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{ "a_id": [ "dr1rm3q" ], "score": [ 15 ], "text": [ "Well we can't be 100% sure what their percentage was since ethanol evaporates and only the residue is left behind, telling us only what the ingredients were (with lots of expensive chemical testing). We do know that brewing techniques didn't change much until the industrial revolution and even then it only changed for larger scale operations. When making a beer like product, a high abv would be about 5-6% without using modern high yield yeast strains. That's also a longer fermentation time though, something like 4-6 days. In many ancient cultures fermentation was more like a 24 hour process, giving an expected abv of about 3%, if that. With mead and other \"fruit wines\", you could expect a somewhat higher average yield since it was a 100% sugar base to begin with and therefore the yeast had more to work with. A modern wine with modern production techniques usually clocks in at about 12-14% abv. A good mead maker can certainly hit the 10-12% range today and honestly, mead making is still done in very traditional styles. I would expect an accomplished mead maker in the viking age to be able to do so as well. If you want to learn more I would recommend How to make mead like a Viking by Jereme Zimmerman. He uses a completely organic, natural process that is as close as possible to ancient texhinques. He also has a variety of very herbal, traditional recipes that would be more akin to what early Nordic cultures were actually drinking. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cs52tv4", "cs544kn" ], "score": [ 4, 6 ], "text": [ "hi! leaving the question of pedophilia for others to tackle, you may be interested in some previous discussions\n\n* FAQ section [Child marriage](_URL_3_)\n\n* [Did Muhammad really marry and have sexual relations with Aisha who was 9 years old?](_URL_0_)\n\nand tangentially, discussions on Aisha's age\n\n* [Age of Aisha (Mohammed wife)](_URL_2_)\n\n* [What calendar did ancient Muslims use?](_URL_1_)", "You seem to be confusing pedophilia with child marriage here. Pedophilia is a psychiatric condition where someone is primarily or exclusively sexually attracted to prepubescent children. There is no indication Muhammad was a pedophile in the modern medical sense. In addition to Aisha, Muhammad married several other women. All of those women were older than Aisha, and some were well into middle age when Muhammed married them. His first wife Khadijah was 40 years old when he married her. Khadijah is notable not only because she was his fist wife, but also because he stayed married to only to her while they were married, and is considered to be his most beloved wife. A pedophile would lose sexual interest in a child once they start puberty and start to mature, yet there is no indication that Muhammad's interest in Aisha dissipated as she matured. In fact she stayed his favorite wife until his death. \n\nIslamic sources also differ on Aisha's exact age. The most widely cited ages come from hadith, but some biographers of the Prophet sometimes put the age of marriage and consummation forward by a couple years. 7th century Arabs didn't really keep strict track of people's ages like we do now. The onset of puberty was considered the passage into adulthood. In Islam, a Muslim is supposed to start praying five times a day, fasting for Ramadan, etc. once they reach puberty. Aisha's age was recorded in hadith not because Aisha's age was notable in and of itself, but because it was important for Muslim politics after Muhammad's death. Since many of Muhammad's wives had been previously married and had children, confusion arose as to which children were actually Muhammad's, and who were children from his wives previous marriages. As I said earlier, Aisha was Muhammad's only “young” wife, and his only wife that was a virgin when they married.\n\nChild marriage has been very common throughout history, with many cultures practicing it. The concept of \"child marriage\" is relatively recent, only coming about in the last century or so. In general, age of marriage was historically defined as being around puberty, usually after a girl's menarche. It certainly wouldn't have been seen as odd amongst Muslims or Arabs at the time, especially since Muhammad was a man of prominence and Aisha's father was a political ally of Muhammad. Islam actually restricted the marriageable age of people to puberty because Pagan Arabs would sometimes marry girls well before they were even 9 years old. Cultures that practiced child marriage would also sometimes differentiate between when a marriage was performed and when a marriage was to be consummated, as we can see here, with the marriage happening earlier and the consummation happening later. " ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1prjap/did_muhammad_really_marry_and_have_sexual/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/34v3qh/what_calendar_did_ancient_muslims_use/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2eofs8/age_of_aisha_mohammed_wife/", "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/marriage#wiki_child_marriage" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "de36k0s" ], "score": [ 10 ], "text": [ "In the Red Army, so called \"trophy teams\" would survey the battlefield after the front line moved on. Their job was to find out which tanks could be salvaged and which ones were a lost cause. A report would be composed with a map of where the tanks are left, what kind of tanks they are, how badly damaged they are, etc. [Here](_URL_0_) is an example of such a report.\n\nTanks were separated into three categories:\n\n* Worthy: No major components of the tank are damaged. Penetrations in the armour, if any, can be sealed with plugs.\n\n* Needs repairs: Some major components are damaged or missing. Penetrations are present, but the breaches are small and spaced far enough apart to not have compromised the overall structural integrity of the plate. \n\n* Unworthy: Burnt out tanks, tanks with significant damage to armour plates, including deformation bad enough to impede normal function of the tank's mechanisms.\n\nWorthy tanks are collected at a field evacuation center to be inspected and repaired. Tanks that need repairs are shipped off to repair factories. Interesting specimens were sent to appropriate institutions to be studied, regardless of their condition. Unworthy tanks were basically scrap. Typically they were not high priority and were abandoned, only to be picked up after the war and cut up/melted down. However, by that time, nobody had the nice maps composed by trophy teams anymore and a number of tanks that were left in hard to reach places. I follow archaeological communities and tanks in various condition are still found once in a while. All the low hanging fruit is long gone though, a lot of what's found these days is more like a pile of fragments than a tank." ] }

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[ "https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/65/25/d1/6525d16b6c92108d45a700edd7e5b47d.jpg" ]

[ [ "http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2015/12/trophy-report.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dig8q14", "digadle" ], "score": [ 6, 4 ], "text": [ "( I'm far from an expert on the Peninsular war but I'll do my best)\n\nNapoleon himself referred to the Peninsular War as 'The Spanish Ulcer'.\n\nThough the Spanish state itself fell with ease, the occupation proved extremely costly for the French. In 1808 the Spanish rebelled. The French lost Valencia and uprisings took place nationally, on a local level. The French Army worked ruthlessly containing the rebellion in Madrid, but the Spaniards won a major victory in Bailen.\n\nMost importantly, consistent resistance from the Spanish helped convinced the British to land their expeditionary force under Wellesley and march on Lisbon. The Spanish military found little real success, however partisan resistance came to be feared and dealt a great blow to French morale over the years.\n\nWhile the partisans saw very few 'major' victories, the war of attrition, combined with the tenacity of Wellesley and his British-Portuguese forces, proved draining on the French occupation. In 1812 Napoleon marched east on Russia, leaving no reserves from which the French could replenish forces in Spain.\n > According to Glover, \"[i]t was these obscure triumphs—a platoon shot down in an ambush, a courier and his message captured as he galloped across the plain—which made possible the orthodox victories of Wellington and his Anglo-Portuguese army and the liberation of Portugal and Spain.\"\n\nOne must imagine the terror of the French: Wellesley winning major victories, partisans cutting throats in the night, and reinforcements were not coming. \n > “Each day saw the murder of several Frenchmen, and I traveled over this assassins’ countryside as warily as if it was a volcano,” recounted General Matthieu Dumas.\n\nAside from the critical rebellion of 1808, I view the resistance more as a component of the perfect storm, rather than the key factor. It served more as a weapon of morale, and often dealt blows to French supply lines and required garrisons be posted in remote areas to maintain control.\n\nSources:\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\nGlover, Michael (2001) [1974]. The Peninsular War 1807–1814: A Concise Military History. Penguin Classic Military History\n\n\n\n", "I would like to add a follow-up question:\n\nSome years ago I visited the (Spanish) Museum of the Army in Toledo. The museum has a very large section dealing with the Peninsular War (*La Guerra de Independencia*) but to my surprise, it focused almost entirely on the efforts of the Spanish army and partisans, with Arthur Wellesley appearing only in one very small, almost grudging exhibit tucked away in the corner. If I recall correctly, that exhibit implied that he spent most of the war hiding in Portugal and only joined the fight once the Spanish had won it.\n\nHow accurate is this picture? Has the role of Wellesley's army been exaggerated in Anglosphere histories, or was that a bias of the museum (which could be attributed either to the fact that it's the Museum of the *Spanish Army*, or to good old national pride)?" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/januaryfebruary/feature/the-spanish-ulcer", "https://www.britannica.com/event/Peninsular-War" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dzr6v4m", "dzrbrtr", "dzrce23", "dzrj80j", "dzry69q", "dztvo6s" ], "score": [ 16, 5, 2, 7, 3, 3 ], "text": [ "At least in Asia, there are a *huge* number of so-called unstudied texts. That can either mean actually truly unstudied, or simply unstudied in English.\n\nOne of the most significant sources of these in China are the local Gazeteers (usually called *zhi* 志). These are accounts, usually on the county level, of the goings on of the area. They became much more important and common in the 19th century, and there was a huge push by the Qing to further encourage patriotism by encouraging the study of the empire starting at the local level. Many of these that have survived the years have done so locked away in archives or libraries or private collections, and most have been inaccessible until recently, if at all. They are incredibly important for what they can tell of outside of official histories, but they're still mostly not something you can access.\n\nLanguage proficiency is a pretty significant issue. It takes a lot of work to be able to read and interpret a lot of what has been recorded in the world, and for the English speaking world, that means a lot of the rest of the world's history has huge chunks which are inaccessible. Even if you read the language, getting access is an entirely different matter depending on the subject and the place where they are stored.