singer - fine if you're a private citizen but not as cool if you're the Princeps and you have other duties (part of which is not pissing off the elites you rely on for managerial tasks).\n\n\nOn a side note, there's apparently a single scholar put forward a theory that *maybe* those darned Christians did start the fire of 64 CE. He noted that it began exactly 418 years, 418 months, and 418 days after the Gallic sack of Rome in 390 BCE. Maybe a fringe group of Christians in Rome, at this point only a generation removed from the Crucifixion, got a bit radical (and not the good kind) and decided to start the end times and bring back the saviour assisted by this 'magic formula'? Or more likely the fire started by accident - as happened in the many other fires which hit Rome. But still, I'd keep an eye on those Christians, no knowing what they'll do next..." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fkegrx8" ], "score": [ 46 ], "text": [ "We should not misrepresent what Laurence Fox actually said. He wasn't criticized for claiming that Sikhs fought exclusively in British Indian regiments, something which he never claimed in the first place. What he did say was that the inclusion of a Sikh soldier in the movie *1917* broke his immersion and that, \"There is something institutionally racist about forcing diversity on people in that way.\" Fox's statements were ridiculous, ignorant, and racist, reflecting what I have termed as the 'White Mythic Space of the First World War'. There is an understanding of the First World War amongst some that the First World War was a 'white man's war' in which people of color either wasn't present, or if they were, they didn't matter. This is something that has been reinforced by popular culture, which often has not bothered to show a representative depiction of the First World War in terms of diversity. Therefore, when encountering attempts at a historically accurate depiction of the First World War in terms of ethnic diversity of soldiers, these people try to actively defend the white mythic space through various means. One of those is by outright denying or belittling the inclusion of soldiers of color. For more on this, I refer to my article [\"Race, Battlefield 1 and the White Mythic Space of the First World War\"](_URL_0_), *Alicante Journal of English Studies* 2018, 31: 187-193.\n\nTo answer the historical part of your question, the answer is: It depends on the person. Sikhs who were enrolled in the British Indian Army were naturally in their own colonial regiments. However, domiciled British Sikhs would have been in regular British regiments since the 1907 Manual of Military Law allowed men of non-European ancestry to enlist in the British Army. Therefore, British men of Asian and African ancestry were permitted to join regular British regiments. Therefore, the location in which you enrolled played a large part in where you would eventually end up. A man from the British West Indies who enrolled in Jamaica would be included as part of the British West Indies Regiment while his friend, who enrolled in Great Britain, would have been part of a regular British regiment. The regiment you were part of also had a great impact on whether or not you were even allowed to fight. Black British soldiers in regular British regiments on the Western Front would have seen active combat while this would have been denied to the British West Indies regiment.\n\nFor the British Empire, there were two main arguments against the inclusion of ethnic minorities in active combat roles. First, and perhaps most importantly, was the protection of the racial hierarchy which was at the very core of British imperialism. By allowing men of color from the colonies, in particularly of African descent, to fight against and even kill white men would upset the status quo which in turn might have larger consequences. The second argument revolves around racial prejudice and the idea that men of color simply did not have the intellectual or emotional capability to be good soldiers and were inferior to white soldiers. The result of this thinking meant that although colonial soldiers of African descent were allowed to serve in uniform, they were not allowed to fight on the Western front against white Germans and were instead given other roles working with different non-combat tasks. Outside of the Western front, however, the use of soldiers of color in combat roles were far more widespread. For pragmatic reasons and since the enemy was considered \"less white\" than western Europeans, soldiers from the British West Indies fought against Ottoman soldiers in the Middle East. The largest exception of them all were Indian soldiers that served on the Western front, the Middle East, and in Africa. The inclusion of ethnic minorities from British colonies as combat soldiers on the Western front during the First World War is therefore a long and complicated process which expressed itself in various and contradictory forms from one imperial army to the other. \n\nThese contradictions were not exclusive for Great Britain. Although Germany did not field soldiers from its African colonies on the Western front and accused France in its propaganda for unleashing the \"primitive Africans\" onto the white European race, there were Afro-Germans fighting for the Kaiser. France, unique out of all three main imperial powers on the Western front, did not hesitate to use West African soldiers whatsoever. Canada was hesitant at first but allowed their indigenous population to join and serve in positions where they'd see action against white men (while at the same time segregating black Canadians into the No. 2 Construction Battalion and giving them labour duties). Australia outright rejected Aboriginal men from serving in the Australian army in any and all capacities." ] }