\n\nIf you ever hear anyone say something about the sum of all human knowledge being available on the internet, you can be confident that that is very far from the truth. ", "Even for relatively well\\-trodden, modern subjects there is always scope for new discoveries. To take just the most obvious example, many official records are kept secret for varying lengths of time \\(sometimes a century or more\\), so there is always new archival material being made public. Even outside this ongoing process, there is room for discovery. For instance, during my PhD I found some bundles of documents that had been originally miscatalogued by the archivists and had therefore never been accessed by historians before. That's without even touching on material in private collections \\(from private libraries to forgotten boxes of letters sitting in attics\\) that has never been properly catalogued and to which historians have limited or no access.\n\nThis doesn't, of course, mean that there are going to be useful unstudied texts on any given subject, so in that respect it's not surprising to see certain material crop up again and again in scholarship. Finding new material is only one facet of producing original scholarship.", "With regards to official archives, in the absence of legislation like the American FOIA or systematic and scheduled de-classification, historians actually have the issue of not knowing what we don’t know is out there in the archives.", "Consider that most organisations, most companies, most political institutions, educational institutes, etc all have their own archives. Then there's personal archives of private citizens, which do get donated from time to time. Most of them haven't been studied yet - in large parts because many of them aren't very relevant to the subjects people tend to study. It doesn't even have to be new archives, really. Existing archives can grow as well as the result of donations, new discoveries, etc. \n\nI personally did my research for my thesis in a recently unlocked archive that nobody had really studied yet. It was the archive of a newspaper, combined with the personal archive of one of its most prominent editors. It wasn't anything special and I doubt it'll get a lot of future research, but it just happened to fit really well with the research I was doing. I think that's the case for a lot of archives, really. ", "I recently read an interview with a prominent Hungarian historian who deals with XX. century history. She described quite in detail about how hard is it to access Russian archives for non-Russians. Archives that belong to the Defense Ministry and FSB are completely inaccesible making research into soviet foreign and internal affairs very incomplete. Then there are absolutely silly policies, like Foreign Ministry archives only allow 50 pages released per year, or another archive dealing with modern history limits foreign researchers to 100 pages/year requested and any copying needs additional permissions costing 3 euro per(!) page. \n\nSometimes they open up dossiers only to make them restricted a few years later, forcing research projects to stall or be dropped. And lots of decisions to release papers hangson single individuals who might decide on whim or based on personal relations. \n\nTo highlight a couple things, the fate of Axis soldiers who went mia or pow and didn't return is full of blank pages, we don't know the exact background proceedings behind many Soviet decisions, we don't know much about NKVD and KGB operations in the Eastern Block. And to take a huge step back in time, pretty much all Hungarian prehistory happened in what was the USSR, and Hungarian historians simply don't know how much potentially Magyar pre-1991 finds are there lying in some museums and storages.", "To address the specific example you bring up, one reason that these sources continually reappear is because they exist in published format. One doesn't need to go to an archive to read Evliya Çelebi or Katib Çelebi, one simply needs access to a university library or even just the internet. Of course, the reason they are published in the first place is because they are seen as having universal value for the historian. Major chronicles are an essential starting point for any political history of the empire and therefore attract a great deal of attention and most histories have to engage with their interpretive framework to at some degree. They're also limited in number. In my own research I'm drawing on eight or so chronicles, representing basically all that exists (so far as I'm aware) for the mid-seventeenth century, all of which were either published in one form or another or had been edited by scholars at Turkish universities. In contrast, actual archival documents, such as imperial orders, financial registers, or judicial *sicill*s exist in huge numbers and have only limited use for those who are not working on a narrow relevant topic. Examples of these are sometimes published in collections but it would be impractical to do so systematically, the material is just too vast. Scholars who are drawing on new materials for early modern Ottoman history typically do so either using these archival materials, or else the many un- or under-studied literary works housed in manuscript libraries around the Middle East, though above all Istanbul. They do this alongside previously published primary sources such as the above-mentioned chronicles.\n\nAs for why these *specific* chronicles get used over the others - Katib Çelebi and Naima have the advantage of being both chronologically comprehensive and highly detailed. Given how derivative Ottoman works of this nature are, it may seem redundant or an inefficient use of time to many historians to work with shorter, less-detailed works which ultimately don't differ much from what KÇ/Naima says anyway. I personally disapprove of this and think there's much value in exploring their nuances, but a KÇ/Naima and for later decades Silahdar/Defterdar-heavy approach does seem to be fairly common. Evliya Çelebi, on the other hand, is a totally unique source as a highly detailed on-the-ground first-person narrative of an Ottoman traveler, so he attracts a great deal of attention." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ciaop4a", "ciaw499", "cibawde" ], "score": [ 59, 4, 2 ], "text": [ "Sri Lanka was a separate crown colony from the British Raj since the end of the 18th century. Sri Lanka and Burma became seperately independent from India because they had become separate colonies.", "A followup question is why Sri Lanka mattered geopolitically. Wikipedia has one sentence:\n\n > Its geographic location and deep harbours made it of great strategic importance from the time of the ancient Silk Road[9] through to World War II\n\nIf it was access to India, then surely accessing India would be easier than an island offshore. The economy and goods didn't seem to stand out, again with India right next door and having the same exports.", "Since you didnt specify, and /u/sh0rug0ru already gave a good account for the why post-colonialisation, Ill account for pre-independence.\n\n\nThe island of Lanka **was** part of Maurya Empire which spanned a better part of the sub-continent. Following the Mauryan dynasty, you have the Pandyan and Chola dynasties which also occupied large parts of the island. \n\nThere was also a lot of intermarriage and assimilation between the kingdoms present in Lanka and India as well. In fact, the last dynasty of Lanka- the Nayaks- were related to the south Indian Nayaks.\n\nSo, the *island* of Lanka was part of Indian kingdoms at certain points in its history. However, the *Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka* was never a part of India." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cbd8928", "cbdbbbu", "cbdcyqh", "cbdcz52", "cbded8n", "cbdg5pm", "cbdj95e", "cbdjtqi", "cbdl7t3", "cbdnfze", "cbdp0w6" ], "score": [ 58, 26, 3, 39, 13, 4, 13, 6, 5, 2, 5 ], "text": [ "I believe in the dark ages.\n\nOkay, not really...but the early middle ages have been overly redeemed. This was a terrible time to live in western Europe. Cities, the oases of fine living, declined to the point where even large ones were mostly towns and this de-urbanization led to a decline in trade, education, and technology. The peasantry, never having great lives, had their freedom and mobility restricted in late antiquity, a reality only intensified during this period.\n\nThere were great things going on elsewhere, sure. And the traditional portrayal is hopelessly cartoonish and wrong. But this period sort of sucked to live in compared to the ones that bookend it, and we ought not forget that.\n\nedit: grammar", "I believe in a form of diffusionism, with the belief that there is more contact between cultures than many expect. Mainly the pre columbian contats, and heavy trade between different regions of the world. I am not saying that the phoenicians made it to the Americas, but there is a distinct possibility some one besides the Vikings did.", "There was a great book about the first world war called \"The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I\" I thought it was an absolute fantastic read but when I did my research on it, i found not many prominent WW1 historians agreed with it. But I still do, I guess that counts for this thread. \n\nEither way I recommend the book.\n\nEdit: seems to be getting request on what the book was about, basically it says that the Germans had a much more advanced war machine that basically understood that the war was a war of firepower and not manpower, (as was the case in most wars before it). And that they consistently beat the French/British and, had it not been for the arrival of the Americans, who's mere presence after a long fought war, struck a demoralizing blow to Germany and her war effort.", "How about a historically unpopular idea that I *no longer* ascribe to? For years I was convinced that the \"Black Death\" was not caused, at least not in most deadly part, by *Yersenia Pestis*, the bacillus we currently know as \"plague.\" There were good reasons for this- the lethality of it being chief among them. Plague, especially in its *bubonic* form simply doesn't have the kind of mortality rates that we typically see. There are some problems as well with symptomology, disease progression, cycles of plague with weather patterns, etc. The case for *Y. Pestis* being the agent for Justinian's Plague in the 6th century was even less convincing. \n\nAt first, genetic testing only made the picture murkier. The [first senquencing](_URL_0_) (PDF warning) of the genome of victims from the mid 14th century seemed to indicate that the emergence of *Y. Pestis* as an agent capable of infecting humans would have occurred *after* Justinian's Plague. More recent [studies](_URL_1_) have successfully isolated *Y. Pestis* from the bones of victims of the Justinian plague and genotyping confirms that the ancient strains would have been able to infect humans.\n\nIt's a solid case, built on modern science that essentially didn't exist when I first started devouring plague studies.", "Unpopular among the public, or unpopular among historians in general, or unpopular among specialists in my subject? Because I have lots of the former, some of the middle, and few of the latter.", "Personally, I believe in the [Oxfordian](_URL_0_) authorship of Shakespeare's plays. In other words, I believe the plays we attribute to William Shakespeare were actually written by (among others since I do not believe them to be by a singular author) Edward, the 17th Earl of Oxford. \n\nShakespeare himself had no formal education and it is only assumed by historians that he was enrolled as a youth at the New King's School in Stratford. The first play attributed to him appeared around1592. By then he was 28 and was not established as a playwright but rather as an *actor*, having joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men. \n\nAlso, he was known to act in his own plays, something considered unusual given the time constraints for both the playwright and actor occupations of the day. We know this since his name appears on the top of the names of the principle actors \"of all Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies\" in the [First Folio](_URL_1_) published in 1623. \n\nShakespeare retired early from his profession and invested heavily in Stratford, buying large real estate including the second largest property in Stratford as well as two cottages and two farms. While not known how much time exactly he spent in Stratford, it appears to be considerate for someone who apparently had plays attributed to him as late as three years before his death. \n\nYes, there could be assumptions and explanations for his behavior from the period of 1582-1592, but there is no evidence of a formal educaton for him nor is there proof he even enrolled in New King's Grammar School in Stratford. I understand I may be in the minority in this opinion and welcome any responses to it. ", "The Aquatic Ape theory. As opposed to the common belief that ancestors of Homo Sapiens walked out of the jungle and onto the savannah, I believe that the primates that would eventually become humans spent a substantial amount of time as a primarily aquatic animal. It explains our hairlessness (SOME of us' hairlessness), our bipedalism, our ability to control our breath (and subsequently speak), and our subcutaneous fat layer. None of these things are present in even our most similar simian relatives.