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[ [ "https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/87178/6/RAEI_31_12.pdf" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e8k21oa" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ "I don't know Red Dead Redemption of any variety or number because I am really old, but it is easy to imagine what your example looks like because the primary source record is so full of these images - that's assuming that we can accept Hollywood movies as primary sources. [Here, for example,](_URL_1_) is an excellent depiction of an extended bar brawl scene from Mel Brook's Blazing Saddles (1974 - you may want to jump to around 1:10). Is this accurate? It is for Hollywood, but not so much for the West.\n\nThat said, [here is an image](_URL_0_) from [J. Ross Browne](_URL_2_) (1821-1875) who visited Virginia City, Nevada in 1860 when it was barely a year old. Browne was a travel writer and illustrator for Harper's Weekly. Browne's work was often tongue-in-cheek and here he is feeding the Eastern appetite for Western cliches. This illustration is titled \"Home for the Boys,\" shows a saloon called the \"Cosy Home\" offering \"comforts\" for its clientele. This was exactly what people thought was going on in Western saloons in the 1860s, just as it fit the stereotype that Hollywood capitalized on - and Mel Brooks exploited.\n\nSo, then the question is whether this is realistic for the period - as you are asking. In all my four decades of pouring over primary source records that were not a matter of satire as in the work of Browne, I have not found this sort of fight. There were, of course fights: young men with alcohol in a small space will result in some flaring tempers and physical contests, but the pattern that is repeated throughout the records are two men fighting with or without weapons and with their friends trying to deescalate the conflict or attempting to pull a wounded comrade away from an assailant. Large bar brawls make for good drama, but they were not the norm from everything I have read.\n\nAt the same time, your Red Dead Redemption 2 is certainly following a time-honored tradition of depicting the Wild West as a place of violence, often with large groups of men fighting one another. It is part of the image of the West, and to paraphrase Samuel Clemens (who took his name \"Mark Twain\" in Virginia City in 1863), \"a lie will travel around the world before the truth gets its boots on.\" Sometimes we can learn a lot from a lie, since it speaks to what we want to believe as opposed to what is true." ] }

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[ [ "https://imgur.com/520xuW2", "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9B_9YeVhsw", "http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/john-ross-browne" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d3tday2" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "In the England and Wales this scenario is used in criminal law for factual causation. R v White 1910. The guy poisoned is mother but she died of a heart attack. The question asked is \"but for the defendants actions would the result have occurred\". They couldn't prove a link between the poisoning and the death and causation wasn't proved. Of course criminal law requires a much higher standard of proof than an angered baron, but I thought I'd chip in because OPs question is actually a central point in English criminal law." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cru1zdw" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "The only way in which it could possibly be true is if you compared average standards of living. From the colonial period through to the late 19th century, the US population was composed of a majority of landowners. This stands in stark contrast to Europe, where land ownership was relatively quite rare, and had been for centuries. Most farmers in Britain were tenants (renters), and these people were increasingly moved off the land as England industrialized; it became more profitable for the landlords to consolidate farmland, especially for mass sheep farming. The dispossessed farmers ended up in the rapidly expanding towns and cities, where they in large part formed the new urban proletariat. \n\nNow, it is true that most landowners, North and South, were small subsistence farmers who owned 100 acres or less. They produced very few cash crops, mostly concentrating on foodstuffs. This made them cash poor, but it bred a feeling of independence and self-reliance. More concretely, it also enabled a relatively high standard of living despite their \"poverty,\" especially compared to the inhabitants of cities, who, in the 19th century, were far more prone to disease, bred by cramped and unsanitary living conditions, poor diet, and, sometimes, horrid work environments. Besides having greater access to a varied and plentiful diet, American farmers were much less exposed to disease in particular. This would come back to bite them when they were placed in urban-like conditions, where they generally suffered from disease even more so than urbanites due to their lack of resistance (2/3 of Civil War deaths came from disease).\n\nHuman height correlates pretty directly with social health. When conditions are good, when people are relatively free from disease and eating well, average height tends to go up, at least so far as genetics allow. When a population is stressed, especially by overpopulation, poverty, or other factors, it goes down.\n\nIf you compare estimates of average height for the United States with those of France or Britain in the 18th and 19th century, they are startlingly divergent. The British Army during the Napoleonic Wars boasted an average height of about 5'4\" (among the enlisted; officers tended to be much larger than their men); the French Army, much larger and drawn from a broader cross-section of society, may have been marginally taller, but not by more than an inch or so. Both populations were as short as they had ever been, down from an early medieval average of perhaps 5'7\" or 5'8\". In contrast, Americans in the Union and Confederate Armies averaged slightly over 5'8\", and I have seen speculation that the average in the late 18th century was around 5'9\", scarcely less than it is today." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c69496m", "c695hi3", "c69cryd" ], "score": [ 4, 7, 2 ], "text": [ "The idea that \"officials on the street have a very low and distant incentive to uphold the law but a larger and immediate incentive to take the money\" isn't a universal, and only arises in certain situations, ones which I would guess are breeding grounds for that sort of corruption. Corruption is tough to nail down, partly because it's not necessarily well-documented, and anti-corruption efforts can be difficult to measure, too, because the difference between eliminated corruption and better-hidden corruption isn't always easy to see.", "My view, based on researching corruption in early 20th cent. municipalities, is that the only way to eliminate corruption is to make it easier to do things the legal way rather than the illegal way. What's essential is eliminating the benefit of using corrupt channels.\n\nAn example: building permits. If the legal process is easy and straightfoward, most people would choose this over bribing an official. However, if the legal process is slow and cumbersome, bribing an official is more attractive - especially if you're unlikely to get caught.", "Hannibal Barca simply opened up legal avenues for the People to both prosecute corrupt officials as well as being able to remove them from office if they are found to be \"not transparent enough in their doings\". \n\nBasically he attached consequences to corruption. It's hard to ask for bribes when any given eligible voter can ring you up to the courts. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c50hfgl", "c50jlxa", "c50k3q9" ], "score": [ 21, 48, 15 ], "text": [ "Depends on who you ask. \"Intellectuals\" are not and never have been a monolithic group. You'll find plenty of every viewpoint among early modern scholars, and not a few of them were staunch proponents of despotism and absolute monarchy. Not until the mid-late 19th century did you begin to see mass movements and a majority of public intellectuals broadcasting democratic and republican ideals. Generally, the mass movements came first, then were followed by intellectual support.\n\nAs an aside \"small government\" as an American \"ideal\" is a recent phenomenon. Within the last handful of decades.", "Most of these \"American\" ideas were actually the ideals of European enlightenment.", "Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about his thoughts on American political ideals in [Democracy in America](_URL_0_)." ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "e4mhbim" ], "score": [ 31 ], "text": [ "No, Joan of Arc did not kill prostitutes. First of all, that was in fact quite illegal. Second, the author being quoted on the page you linked doesn't seem to be faithful to his sources, or else something is being lost in translation from Bouzy's French. Here's Jean, Duc d'Alencon and one of her close supporters:\n\n > Jeanne was a chaste maiden; she hated the women who follow in the train of armies. I saw her one day at Saint Denis on the return from the coronation, pursuing one of them sword in hand: her sword was broken on this occasion.\n\nAnd Louis de Contes, her page:\n\n > She would have no women in her army. One day, near Chateau-Thierry, seeing the mistress of one of her followers riding on horseback, she pursued her with her sword, without striking her at all; but with gentleness and charity she told her she must no longer be found amongst the soldiers, otherwise she would suffer for it.\n\nThese are, uh, quite different from that site's \"According to the Duke of Alençon, Joan's sword was destroyed in Saint Denis, when she lanced it through the back of a prostitute\" and \"It seems that Joan was in the habit of striking her sword across the backs of any prostitutes that she would come across; such incidents being reported...[by] Louis de Contes.\" Neither witness testifies to what that site (and its own source) claims.