\n\nAlso, and I hesitate to even say this as it's going to make me sound like a crack-pot, but I believe there may have been a (relatively) advanced seafaring civilization concurrent with the Egyptian Old Kingdom. I believe that civilization was decimated by a volcanic eruption or subsequent landslide induced tsunami, possibly the same one that caused the Great Flood. I believe that civilization is the source of the mysterious and antagonistic sea-people referred to in Egyptian history. It may have been the Minoans, and the reach of the Minoan Empire was greater than we realize, or it may have been an earlier, less understood civilization with close cultural ties to the Minoans. They MAY (I can't stress that enough, MAY) even have been transatlantic. I don't want to use the A word, but I believe that unknown civilization is likely the source of the story.*\n\n*-Before anyone attacks me for this, I am completely open to having my mind changed with further knowledge about this. I welcome any Ancient Mediterranean expert's input on this.", "Only unpopular depending on who you talk to, but I believe in the relationship between the Lost Colony (Roanoke Colony) and the Lumbee Indian tribe. The tribe itself traces their heratage back to the colony, with many of its members having European last names and physical characteristics. ", "I do not believe Alexander-The-Great's reputation lives up to the man. As said Adrian Goldsworthy, he won the persian empire in basically 3 pitch battles.\nI mean, he was considered the greatest general of all time and by some he still is.", "I believe that Richard III was quite a nice guy, and that a lot of the shit he gets comes from Shakespearean propaganda.", "Jesus existed. I know this is a \"accepted theory\" but when I say it for some reason people lose their shit. " ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://izt.ciens.ucv.ve/ecologia/Archivos/ECO_POB%202011/ECOPO6_2011/Bos%20et%20al%202011.pdf", "http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1003349" ], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship", "http://doyle.lib.muohio.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/wshakespeare&CISOPTR=45&CISOSHOW=0" ], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dsmngs4" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "The French Parlements, although etymologically the same as Parliament, were not the same politically. They were local courts and legislatures, more similar to the English shire system than to Parliament. In the US system, they most closely resemble state governments, although that's a very tenuous comparison. Regardless, the King repeatedly tried to reform taxation and was repeatedly blocked by these local governments. This was a problem as France was undergoing fiscal and social crisis at the time, and taxes would alleviate both.\n\nNone of the Parlements told him to call the Estates-General. The King, frustrated by the failure to implement his reforms, called the Assembly of Notables. This was a separate body, where the King appointed a bunch of people from all over the place to advise him. But he got to appoint them, so he could skew things in his favor. He asked them for a constitutional way to implement his reforms (with the unspoken understanding this meant getting the Parlements to comply or getting around them).\n\nPerhaps he was hoping they would endorse his tax plan and give him the political capital to force it on them. Maybe he was hoping they would consider themselves to have the authority to modify how local government functioned. Maybe he was hoping he would create a bunch of political allies by giving them this honor, since many of them sat in local Parlements. They would then push it through Parlement. This is not entirely clear, because various people all argued for each of these outcomes. Maybe it was all of them.\n\nWhat is clear is that it didn't work. The Assembly of Notables advised the King that the only way to force something on the Parlements was the Estates-General. It was the Estates-General that was most politically similar to the English Parliament. The Estates-General had not been called in a long time but it remained a constitutionally relevant entity. The King had to respect the constitution, in that there were institutions other than the King with rights and privileges. But the Estates-General, with the King, was virtually omnipotent. (As was English Parliament when the King assented.) They could have levied any taxes they pleased. They could have taken any other measures to alleviate the crisis as well.\n\nBut that's the issue: they're omnipotent and could take *any other measures*. And when the King's approval isn't forthcoming, they can start to pressure him to do things he doesn't want to. We know the French King was acutely aware that the strengthened 17th century Parliament in England had led to civil war, the death of Charles I, the dethroning of James II, the end of the Stuart dynasty, and reduced the King of England to a much less powerful person. The Royal Ministry feared reform that would (eventually) lead to either constitutional monarchy or, in the worst case, revolt and the death of the King.\n\nBut the social and fiscal crisis was so acute the King decided to do it anyway. And... well, the doomsayers were right, in the end." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cdnx6i6" ], "score": [ 78 ], "text": [ "There's a lot of confusion about the \"reality\" or otherwise of Troy, and it stems from thinking about it back-to-front. This is the curse of Schliemann: Schliemann *wanted* everyone to think of mythical Troy first, and only then wonder whether it was \"real\". But it's completely barse ackwards. To get it right, we need to ignore Schliemann's propaganda campaign, focus on what we *know* first, and *then* work towards questions about the relationship with the myths.\n\nSo, to do it the right way round: the site in NW Turkey now known as \"Troy\" is most certainly accurately named, since it was inhabited continuously from the late 8th century BCE until ca. 1000 CE. We have many, many contemporary writers telling us about it, and heaps of Hellenistic and Roman era evidence about the city. Its most common name was *Ilion*, with *Troia* as a secondary name, but the two were always equated with one another during this time. There is no doubt whatsoever that it is the site known to the Greeks and Romans as Ilion, and there never has been.\n\nOnly *after* we've established that does it make sense to go on to ask the *secondary* questions -- and there are several secondary questions to ask. Again, it makes sense to work from the more historical questions towards the mythical stuff. So:\n\n1. **Did Troy exist in the Late Bronze Age?** Certainly yes; the archaeological evidence from Ilion shows that there was a decent-sized Bronze Age city there, comparable to Gordion in size, which was at its height ca. 1290 BCE, and then gradually dwindled away to nothing by ca. 950 BCE.\n\n2. **Was it called Troy in the Late Bronze Age?** Almost certainly yes -- provided we substitute the more common name, Ilion, and allow for changes to names from one language to another. There is very little doubt that Bronze Age Ilion was the site of the city that the Hittites called *Wilusa* or *Wilusiya*, which corresponds rather tidily with an early Greek form of \"Ilion\". One Hittite text hints at an association with a place called *Taruisa*, which may or may not be the Hittite name that Greek *Troia* came from. We don't know what the people of Wilusa/Ilion called themselves, because we don't know what language they spoke at that time. But northern Asia Minor was certainly dominated by Anatolian culture, not Greek, so it's going to have been an Anatolian language: perhaps Luvian, though an early form of Phrygian isn't impossible, and it might be a language that we just don't know anything about.\n\n3. At last, the question you really want: **Is the real Ilion to be equated in any meaningful way with the mythical Troy?** Now that we've got the real stuff cleared up, the long-and-short is: it's a moot question. A few respectable experts think that the answer is likely to be \"yes\"; most would say \"no\". The reasons why \"no\" is the more popular answer boil down to the complete lack of anything at all to corroborate the myths. \n \n (The existence of a real city doesn't mean the reality of a myth; if it did, we'd have to accept the reality of Thebes as evidence that Oedipus really did kill the Sphinx, or the reality of Jerusalem as conclusive evidence that Jesus was the son of God. That way madness lies.)\n\nBased on that last answer, your third, fourth, and fifth questions are pretty easy:\n\n* **Achilleus and Hektor**: there's nothing to substantiate their existence. In particular, note that Hektor's name has a Greek suffix, and many other Trojans in the myths have Greek names too (Alexandros, Antenor, Euphorbos, Andromache, Astyanax, etc), pointing to the name -- and, very likely, the character -- being a Greek creation.\n\n* **What happened to the city?** This is a straightforward historical question. See above: the Bronze Age city gradually dwindled away to nothing by 950 BCE, and it was resettled by Greeks a couple of hundred years later.\n\n* **Where did the survivors go?** Well, we never took the step of substantiating the reality of a war; but it's the same situation as with Achilleus and Hektor -- there's nothing to substantiate a war. Wilusa/Ilion wasn't destroyed at the end of the Bronze Age, it just gradually faded away. Though there's some evidence of fire ca. 1190 BCE, that doesn't equate to evidence of a city being destroyed by enemies (we know from textual evidence that the city *was* ransacked by the Hittites a couple of hundred years before that, but there's no archaeological trace); and even if it *was* attacked by enemies, there's nothing to indicate who those enemies were. It's best to regard the violence at Troy (if violence it is) as part of a wave of destruction that afflicted many, many, many cities in Mycenaean Greece, Anatolia, Cyprus, and Ugarit at the same time. Anyway, if there's no evidence of a war, that means there isn't anything to say about survivors.\n\nNone of this diminishes the importance and cultural impact of the myth. It's believed by some experts that in the 7th-6th centuries there was a clan of Aineidai in Phrygia who claimed to be descended from the hero Aineias (Aeneas); later on the Romans claimed Aeneas as a founding figure too, just as Beneventum claimed Diomedes, Naples claimed the Sirens, and Tusculum claimed Odysseus' son Telegonos. The myth had a huge impact on historical developments, regardless of whether there was a real war or not.\n\nFor more info [you'll probably find this part of our FAQ interesting.](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/antiquity#wiki_the_trojan_war" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fnkkzsx" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ "The reference to Aboriginal Australians trading with and visiting China in Pascoe's *Dark Emu* is a reference to the work of author Gavin Menzies, which is unfortunate because Menzies has a particularly poor reputation. [Our FAQ](_URL_2_) on /r/AskHistorians has some posts about Menzies' claims, and generally Menzies has a terrible reputation amongst historians as a fantasist (e.g., as is explained in more detail [here](_URL_1_) by /u/EnclavedMicrostate). It is ...unfortunate that Pascoe has read *1421* and discussed its theories without a Dead Sea's worth of salt.