\n\nNow, were there contemporary or near-contemporary wild stories? Joan's pursuit of camp followers was an eye-catching tale for people--literally. [Here's an illumination](_URL_0_) of the deed from a 1484 copy of *Les Vigiles de Charles VII.* For example, Eberhard Windecke, a chronicler (journalist/historian hybrid, kinda) living in Mainz, had *heard* the story that Joan cut off the heads of two prostitutes with her sword, for example. There are a couple of things going on here. \n\nThe first is, as the site you linked mentions, some rumors/superstitions at the time of this particular sword being magical. Its finding, after all, is recounted as a miracle. Jean Chartier, the chronicler mentioned there, is one of the authors definitely known for his magicking-up of the sword--including departures from what Joan herself testifies at her trial. (Daniel Rankin and Claire Quintal discuss this in their translation of some early Joan-related texts). Some versions of the sword story attribute its magic to Joan's strength as a military leader. When it broke, in other words, her prophetic/divine abilities broke, too.\n\nThe second is the accusations of sexual impropriety against Joan. Throughout the nullification trial (the appeal, except it was too late for her), the witnesses stress over and over her *chastity*, to the extent that her desire to remain chaste made *them* also desire it, at least around her. The original stories of Joan chasing away some of the women following behind/with the army (\"camp followers,\" which almost certainly included prostitutes by this time but other women as well) aid that image of Joan. But you can also see where people one and more steps removed from the events and the eyewitness would fancy up the story a little for emphasis." ] }

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[ "http://musee.jeannedarc.pagesperso-orange.fr/sword.htm" ]

[ [ "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vigiles_du_roi_Charles_VII_63.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f24k9hx" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Hello, I wrote an answer a little while ago [here](_URL_1_) that dealt with the process by which Anglo-Saxon *burhs* developed - or didn't - into towns or cities, and another [here](_URL_0_) which dealt with the colonisation of the post-1066 Anglo-Welsh frontier, and how a new landowner might populate his holdings. I think that the second one in particular might be useful.\n\nThe long and short of it is that, by the 11th century, you don't *really* tend to get new settlements outside of frontier areas, although you do see the resettlement of devastated areas. As the distribution of settlements in *Domesday* shows, by the eleventh century - and probably before that - the vast majority of useful land had long been inhabited. Even in areas of relatively low population density, like the West Midlands, tend to have the same *number* of villages, they just tend to be smaller.\n\nThis isn't to say that you don't get new settlements, of course! The prime location for new settlements is in border regions, as discussed heavily by Davies with regards to the Welsh Marches in particular. We can see both new towns and villages emerge in particular in the late 9th and early 10th centuries as the *Cerdicing* dynasty fortify the Danelaw border and then expand and unify England. I discussed in my first linked answer the process by which many proto-towns were established: those *burhs* which weren't already major settlements but developed an urban function did so largely as a result of conscious planning. Established by royal decree at focal travel nexi, *burhs* either accreted populations as a result of their specific function - Stafford required butchers, bakers and potters for example - or were mandated as the hubs of a vast array of civil functions which accompanied the expansion of royal authority from the 870s onwards. As well as places of safety, *Burhs* became centres of moneying - and as a result of metal craft - of trade and commerce, of the Church, and of civil legal offices. This didn't mean that they instantly garnered a significant urban population, but that the framework was laid for urban development.\n\nVillages were established often as a result of a nearby *Burh* in order to lay greater claim to a territory. As we can see from the case of Stanton in Derbyshire, land was sometimes granted specifically for this purpose. A charter of Æthelflæd grants Stanton, likely in the hope that it would develop into a hinterland for the new *Burh* at Stafford. The Cheshire plain sees rapid colonisation following the re-establishment of the Roman defences of the city by Æthelflæd's army in 907. The phenomenon is seen throughout the Welsh Marches in the late 11th and 12th centuries as Anglo-Norman castles are established as well. As Davies discusses, this wasn't necessarily a formal procedure that had to be officially instigated: nobles seeking to claim territory would be often accompanied by retinues of soldiers, mercenaries, freemen and more adventurous tenants who sought the opportunity - and greater land rights - that a new frontier settlement would bring. Quite often, these settlements would show up organically in the wake of a castle's founding as its security and status attracted adventurous tenants.\n\nOne very noteworthy exception is the city of Carlisle, which grows incredibly quickly in the 12th Century from quite literally nothing, following the establishment of a royal hunting lodge in 1092. A good account can be found in Blanchard's *Lothian and Beyond*. Shortly after the establishment of the royal lodge, Carlisle was found to be an incredibly rich source of silver and grew rapidly into a massive boomtown that became the lynchpin of the North English economy. For the brief period during The Anarchy that it fell under Scottish control, its silver trade paid for the construction of several Scottish castles and monasteries. The extensive silver mines attracted an array of traders from across England, Scotland, Ireland and the Low Countries, and what had been a small mining camp rapidly becomes a thriving trading centre with a large Flemish quarter and several religious communities. The need to protect this new prosperity meant the construction of a large castle by the mid-12th century, while the town's extensive walls were completed while under Scottish tenure. By the Anglo-Scottish wars of 1173 and 1174, Carlisle had, according to Jordan de Fantosme, some of the grandest and most spectacular fortifications in all of North England and Scotland." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cgi3wa/z/eujvygs", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d31vy8/z/f00mqxo" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cup7m0i" ], "score": [ 53 ], "text": [ "Timing and circumstance more than anything. Had war broken out a few years later, the USSR and the French probably would have been soldiering with semi-automatic rifles as their standard issue arm. \n\nThe United States adopted the M1 Garand in 1936, and it entered production a year later in 1937. By the time America entered the war, conversion from the M1903 Springfield had been completed by the US Army (The Marines were slower to replace the Springfield and still used them in the beginning of the war). I start there to point out that the United States was a) an industrial behemoth, b) Remained out of the war until late 1941 and c) Employed a small, professional military during the 1930s, yet it still took them four years to change over. They weren't the only country looking into the possibility, just the only one who was able to do it.\n\nFrance adopted the MAS 36 in 1936 as something of a compromise. Semi-automatic designs had been worked on through the 1930s and earlier even (See the St. Etienne M1917 for instance), and originally they were hoping to adopt a semi-auto by 1940. The MAS-40 would have been adopted had the war not interrupted things, and the MAS-36 would have been seen as nothing more than a short time placeholder. Its design even reflected this, as my understanding is that the receiver imitated the semi-auto designs closely enough that the same machinery could be easily switched from making MAS-36s to MAS-40s.\n\nLikewise the Soviets had been perfecting their own semi-auto designs, first with the problem plagued AVS-36 (which actually was full-auto capable, but lets not quibble!), and then the SVT-38 and SVT-40, the last of which was considered a very solid design, and had gone into production well before Operation Barbarossa. In fact, it was slated to replace the M91/30 Mosin Rifle around that time with production of the latter being scaled down, but again, the exigencies of war meant that the USSR simply couldn't afford to continue with that plan, and instead ramped up production of the Mosin, although the SVT was made in large numbers along side it.\n\nSo what this all is to say is that America wasn't alone in its quest to create a semi-automatic service rifle through the 1920s and 1930s. The shortcomings of the bolt-action was becoming apparent, and other countries looked into the possibility. But the design process was slow (the M1 project dates to the 1910s!) and production doesn't start off with a bang (In the US they were building 20 M1s a day in March of '38, and about 200 per day by Jan. 1940. Official estimate was 145,832 needed for total replacement, obviously much smaller than the European armies. That number of course rose once the peacetime draft began in late 1940). If World War II hadn't happened, or at least their production capabilities considerably greater than in reality maybe (?), at least France and the USSR would have been fielding semi-automatic rifles as their standard service arm by the mid-1940s. \n\nGermany did have limited testing in the '30s of an automatic carbine using an intermediate cartridge, the Vollmer M35, which was actually considered an excellent design, but few recognized how useful it could be, so development died and it wasn't until after the war began, that a domestic semi-auto rifle program began, resulting in the G41/G43. It is also worth nothing that the G41 was considered something of a dud due to rather heavy requirements on the design (There were actually two versions, Mauser's being REALLY bad and Walther's being just mediocre). The G43 was a considerable improvement, building off the Walther design with some influence from the much better Soviet SVTs they had encountered.