\n\nThat said, the basic thesis of Pascoe's book - that Aboriginal Australians interacted with the environment around them in ways that are complex and show enormous insight and intelligence that make it seem more like 'farming' rather than 'hunter-gathering' to 21st century readers - is not in doubt, and Pascoe is often more or less popularising research done by careful academics and is thus mostly on solid ground. But there's [a fantastic review here](_URL_0_) by /u/djiti-djiti of the accuracy of the book, which does discuss the way that the book can be hyperbolic and polemical at times, and the way that it sometimes obscures the differences between different Aboriginal groups and their techniques for growing and finding food. \n\nIn regards to Menzies' claims about Zheng He's fleets hitting Australia, it's not entirely absurd on the face of it; certainly Northern Australia is closer to China than some of the places He apparently did get to. However, there's simply nothing close to conclusive evidence for it. In a 2006 article in *Teaching History*, Cathie Clement points out that Menzies and other crackpots are kind of Lewis Carroll 'Humpty Dumpty's - they look at (profoundly ambiguous) evidence, and (selectively) see exactly what they want to see - no more, no less. \n\nOne bit of evidence used by Menzies is some Kimberley wandjinas (artistic representations by local indigenous people of the Kimberley area) that appear to depict people dressed in clothing unlike that of the local indigenous people, that survive in sketches made by a Lieutenant Grey in the 1830s. Kenneth Gordon McIntyre (another crackpot) sees in those Kimberley wandjinas a churchman who might have accompanied a Portuguese on an early secret mission. Menzies sees in those wandjinas a Chinese sailor, unsurprisingly. Other crackpots with other theories to promote see Sumerians, and so forth. The possibility that the local indigenous people are simply doing artworks that represent their own culture in symbolic ways, or that they represent later, known contact with non-indigenous peoples, is never entertained.\n\nOther evidence Menzies uses to assert that the Chinese visited Australia is related to ambiguous island land masses on early maps which, in all likelihood according to Clement, are more likely to represent other islands as diverse as Sri Lanka, Java and New Guinea and which don't represent the Australian coastline very convincingly in any case. A Chinese figurine found in Darwin likely dates to the 18th century or 19th century according to actual archaeologists, despite Menzies' claims in *1421* that it was put there by Zheng He. Etc.\n\nWhere Chinese people and indigenous Australians *did* in a way have contact pre-European settlement, however, was in the trepang (sea cucumber) trade. [As explained in excellent detail here](_URL_3_) by AskHistorians contributor /u/mikedash, there was a route of trade whereby Makassar traders (from Sulawesi in modern Indonesia) came to northern Australia (specifically, Arnhem Land and the northern Kimberleys) and interacted with indigenous Australians as part of a flourishing trade in sea cucumbers which, after being dried, made their way to China where they were considered a delicacy. Because of this trade, as Dash details in his post, there is evidence that people from northern Australia did journey to Makassar (albeit at a much later time than 1421 - the trepang trade probably doesn't predate the European discovery of Australia, though it does predate the Sydney settlement). The article by Clement I mentioned before doesn't mention this claim within Menzies' book, but it's possible, I suppose, that Menzies' claims that Aboriginal people had visited China is a garbled version of the actual facts about northern Australians finding their way to Sulawesi." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c42hh4/is_the_book_dark_emu_black_seeds_by_bruce_pascoe/erx61z2/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/buqqdg/many_well_known_european_travelers_like_marco/epgnhvz/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14okr7/did_zheng_he_ever_reach_the_americas/", "https://mikedashhistory.com/2016/10/31/dreamtime-voyagers-australian-aborigines-in-early-modern-makassar/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c9cvr1e", "c9czh7b" ], "score": [ 9, 3 ], "text": [ "The slinky and silly putty were extremely popular upon their introduction into WWII/Post-WWII America. Below I've attached a link with some great commericals from the period as well, (in addition to the fact that it briefly explores their discovery and production). _URL_0_", "I'm doing a bit of HEMA at the moment and one of the wrestling 'games' from the Master Fabian von Auerswald is ['Ringen im Grublen'](_URL_0_). \n\nThis little bit of play improves balance, closing to grapple and *hacken* or leg take downs. " ] }

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[ [ "http://www.goodnewsweekly.ca/2010/11/most-popular-toys-from-1940s.html" ], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQQsHKtC5Sg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d2dktxa" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "No, it is not safe to say that. Applying mental disorders to people who were not around to be psychoanalyzed never works well." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cth46gg" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Copying from a [previous similar question](_URL_0_) I answered on the finding of his tomb:\n\nPrior to this all of the tombs that had been discovered had already had significant robbing, likely centuries prior. While there was evidence that someone had been in KV62 post-closing of the tomb, very little was affected. Not only did this mean a treasure trove of artifacts that were buried to go with the King in his afterlife, but the body and sarcophagus were completely in tack as well, pretty much the holy grail.\n\nThe tomb itself was unusual as Tutankhamen died unexpectedly young and his burial place had not yet finished construction. It's believed that this was actually the tomb intended for his Grand Vazier, Ay. It was such a rushed job of burial that the items were in great disarray, a chariot cut apart to fit inside even. Prior to the discovery of the site in 1922, the location of his burial was under great debate. It was believed to have been found at KV54 where some artifacts dating to his time were found. It wasn't until Carter decided in a last effort to dig in an area covered with huts used by builders from a later kings burial that the real tomb was found.\n\nIt gained notoriety due to not only the contents of the tomb, but popular stories that there was a curse upon it, slowly killing off all that had disturbed it. Lord Carnarvon, Carters benefactor, died shortly after the room with the sarcophagus was opened and every subsequent death in the team (for various reasons) was considered to support this theory." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/393z8e/why_was_king_tuts_discovery_such_a_big_deal/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ciapdxw" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The Canadian Bill of Rights had existed since 1960 and provided many of the same features. However, it was less significant since it was a bill rather than a constitutional amendment like the Charter was. A bill may be deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court or simply modified or repealed by the legislative branch at will. The Charter however is entrenched in the Constitution making it harder to change and a more robust bulwark for Canadian human rights (subject to the occasional whims of good ol' S33!)\nSource: _URL_0_\nDavid Dyzenhaus, Sophia Reibetanz Moreau, Arthur Ripstein. Law and Morality: Readings in Legal Philosophy (Toronto Studies in Philosophy), 2007. " ] }

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

{ "a_id": [ "dfb55yp" ], "score": [ 84 ], "text": [ "The electors of the Holy Roman Empire, and other aspects of the empire's structure, were not finalized until 1356 in the Golden Bull of the Imperial Diets of Metz and Nuremberg. Previously, the method of electing an emperor, as I understand it, was not standardized from election to election, and, in this time period, the House of Habsburg were not yet consistently elected emperor. The house that was relatively consistently elected was the House of Luxembourg. The dissolution of Luxembourg's senior branch did not occur until the 15th century. In addition to having held the title King of the Romans, they also, at times, were kings of Hungary and Bohemia and counts of various counties. In 1356, their power was largely challenged by two houses: Habsburg and Wittelsbach, who ruled both the Palatinate on the Rhine and Bavaria. The omission of Austria from the rank of electors was controversial at the time, due to their rivalry with Luxembourg. Wittelsbach was granted an electorship, but it was not attached to Bavaria (their richest and oldest ancestral lands) but to the Palatinate. This was partly due to Emperor Charles IV's rivalry with Louis IV, who was the previous emperor and was of the Bavarian Wittelsbachs. The Wittelsbachs were not happy with this, as Bavaria was one of the original duchies in the empire and was certainly the primary holding of their house. \n\nIt is important to note that the title of Elector came with certain codified privileges and laws. The most important one here is primogeniture. Without this, eventually Bavaria was subjected to dynastic fragmentation. In response to Austria's snub in 1356, their Duke, Rudolf IV, had a forgery made. This forgery was called the *Privilegium Maius* and was purportedly issued by Frederick Barabarossa himself granting Austria the title of Archduchy. This came along with privileges that suspiciously resembled those of an elector, including primogeniture inheritance. \n\nOf course, in 1526 the king of Bohemia/Hungary died in battle with the Ottomans. The Habsburgs inherited Hungary (or what was left of it) by a marriage contract with the slain King Louis II Jagiellon and the Bohemian nobles elected the Archduke Ferdinand von Habsurg as King. This meant that the Electorate of Bohemia passed into Habsburg hands. The Habsburgs attempted to increase their hold on Bohemia in the next decades, resulting in tensions that culminated with the Defenestration of Prague and the start of the first phase of the Thirty Years War. This was ended in 1620 with the Bohemians' defeat and largely quelled notions of Bohemian autonomy.\n\nIn short, they were not Electors because they had not yet achieved the hold on the Holy Roman Empire that they would enjoy in the subsequent centuries and a rival house sought to diminish and contain their power when Electors were selected.\n\nI'm just a hobbyist, so here are my sources. I believe that they are considered suitable, but the professionals here would have a better idea of that. Others also probably have more depth and expertise.\n\nHeer, Friedrich, trans. Janet Sondheimer. 1968. The Holy Roman Empire . New York: Federick A. Praeger Publishers\n\nPánek, Jaroslav, Tůma Oldřich, *et al.* 2009. A History of the Czech lands. Prague\n\n " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e78qfe3" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ "Are you asking for a percentage? Or an answer like \"a lot\" or \"a little?\" I don't like the way you've framed the question, but the answer is: \"a lot.