\n\nEven if development had started earlier though, keep in mind that the German Military was expanding rapidly in the late 1930s, from a small force capped at 100,000 men into one of many millions. Starting up production of an entirely new weapon would have been a rather significant undertaking and hampered their ability to quickly rearm. \n\nAs for other major powers, such as the British or Japanese, I don't know of any serious program that otherwise would have come to fruition prior to the war breaking out. The Japanese late in the war made a small number of Type 4 Rifles, which were little more than M1 Garand clones, but that didn't start until well after war began, and I don't believe were ever issued.\n\nSo anyways, that is the sum of it. If you want a TL;DR, I guess it would be \"Retooling production for a totally new weapon to rearm millions of men with in the middle of a war is kind of hard to pull off\"." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfar1nx" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "hi! Victoria actually was styled [Empress of India](_URL_5_), as well as [Queen](_URL_0_). Here are a few previous threads on the topic ~\n\n[Why were the rulers of the British Empire kings/queens? Why did they not take the title Emperor?](_URL_2_)\n\n[Is the British empire the only one in history to have been ruled by a king/queen? Why didn't they style themselves emperor/empress instead?](_URL_6_)\n\n[Why was the British maritime Empire not officially/legally called an Empire?](_URL_1_)\n\n[Why were British monarchs not referred to as \"emperor\" at the height of the British Empire?](_URL_4_)\n\n[What's up with all the empires in the 19th century?](_URL_3_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Victoria#Titles_and_styles", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ci5bx/why_was_the_british_maritime_empire_not/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1t3pss/why_were_the_rulers_of_the_british_empire/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12en0c/whats_up_with_all_the_empires_in_the_19th_century/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1qydwx/why_were_british_monarchs_not_referred_to_as/", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Victoria#Empress_of_India", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1aac2h/is_the_british_empire_the_only_one_in_history_to/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cfhqmv2" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "According to Boris Rankov's book The Praetorian Guard, they wore white civilian togas. This would actually have made them stand out because by the 1st century it was a highly formal garment (togas are unwieldy; they were not common everyday wear for the Romans, contrary to popular belief). He mentions red tunics could be considered \"parade dress\" and were supposed to give an archaic look, but it is far more likely that the Praetorian guard was equipped just like most other soldiers.\n\nSo, from what I can tell from Rankov's book, they wore white, except for sometimes when they wore red. Not sure if that really helps." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cgi3zan" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "The etymology is as follows:\n\n > Cuckold (n): mid-13c., kukewald, from Old French cucuault, from cocu (see cuckoo) + pejorative suffix -ault, of Germanic origin. So called from the female bird's alleged habit of changing mates, or her authentic habit of leaving eggs in another bird's nest. \n\n > In Modern French the identity is more obvious: Coucou for the bird and cocu for the betrayed husband. German Hahnrei (13c.), from Low German, is of obscure origin. The second element seems to be connected to words for \"ardent,\" and suggests perhaps \"sexually aggressive hen,\" with transferal to humans, but Kluge suggests rather a connection to words for \"capon\" and \"castrated.\" Related: Cuckoldry.\n\nFrom [etymonline](_URL_0_).\n\nMore generally, it's interesting to note that here we have the rare sexual insult against a masculine figure, the implication being that a cuckolded man was incapable of sexually satisfying his wife and so forcing her further afield. \n\nAnother common iteration of the same idea is the idea of a person being \"horned\". This pops up in various places from Shakespeare to the French and Italian rude hand gesture that looks somewhat like \"rock out\" (palm down, index and pinky fingers extended) which means \"I've slept with your wife\", ie. \"you have horns.\"\n\nFor this, the OED gives, under *horn,* ***n***:\n\n > 7. Cuckolds were fancifully said to wear horns on the brow. to give horns to , to graft, plant horns on : to cuckold. The origin of this, which appears in so many European languages, and, seemingly, even in late Greek in phrase κέρατα ποιεῖν τινί (Artemidorus, Oneirocritica II. 12) is referred by Dunger ( Germania XXIX. 59) to the practice formerly prevalent of planting or engrafting the spurs of a castrated cock on the root of the excised comb, where they grew and became horns, sometimes of several inches long. He shows that German hahnreh or hahnrei ‘cuckold’, originally meant ‘capon’.\n\n > 8. to make horns at [French *faire les cornes à*, Italian *far le corna a*] : to hold the fist with two fingers extended like a pair of horns, as an insulting gesture.\n\n" ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "eny7qso" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "This is a very interesting notion, I am from the UK but have a personal (and academic) interest in the American Presidency, so alongside extensive reading, I feel personally able to assist you in understanding this.