\" Myth surrounded the ancient Greek world; it pervaded life, informed it, complicated it. It was a basis for behaviors of all sorts, a reference point, a sort of moral code, and a legitimacy tool. \n\nThe leisure world of the Greeks was wholly dependent on mythology. The drama performances our 4th century Greek sees are mythology; so are the lyric poems, and the epic recitals. The architecture all around is decorated with mythic motif, and its [interpretation depends on a broad knowledge](_URL_0_) of myth for understanding. Was it possible to go through life without knowing any myths? I suppose, but you'd have to work *very* hard at it. You were hearing myths, and internalizing them, when you were a toddler. \n\nMythology also infused and instructed ritual observance, which occupied a gigantic amount of mental territory in the average Greek person's life. Myths define and illustrate the roles of the gods and heroes; they demonstrate accepted and deviant standards of behavior in everyday life; they mirror and critique human behavior in archetypal, fable form; and they explain and canonize ritual behavior. Why am I sacrificing this fawn to Artemis? Why I am drowning this piglet in the Saronic Gulf in honor of Demeter and Persephone? I'm doing it no matter what, because ritual participation is key to my existence as an ancient Greek individual; but why? The answers are tied up in the mythology surrounding those gods, and those corresponding festivals. \n\nThere were many myths. Modernity probably doesn't know even half of all the \"Greek myths\" that existed in antiquity, and some were obviously more prevalent than others. Everybody knew about Zeus' many extra-marital exploits, with their fantastical metamorphoses, but we can probably assume that not everybody knew the particulars of the contest between Athena and Poseidon for who would hold sway in Athens (the fact that Athena gave an olive tree and Poseidon gave a salty spring). Many myths were local like this, and in their local environments they played powerful and important roles which were not as relevant on the other side of the sea. For instance: many local myths legitimized oligarchic claims to power, or reinforced leading families' claims to territory or political authority. Aristocratic families in Attica claimed moldy old Mycenaean tholos tombs as burials of their heroic ancestors, and offered cult to those imagined ancestors. They certainly had myths to tell the stories of those forgotten heroes, which they no doubt doggedly repeated to their fellow citizens. Likewise, individual *poleis* had their own local tales of common gods, like what Artemis got up to at Ephesus, or what Apollo did at Delphi, or what Theseus did at Athens. The identities of many *poleis* were intimately tied up in ther mythic founding event, or the like.\n\nWe often get, in Greek literature, a very \"meta\" look at how myth worked. When Achilles gets his sex slave taken away from him and decides to sulk in his tent instead of helping to fight in the Trojan War, the men who come to convince him to shape up use a myth to show him the error of his ways (Meleager, another hero who had refused to fight because he was pouting). The myth illustrates life and provides a sort of framework of consequences to behavior. In this way, the iconic nature of Greek myth (with human-like deity) is useful and adaptable.\n\nSo no, there weren't very many Greeks who didn't know the myths. No one knew them all, but most almost certainly knew most in one way or another. They weren't just stories to memorize (although that was part of Greek education to be sure), but rather a sort of basic fabric upon which Greek life was structured.\n\nAs always, a fairly approachable source for Greek religious questions is Bremmer's *Greek Religion* (1994).\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.crestonhall.com/mythology/images/0500/731.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cx8vnqs" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "1. If you are considering going on for your PhD, think VERY, VERY CAREFULLY about whether you want this paper and research and argument out there under your name. I don't doubt that it's a great paper--but three years into a PhD program, *you* might.\n\n2. Do you have a target journal in mind? Most basically, different journals have different formatting and length rules. So you'd want to follow the ones of the journal you've chosen. \n\n3. A step beyond that, you can get a sense from reading each journal about the kind of articles they prefer. Is your topic more one for *Church History* or *Journal of Ecclesiastical History*? Did you write about an author that *Gutenburg Jahrbuch* likes to publish articles on, or do you need to go with the *Sixteenth Century Journal* and cross your fingers? Like that. \n\n4. Does your old adviser have e-mail? Get in contact. You'll probably want their read through before you submit, in any case, and if you talk now I bet they could help you fix in on a primary journal to submit to, and then a backup for if the first one rejects it.\n\nGood luck!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c9fhlj5", "c9fhuah" ], "score": [ 7, 7 ], "text": [ "The idea of going to the moon is directly tied to the arms race that arose between The USA and the U.S.S.R. after WWII. The technological competition between the only two superpowers at the time at first focused on ballistic missile technology. 1955 became a watershed when both the USA and U.S.S.R. announced their intention to launch artificial satellites. On October 4th, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik; the first artificial satelite.\n\n This action spurred American paranoia and propaganda about both the intention and capabilities of Sputnik and the Russian space program. With this type of political pressure, US President Eisenhower created what would later come to be known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics Space Administration) in 1958. It also, by the way, led directly to the creation of the National Defense Education Act; where anyone who desired to pursue a a degree in math or science had their tuition paid for; something of remarkable note with all the current political discussions about public education. But I digress...\n\nThe Russians again beat the US; becoming the first nation to put a man in space on April 12th, 1961. This led immediately to calls in the US for massive investments in the US space program. The initiation of these two dueling space programs is vital to understanding precisely *why* modern scientific energies were focused on travelling to the moon.\n\n\nBy May 25th, 1961, President John F. Kennedy had decided that it should be the United States of America to land a man on the moon. In a joint session of congress President Kennedy announced his decision:\n\n\"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.\"-[JFK-May 25, 1961](_URL_2_)\n\nWhile NASA's Apollo Program had been initiated under Eisenhower, after Kennedy's speech, it was provided with this new primary and instrumental goal. Kennedy focused on this very goal in his now famous address at Rice University on September 12th, 1962. [Here is an excerpt](_URL_0_) Wasn't Kennedy such a great orator?! Can I just take a moment to mention that?! Anyways, once the initiative was underway, (the objective was to get there by the end of the decade) enormous effort and public funds were allocated to its pursuit. The moment came for America on July 20th, 1969, with these iconic [words and images](_URL_1_).", "I'd make the case that serious consideration begins with \"From the Earth to the Moon\", published by Jules Verne in 1865. While he was wrong in his approach (he postulated a large gun to launch his manned projectile), he did make the effort to conduct the mathematical calculations to see if it would be possible.\n\nTchaikovsky in 1902 was inspired to analyze and rebut Verne's conclusions about a voyage to the moon in his advocacy of rocketry." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g25G1M4EXrQ", "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCt1BwWE2gA", "http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/xzw1gaeeTES6khED14P1Iw.aspx" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dgbiuow", "dgcadcf" ], "score": [ 6, 9 ], "text": [ "To add to the question, to what extent did the Anglo-Saxon culture and language actually die? How much of the emergent English culture was a fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultures?", "'Anglo-Saxon culture' is a fuzzy term that's hard to talk about as being just one thing. England before the Norman conquest wasn't culturally homogeneous. Different regions spoke different dialects of Old English, and the peasantry lived in local communities whose traditions and histories were varied. There many 'Anglo-Saxon' Englands, many 'small worlds' that could get along with each other, but which were only very loosely tied together into anything we might today recognize as a nation or culture. Think about how many different accents and cultural quirks there are in modern England today, and then imagine much less unity there was 1000 years ago when there was no television, no radio, no public education, no printing press, and no strong central government to tie things together. Which of these small valleys had the 'real' or most genuinely 'Anglo-Saxon' culture? This label, like all historical generalizations, is very vague, and refers to many diverse (rather than one unified) things.\n\nWhen the Normans arrived, their approaches to local cultures varied. In many cases, they replaced the Anglo-Saxon elites with people tied to William's court. These new Norman rulers brought new cultural practices with them. They hunted differently, ate different diets, and--most famously--built castles across the landscape to mark their control. Yet they also worked very hard to fit in with the local population. It's easier to rule people who recognize your right to rule them, so Norman elites in, for example, Yorkshire went out of their way to express power in the visual language of their Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Anglo-Norman burial effigies in the North from the late eleventh century look very much like late Anglo-Saxon burials, because the new elite were trying to blend in with the existing systems of power.\n\nAcross England, accommodation between the new elites and the people they ruled was the norm. There were never enough Normans to stamp out the Anglo-Saxon population. Instead, the new elites put themselves at the head of English society, and conquered and conquerors shaped each other. Remember, also, that there were many other factors that drove cultural change in this period. England's economy was changing rapidly in response to growing urbanization and trade before the Norman conquest, and both Anglo-Saxons and Normans were swept up in these changes, and their cultures transformed. If the Normans had never conquered England, 'Anglo-Saxon' cultures and societies would still have been hard to recognize by the end of the middle ages from how they looked in 1065.\n\nThe language we speak today evolved out of Old English. The Middle English spoken in the 14th century in the west midlands is the bastard child of English and Norman French; some linguists have called it a creol. Other dialects of Middle English (like those in which Gawain and the Green Knight or Piers Ploughman were written) have more Old English than French in them -- but they slowly died out because the West Midlands' dialect proved more successful and, when the printing press arrived, became the language of print media. Old English never stopped being used, per se--rather, it evolved, and we're still speaking one of the tongues it turned into (I'm not a linguist, but I *believe* the last text written in something linguists would identify as Old English was from the 12th century).\n\nAs far as calling England 'England' instead of 'Anglo-Saxon,' this actually happened during the late Anglo-Saxon period. England is Angle-land, the land of the Angles, ie of the Anglo-Saxons.\n\nSo, when did Anglo-Saxon culture die? This question is kind of like the paradox of the Ship of Theseus. Theseus had a ship, described by Plutarch 2000 years ago, that had been repaired so many times that every board in its hull had been replaced at least once. Plutarch asked, if all the boards have been replaced, is it still the same ship? And if it is the same ship, what would we call a ship that we built from the worn-out pieces of the original if we were to gather them all up again and build a second ship? Which would be the real ship of Theseus? Anglo-Saxon cultural change is like this. The culture was never stamped out, but it changed, and eventually those changes ended up where modern England is today. Along the way, it picked up a lot of new pieces -- French language from the Normans, sugar from the West Indies, curry from Pakistan, etc, and things like Old English became unrecognizable as they evolved. Does that mean that English culture today is something fundamentally different from 'Anglo-Saxon' culture? Or is it still 'Anglo-Saxon', just with the old, worn-out planks replaced along its journey into the present?