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe notion that the United States is an elective monarchy no doubt stems from the perceived individual power of the office of POTUS. If we consider the number of traditions associated with the Presidency, such as the playing of Hail to the Chief, the inauguration ceremonies, State Funerals where the casket lies under the rotunda and a service is held in the National Cathedral, the Presidency has become almost as ritualistic as a traditional monarchy. As a Brit myself, I couldn't help but be reminded of a ceremony like the Trooping of the Colour when I watched the coverage of President Bush's funeral last November. Queen Elizabeth II has Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Balmoral (amongst others), he President has the White House, with the Oval Office and the Resolute Desk and Camp David, which are just as significant symbolically. He also has a title, 'Mr. President,' and features on currency, just like the British Monarch, and even has his own day, President's Day on the third Monday in February.\n\nInterestingly enough, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the idea of having a Monarchy in the United States was debated. Supporters of the idea wished to have George Washington installed as the first King, but this did not occur, obviously. Washington is revered in the public consciousness still, his face on currency, the capital bearing his name and indeed, a magnificent monument on the National Mall being constructed in his honour (it was supposed to be more extravagant, but these plans were halted). There were also plans to bury Washington at the centre of the Capitol, but these never came to fruition, with the objection of his wife. Thus, the public veneration Washington in particular is clear, alongside select other Presidents including Lincoln, Jefferson and FDR who have received their own monuments in DC. (A book on this subject would be Kathleen Bartolini-Tuazon's \"George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789: For Fear of an Elective King.\")\n\nI'm not sure I would agree, personally, on the concept of the U.S. being a Monarchy. In the eyes of the public, perhaps, yet from a political science perspective, the real 'power,' lies with the US Congress, the President can only pass Executive Orders by himself, requiring Congress to do much more, including authorise wars. (A good book on this debate is The Imperial Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger or the Presidency and the Constitution by Genovese and Spitzer).\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe United Kingdom, by comparison, despite the attempts of the various Reform Acts from the Victorian and Edwardian Era, has a Parliament comprised of a relatively small slice of society. In the Georgian era, there would be little choice for constituents and only wealthy men were able to vote, keeping the 'power', i.e. the seat, amongst themselves, filling Parliament with their 'type.' This undoubtedly continues, the vast majority of MPs having gone to private schools and elite Universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader of the Labour Party, would be an exception to this, but he does not get favourable treatment from the press. Furthermore, before attempted reforms, seats would pass from father to son, keeping the power in bloodlines. For example, current politicians such as Jacob Rees-Mogg have fathers who were MPs, and David Cameron was a descendant of the prominent Astor family. No doubt this has opened up in recent years, with the first black female MP Diane Abbott still serving, and increasing diversity with individuals such as Sajid Javid or Chukka Umuna. But the Parliament remains disproportionately white and male. \n\nIf we consider more recent British Prime Ministers, although Margaret Thatcher was in office for an extensive period of 11 years from 1979-1990, she attained only 44% of the popular vote at her peak, due to the peculiarities of our electoral system, with its 600+ constituencies and not voting for the individual, but rather, a local MP. Much akin to the frustrations of the electoral college.\n\nWith the examples I've just highlighted, there are clear aspects of a hereditary British Parliament, so no doubt the argument could be made for a hereditary republic existing.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nI can't, nor would any other Historian, be able to say whether this is 'true': it's a historiographical debate, and one that will probably never be resolved. But I hope what I have just written assists your understanding and helps you form your own conclusion." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c6dzki3" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The Hispanic racial castes went (from highest to lowest social status) peninsulares, creoles, mestizo, mulatto, Indian, African. There was (is) a huge gap between creoles and mestizos, but ironically it was the gap between creoles and peninsulares that provided the impetus for the revolutions. They actually developed really specific sub-castes of mestizo based on the fraction of spanish blood. Indians, Africans, and Mulattos really had the short end of the stick. Despite being virtually equally oppressed by white people, Indians still looked down on Africans." ] }

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