\n\nOf course, how we answer the question above often comes down to politics. You may have noticed that white nationalists tend to care more about England's 'Anglo-Saxon'-ness, because it helps them argue that England's people ought to be white, and its traditions Germanic; while those who favor an open society and ties with Europe will point to the Anglo-Saxon era as a time of migration and cultural change, and say that ongoing migration to England is a continuation of that legacy--ie, the fact that curry is now a staple of the English diet is proof that the 'Anglo-Saxon' culture of migration is still alive and well. Which is more historically 'true'? There is no scientific answer to this question, and whether or not you believe Anglo-Saxon culture is alive or dead depends on what you think was 'Anglo-Saxon' England's most defining cultural practice. Which cultural practices from the early middle ages made 'Anglo-Saxon' England 'Anglo-Saxon', and how much do those practices have to change before you think they're dead?" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "drbxuu8" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "For medieval history you can try [The Medieval Review](_URL_0_) to find some reviews. You can also search at [Bryn Mawr Classical Review](_URL_3_).\nIf you can read german i can highly recommend [Sehepunkte](_URL_1_) and [Hsozkult](_URL_2_). \nI hope this answer can help you." ] }

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[ [ "https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tmr", "http://www.sehepunkte.de/", "https://www.hsozkult.de/review/page", "http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/index.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e7c7zj0" ], "score": [ 27 ], "text": [ "There have been a number of genetic studies comparing modern dog populations with archaeological remains of dogs. However, even before these studies the conventional archaeological wisdom was that the Paleoindian people who populated the Americas brought dogs with them from eastern Asia. The reasoning was that the earliest domesticated dog remains in eastern Asia far predated the peopling of the Americas, and so whichever populations moved into the Americas likely already had dogs. \n\nGenetic testing has more or less confirmed this suspicion, that east Asian dog populations are closely related to the earliest dogs found in the Americas. For instance, the oldest dog remains in the Americas (from the Koster site in Illinois) are genetically quite similar to a number of dog remains found at Zhokov Island in the arctic, off the coast of eastern Siberia (Leathlobhair et al. 2018). In the broader story of dog domestication, both this study and a number of earlier studies (including most recently Frantz et al. 2016) indicate that dogs fall broadly into two groups, suggesting independent domestication in two regions of the Old World. From Leathlobhair et al. 2018: \n\n > Studies of nuclear genome data have identified two modern clades of global dogs: an East Asian clade (including dingoes) and a Western Eurasian clade (including European, Indian, and African dogs)\n\nThe exact relationships between these groups is unclear, and there may have been significant intermixing of the east and west Asian dog populations due to human movements (for instance, movements of people across central Asia introducing east Asian dog genes into west Asian dog populations). Likewise, as demonstrated by the Koster case and testing of a number of other archaeological dog remains, New World dogs prior to European contact cluster most closely with this East Asian clade. \n\nHowever, there was likely pretty significant divergence between this East Asian clade and the dog populations that ended up in the Americas, due to the isolation of these two populations following the original peopling of the Americas. There may have been a second introduction of dogs into the New World by paleo-Inuit people more recently (the last few thousand years), and archaeological remains of Arctic dogs in Alaska from this more recent period are quite similar genetically to Arctic dogs from Siberia. Likewise, while the people of the Americas did not domesticate dogs, there was certainly continued manipulation of dog genetics in the Americas, including the possible introduction of some coyote DNA into American dog breeds (see Leathlobhair et al. 2018). \n\nFinally, these genetic studies have also demonstrated that modern dog breeds in the Americas are largely descendants of the West Asian clade of dogs. The introduction of West Asian dogs in the last 500 years has largely replaced indigenous dog populations, such that even breeds which are known archaeologically as New World breeds (like chihuahuas) are in the present actually from this West Asian stock. As such, although modern chihuahuas morphologically resemble pre-contact chihuahuas, they are not genetically related. Most likely, these pre-contact breeds were replicated by breeding Eurasian stock following the replacement of pre-contact dog breeds with Eurasian dogs. The only possible exceptions are some arctic breeds (like malamutes) and Carolina dogs, though in both cases there isn't a clear-cut relationship with pre-contact dog breeds (probably because of intermixing with West Asian dogs). \n\n**Sources:**\n\nFrantz, Lauren A. F. 2016. Genomic and Archaeological Evidence Suggest a Duel Origin of Domestic Dogs. *Science*, 352(6290):1228-1231. \n\nLeahtlobhair, Maire Ni, et al. 2018. The Evolutionary History of Dogs in the Americas. *Science*, 361(6397):81-85. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dl1t3kt", "dl1ucb2", "dl4kpbw" ], "score": [ 29, 21, 2 ], "text": [ "The simple answer is that the Nazis viewed them as nonconformist. Jehovah's Witnesss are opposed to military service on two grounds: 1) it violates the Bible's command not to kill and 2) they believe that loyalty to the State has its limits, I.e. people should obey the basic laws of the land EXCEPT where they see a contradiction between the State's laws and the laws of God (according to the Bible). For example, if the State passed a law saying it was illegal for Jehovah's Witnesses to worship (as Russia just recently did) they would not obey that law, deeming it inferior to the higher law of God.\n\nBeing opposed to military service in Nazi Germany was a big no-no. Also, anything other than absolute loyalty to the Hitler regime was punishable by persecution regardless of who was seen as disloyal.\n\nThe Nazis also feared the ability of the Bibelforscher (what they called Jehovah's Witnesses) to make converts and further \"infect\" the population with \"disloyal\" thinking. You may know that Jehovah's Witnesses are very public with their religious beliefs and the Nazis feared this as they feared any form of public contradiction if Nazi ideology.\n\nWitnesses believe that to swear allegiance to any State, regardless of what kind of government it functions under, is a violation of Christianity and the primary allegiance of a Christian to God. The way they view the flag salute is similar to how they view idolatry. In their minds a flag is literally just that: an idol. No more worthy of veneration or adoration than a statue of a god or goddess. This also was seen as dangerous by the Nazis.\n\nThere is also the fact that the religious beliefs of Jehovah's Witnesses are rather different than most mainstream Christian churches. When people are different it breeds suspicion and mistrust. This is true in modern democracies and it was true in Nazi Germany. \n\nYou may be interested in the book Facing the Lion. It is a firsthand account of a Jehovah's Witness who survived the Nazi persecution. It used to be available in the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in the US but I don't know if they still carry it there or not. I'm sure you could find it on Amazon. Depending on your preference you may want to visit the official web site of the Jehovah's Witnesses _URL_0_. There are articles and videos about the persecution they experienced under the Nazis there.", "I'm really glad to hear that my advice inspired you. /u/A-Touch-of-the-Blues did already cover a couple of things in their answer but here's some additional information:\n\nA couple of distinctions first: The Nazis didn't just target JWs, but were focused on people they called \"Ernste Bibelforscher\", which included JWs, Seven Day Adventists, and the so-called Free Bible-Students, which were an offshoot of the JWs and Adventists. The main reasons these groups were persecuted was that they rejected that state and especially military service and that they continued to try to convert people to their religion that had been outlawed (because of the military service thing) in 1935. In the Nazi logic, refusing to join the military and to swear oaths on the Führer amounted basically to treason against your race and thus these groups, the Bible-Students, were considered a small but nonetheless serious problem.\n\nThose imprisoned in Concentration Camps were mostly those who continued missionary duty and who actively rejected military service. Little research has been done into this but it seems that there was a small number of JWs and Seven Day Adventists drafted into the Wehrmacht serving without weapons, so those who were persecuted were those who actively and publicly rejected serving.\n\nGeneral estimates say that of the 25.000 to 30.000 JWs in Germany, about 20.000 remained active in the Nazi period. The rest renounced their faith, fled Germany or found a way to arrange themselves with the regime. About 10.000 of those active were at one point or another sentenced and convicted by the Nazi state for \"crimes\" related to their faith. 2,000 to 2,500 were sent to concentration camps, as were a total of about 700 to 800 non-German Witnesses (200–250 Dutch, 200 Austrians, 100 Poles, and between 10 and 50 Belgians, French, Czechs, and Hungarians). The number of Jehovah's Witnesses who died in concentration camps and prisons during the Nazi era is estimated at 1,000 Germans and 400 from other countries, the latter's group higher mortality rate having to do with them being non-German.\n\nIn the Concentration Camps, we see two distinct phases on how the JWs were dealt with. Up until 1941, the regime for them was especially harsh. The idea behind it given out by the Inspector of the Concentration Camps was to make them repent through violence and harsh treatment. JWs and other Bible-Student prisoners could be released from the camps if they renounced their faith and joined the Wehrmacht. The camp administration often tried to achieve this by treating them especially brutal and forcing them to do work against their religion (i.e. working in an ammunition's factory) and killing or beating them if they refused.\n\nTheir treatment changed around 1941 however. With the camp system becoming larger and larger and also involving itself more and more in economic activity, prisoners were needed for work details that took place outside of the camp area and where the Nazis – rightly – suspected that the danger of prisoners escaping was rather high. That is for all prisoners except the Bible-Students. Even if given the chance, the Bible-Student prisoners would not escape the camps. In their faith, imprisonment in the camps was basically a test from God for the coming end times and while they refused any cooperation with the war effort, they also refused to flee. Theological debates took place in the cams surrounding this in illegally printed watchtower leaflets. Anyways, once the camp administration figured this out, they used the Bible-Students as preferred prisoners for work details outside the camps. In Austria, one such detail e.g. fixed up a farm house for a high ranking Nazi where the prisoners also slept in said farm house with only one guard. They could have overwhelmed him but stayed put.\n\nSimilarly, the Bible-Student prisoners were also favorites among the other prisoners because if they were in charge of a work detail, they would not beat their fellow prisoners even if ordered to.\n\nDue to these early efforts from within the camp to preserve their perspective in illegally printed copies of the watchtower, which even circulated between camps (Garbe mentions a debate between the Buchenwald and Dachau JWs if it was theologically permitted to work producing coats for the Eastern Front since for some this was too much a contribution to the war effort), there are more accounts out there from JWs than from any other of the smaller and/or often marginalized prisoner groups (Roma, criminals, so-called \"asocials\", homosexuals).\n\nThis starts in 1934 with some groups giving information about the treatment of those JWs arrested first to the International Watchtower Society and continues throughout and after the war. However, as you can imagine most of these Watchtower articles are concerned with martyrdom and tests from God as well as being mired in theological debates about their faith that for someone who is not a JW or doesn't intend to join them is not what we usually associate with accounts of former CC prisoners. Also, a lot of it, [such as this brochure produced by the JWs on 12 cases of persecution in German NRW](_URL_0_) is in German.\n\n\nSo, to sum up: JWs and other similar groups were targeted because their pacifism and refusal to cooperate with the state was seen as dangerous. They were not targeted for extermination but rather imprisoned if active in their faith and treated brutally in at first in order to get them to renounce. Later on, the Camp administration improved their situation because they figured out that as far as theologically permitted, the Bible-Student made for cooperative prisoners.\n\n\nSources:\n\n* Detlef Garbe: Zwischen Widerstand und Martyrium. Die Zeugen Jehovas im „Dritten Reich“. In: Studien zur Zeitgeschichte. 4. Auflage. Band 42. Oldenbourg, München 1999. [translated as Between Resistance and Martyrdom: Jehovah's Witnesses in the Third Reich. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press]\n\n* Garbe, Detlef, \"Der Lila Winkel. Die \"Bibelforscher\" (Zeugen Jehovas) in den Konzentrationslagern, hrsg. v. W. Benz, B. Distel, Dachauer Hefte Bd. 10, dtv, München, 1995, [Seite 3-31]\n\n* Michael H. Kater: Die Ernsten Bibelforscher im Dritten Reich. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. Nr. 2, 1969.\n\n* M. James Penton: Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich. Sectarian politics under persecution. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2004.", "I was wondering that exact question. I found a lot of interesting real life examples on _URL_0_ and a lot of interesting details I never even knew about natzi imprisonment and how they treated and killed numerous people. " ] }

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[ [ "jw.org" ], [ "http://www.jwhistory.net/text/pdf/nrw2006.pdf" ], [ "jw.org" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7lxdlg", "c7lxi8p", "c7lyhui", "c7lyxrq", "c7lzh5c", "c7lznkg", "c7m1fpn" ], "score": [ 15, 28, 23, 241, 3, 10, 20 ], "text": [ "Because they wanted the principles of the Revolution to have a wider appeal. The propertied men who were leading the American Revolution (i.e. the Founding Fathers) needed the support of the poorer men who had very little property to successfully throw off British authority. \nSource: Several of my high school history teachers from 6th to 12th grade all said this.", "In Locke's view property as a legal and metaphysical concept provided the means for (wo)man to find freedom and autonomy. As in: the ability to claim and control property and assert those rights against others allowed one to think and act freely now that one is able to control his/her own material needs and permit one his/her own material endeavors (the idea of being able to build, use your own land, have a right to the profits/proceeds from that land)*.\n\nIn the legal sense of the drafting of a Declaration you could infer that 'the pursuit of happiness' is equivalent to 'property' - i.e. America was to become a land that would give men a right to 'life, freedom and the ability to pursue your own economic ends', especially contrast this with the perceived control of the British Crown over taxation and industry.\n\nNo idea if this was the specific reason, just a speculative idea on my part coming from a legal/jurisprudential view of property.\n\n*Source available if necessary", "Because some delegates from the south had a \"controversial\" interpretation as to what should be considered property or not. It was a compromise. Literally write down \"property\" and it could be taken as an endorsement of slavery, something someone like Franklin (early abolitionist and member of the committee that drafted the DOI) would not have been OK with. ", "I can offer one minor correction, which in turn leads to an answer to your question:\n\nThe minor correction is that Locke did not list \"life, liberty, and *property*\" in his *Two Treatises on Government*. He listed \"life, liberty, and *estates*.\" The distinction is important -- for Locke, *estates* meant both \"real property that is owned\" and \"the means by which one autonomous individual supports himself by extracting value, either through rent or by work\". \n\nFor Jefferson, then, the choice of wording in the Declaration invoked the concepts of Locke, but translated them slightly to an American rather than a British context; land-owning nobility with \"estates\" would not be a hugely persuasive example for Jefferson to invoke, though landowners were a part of his audience. But neither does the phrase \"pursuit of happiness\" mean that the signers of the Declaration wanted Americans to be cheerful. \"Pursuit of happiness\" would most likely have been interpreted by the contemporaneous readers of the Declaration as a synonym of \"estates\": the ownership of some sort of property by which an individual made his way in society, be it land, shop, tools, horses . . . or other \"things\" (possibly even chattel / slaves).\n\nBasically, the independent action of individuals who are not dependent upon or controlled by a manorial lord or some other nobility is absolutely necessary for the political philosophy of liberalism and republicanism, both of which shape the thinking of the revolutionaries. And how can one be independent? By owning, as an inalienable right, the means of self-support.\n\nSee pages 8 and 9 of Eric Foner's *The Story of American Freedom*; a fine brief summary of some hugely complex scholarship about the popular understandings of liberalism and small-r republicanism in the revolutionary era. For more on this, I might recommend Joyce Appleby's countless publications on the philosophy of republicanism.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nEDIT: subject/verb agreement", "So I've been wracking my brain for weeks trying to figure out who it was, but I recently was reading an article on the early Italian Renaissance, and I think actually there was an artist who used the phrase, \"life, liberty, and happiness,\" a hundred years or so prior to Locke... It's really annoying me that I didn't save the article!", "One bit of evidence sometimes cited (usually by people left-of-center) is that some of the founding fathers considered property to be a socially-sanctioned rather than natural right. They were still in favor of it, but philosophically considered it derived rather than basic; that is, property rights are justified because a society with them is better, not because they are inherently justified of their own accord. [This letter by Benjamin Franklin](_URL_1_) is one of the more direct expressions of that view, though it postdates the Declaration by a few years.\n\nA further complication is that some scholars argue that Locke's \"property\" actually *did* mean something more like \"pursuit of happiness\", or at least something considerably broader than material possessions. James Ely (*Property Rights in American History*, pp. 174-175) discusses this, and notes that Locke was somewhat inconsistent on the point. So Ely suggests that Jefferson may have merely been rewording Locke (as Jefferson understood him), into clearer, more contemporary English. Some evidence in favor of this interpretation is that Jefferson didn't see himself as departing from Locke.\n\nThere are, as you might expect, a lot of other things written on the subject, without complete agreement. One [interesting book](_URL_0_) argues that the language of the Declaration (including this clause) should be considered in light of the fact that it was meant to be read aloud as a public declaration, rather than to serve as a philosophical treatise or scholarly letter.", "Weirdly enough, I had to address this in my [MA thesis](_URL_0_) at a point. I had to make an argument about that in relation to that change, in order to make part of my larger argument work. Here is the respective section: \n\n > This scholarship on the whole identifies two primary sources of influence for Jefferson, with no consensus as to which was the major influence: John Locke and his liberalism and the classical republicans (Aristotle, Machiavelli, Harrington and Sidney among others) (Janye, 2). John Locke was held in the same high regard by Jefferson as Newton, a member of the same intellectual, yet Jefferson attributed his inspirations to the classical republicans and their historical champions as much as he did to Locke (Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, 1825 FE 10:343, WE 7:407).\n\n > To me, it seems that the best way to read Jefferson is to take into account exactly what he was reading—all of it—and extrapolate from this a view of his ideas in light of all influences, rather than to cherry-pick one set of influences over another. With so many influences at play, it seems irresponsible to assign primary influence to any one author or school, and more important to reflect the synthesis which occurred in Jefferson’s works. As such, what I will attempt to show is that Jefferson’s philosophy is a synthesis of these influences, rather than a direct derivation from one or the other schools in question. This is not to say that Jefferson has no original developments of his own, but rather develops his foundations in a syncretic manner before moving forward to contribute his own ideas. What then does natural right mean for Jefferson? A natural right is a right to something, be it an action or possession or some other sort of object, that a human has first, by virtue of being human, and secondly which exists prior to and external from any civil, social, or governmental existence or interference. They are “rights as derived from the laws of nature” which exist regardless of whether society or government exists (“Rights of British America” 1774. ME 1:209, Papers 1:134). Both the classical republicans and Lockean libertarians hold similar stances. The difference between these two theories is based upon to what purpose individuals give up their rights when governments and societies come into existence. Locke held that when human beings enter into a society, they consent to give up some of their natural rights whole or in part for the good of themselves as individuals; the classical republican idea, however, states that they consent to give up some of their natural rights for the good of the society (Kramnick, 91). For Jefferson, the purpose of a government is aimed towards the protection of, and the good of, the individual, rather than the good of the society (Thomas Jefferson to A. Coray 1823. ME 15:482). How then could Jefferson’s natural rights be seen as also belonging to the camp of the classical republicans if it seems so staunchly Lockean?\n\n > The answer is in Jefferson’s conception of the right to happiness. Locke held that there were three natural rights: life, liberty, and property (Locke, 1960, 1689, pp.387, 420). In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson writes “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Jefferson, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:315). There are those who read Jefferson as purely Lockean, such as Jan Lewis, and say “that ‘happiness’ might mean ‘property’ was one of the harmonizing sentiments of the day” (656). Yet the classical republicans would have disagreed, and it is likely that the change of wording from property to pursuit of happiness by Jefferson was not simply a substitution, but a deliberate change of tone to show both of his philosophical allegiances at once. For the classical republican, happiness was the result of civic virtue and devotion to the public good (McMahon, 324). For the Lockean, happiness is derived from property and its use (Lewis, 656). For Jefferson, happiness is derived both from benefiting the public good and from using one’s property as one sees fit. Thus Jefferson’s conception of natural right is both classical republican and Lockean. \n\nFor sources, see:\n\nLewis, J. (2003). Happiness. In Green, J. P., and Pole, J. P. (Eds.). A Companion to the American Revolution. (pp. 655-680). Boston: Blackwell Publishing. \n\nMcMahon, D. M., (2006). Happiness: A History. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. \n\nJayne, A. (1998). Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. \n\nLerner, M. (Ed.) (1996). Thomas Jefferson: America's Philosopher-King. (R. Schmuhl, Contrib.). New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. \n\nKramnik, I. ( ) Ideological Background. In Green, J. P., and Pole, J. P. (Eds.). A Companion to the American Revolution. (pp. 88-93). Boston: Blackwell Publishing.\n\n" ] }

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[ [], [], [], [ "http://books.google.com/books?id=YhHcaweX2tIC" ], [], [ "http://www.amazon.com/Declaring-Independence-Jefferson-Language-Performance/dp/0804720762", "http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12.html" ], [ "http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=philosophy_theses" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cayf74f" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The stadium at Olympia underwent several major repairs, expansions, and reconstructions over the approximately 1200 year history of the ancient Olympic games so the number of attendees varied quite a bit over this time period. However, it is generally accepted that the number of spectators at Olympia were between 25000 and 50000 people. I will see if I can find the articles I have from Archaeology magazine or the Journal of Archaeology that talk about this. I would highly recommend Archaeology (if you want just a mainstream magazine) or the Journal of Archaeology (if you like academic reading) for a ton of information about the Ancient Olympics. D. C. Young is a Classics professor at the University of Florida, if I remember correctly, and he has written several books and papers on the ancient Olympics. Fun bonus facts: Only freeborn males and unmarried women were allowed to go to the games. Married women were prohibited on pain of death." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c5uc22q", "c5uf206" ], "score": [ 10, 9 ], "text": [ "Hey, I have a BA in Religious Studies and I delved a little on this topic. While I know I could easily point out how fundamentalist communities reacted, I think it would be more interested to see the reactions of larger religious communities towards Evolution.\n\nThe Catholic Church's first reaction was to delay their official statement. This did not, however, stop local clergy and followers from critically criticizing the publication. Eventually, official statements endorsed the acceptance of evolution as true. Pope Pius IX reemphasized that science should not be at odds with the religion during the [First Vatican Council](_URL_1_). Since then, consequent Popes have also made statements supporting the truth in Evolution.\n\nIn the Muslim science communities, there are instances recorded where they observed natural selection, so at the scholarly level, reactions were less reactive than at the local levels. I don't have a good source for this, but you can check out this Wikipedia page [Islamic view on evolution](_URL_0_).\n\nTo turn back to the fundamentalist communities, one area I studied involved the Scope Trial's where I read several articles regarding reactions towards the trial. Newspapers of fundamentalist communities tended to post very biased and celebratory responses towards the trial. Afterwards, you see a huge movement in other states to add anti-evolution bills.\n\nEdit: Typos and Grammer", "I have a B.Theology and an MA in intellectual history. I have studied this issue quite a bit.\n\nThere was a range of diverse opinion on the issue. The most important thing to remember is that the religious reactions should not be interpreted today as fundamentalist reactions to progressive science. For all intents and purposes those who reacted to Darwinian science were arguing in favour of 18th century science (Paleyism). Many more clergy voiced legitimate arguments against Darwin's theories arguing for what we today would have been scientific concerns about some of the gaps in the theory. Today these gaps have been cleared up but a critical scientist like the Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was absolutely correct to peer review Darwin's theories critically. That's how science works after all. Other than this, Victorian society did experience some very interesting reactions to the theory, especially the large time scale of it. Some people found the age of the earth very difficult to come to terms with. \n\nI would stress the distinctions between religious criticism of the theory in the nineteenth century (which was as much a scientific criticism of the theory) and contemporary fundamentalist reactions to the theory (which are anti-scientific criticisms)." ] }

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[ [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_on_evolution", "http://www.ewtn.com/library/councils/v1.htm" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cyngc63", "cynkb11" ], "score": [ 3, 5 ], "text": [ "You might be interested in a past post on this topic:\n\n* [*Were castles really occupied as living quarters year round by the nobility who owned them?*](_URL_0_) \n^(24 Oct 2014 | 4 comments) \n^(/u/Freevoulous describes the living arrangements in various types of castles.)\n\nYou can ask followup questions by posting your questions in the comments with experts tagged to direct questions to them.", "There were many different types and sizes of castles in Medieval Europe. Most were small, and housed a knight and his family and perhaps a few servants.\n\nThe sorts of servants found in castles might have been cooks and chambermaids (doing cleaning and laundry). There might have also been a groom or two to look after the horse (horses). More prosperous castles might have included falconers or huntsmen.\n\nMost castles did not have \"garrisons\" per se. The average castle in Europe was the home of a knight. The \"garrison\" would be the knight, any of his family (sons or brothers) who still lived at home and were of fighting age, and his servants and retainers (cooks, grooms, falconer, huntsman, etc.) who could be armed in case of need. In times of danger, the villagers would take refuge in the castle and would be armed with the weapons stored there.\n\nLarger royal castles or fortress castles, or the castles of great nobles might have had a garrison in peace time. Even so, these garrisons were often surprisingly small.\n\nFor example, here are some of the garrisons for important castles guarding the Welsh Marches in about 1160.\n\nThe Pipe roll entries show that Oswestry Castle had a garrison of one knight, two porters and two watchmen between 1160 and 1165 (William Fitz Alan was the lord of the castle, but he was a young child and was a ward of the king. The King appointed Guy Lestrange to administer the Fitz Alan lands, and this is the garrison which Lestrange paid for as shown in his accounts of his guardianship).\n\nThe two other Fitz Alan Welsh border castles of Clun and Ruthin seem to have had the same peacetime garrison of 5 men.\n\nThe Welsh border castles of Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth, seem to have had even smaller garrisons. Shrewsbury was a royal castle, but about 12 miles from the Welsh border and shielded by intervening castles such as Oswestry. It had a garrison of one porter and one watchman.\n\nBridgnorth, another royal castle, slightly further from the border had a garrison of one permanent year round porter.\n\nIn time of danger or war, the troops in these castles would be increased. In the summer of 1165 Henry II used Oswestry Castle as his base for a campaign against Owain Gwynedd (an unsuccessful campaign), and during this summer 200 soldiers were stationed at Oswestry and Knockyn Castles.\n\nAgain, in 1166-67, the border was troubled and 40 soldiers were paid for at Oswestry Castle for two years. For 158 days of one of these years another 60 soldiers, paid for by the local barons, not the King, were also stationed at Oswestry Castle. By 1168, the soldiers at Oswestry castle were reduced to 20 and that garrison seems to have remained until 1174.\n\nSource: _URL_2_\n\nTo get an idea about how many people of what types might live and work in a large castle, let’s look at Hame Castle in Hameenlinna, Finland, about 60 miles north of Helsinki.\n\nThis was a major royal castle of the Swedish Crown. One of the three most important castles the Swedish Kings held in Finland.\nIt was built in the 14th century, but to understand the number of staff, we are going to look at the castle in the 16th century, because particularly good records for the time period 1539-1570 are available for this castle.\n\nBrief wikipedia article on Hame castle with some photos: _URL_1_\n\nThis was a generally peaceful time in Finland, and Hame castle was no longer near any Swedish frontiers. The castle was a royal administration center in the period, more than a strategic fortress. (Though there were often soldiers mustered at the castle or training at or near the castle.)\n\nStaff at the castle can be grouped into several categories:\n\nAgriculture: The castle controlled three large landed estates, growing primarily rye, peas, beans, and raising cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses (a royal stud farm). Of course, most of the agricultural laborers lived on the estates, but some of the managers, those making agricultural tools and implements, those storing and transporting the produce, and several fishermen (from 1 to 7 at different times) lived in the castle.\n\nAbout 10-20 people involved with managing storing or producing food lived in the castle.\n\nArtisans and Domestic staff: In this category were artisans such as the blacksmith, carpenter, masons, weavers, and their staff, as well as the food service and domestic service staff.\n\nAbout 10-20 Artisans and Domestic staff lived and worked full time in the castle. This number could grow considerably however when major work was being done on the castle or when the castle was crowded and more domestic staff were needed to look after extra numbers of officials or soldiers. \n\nFor example, in 1559 work was being done to make the castle more defensible against cannon (castles were becoming obsolete due to cannon and star fort defenses were beginning to be built across Europe. In 1559 a gun tower for cannon was added to the castle and in this year 65 craftsmen from different trades were employed and living in the castle, and 47 people were employed in Agriculture management and Domestic Service to help look after them. The construction of star fort type defenses around the castle continued for a decade, and the number of craftsmen and extra workers in the castle remained high (though not as high as 1559). There were always a fluctuating number of temporary artisans living in the castle while engaged in some contract or other. There were also a fluctuating number of servants who lived outside the castle but would be engaged to work in the kitchen or housekeeping on a temporary basis when there was extra demand.\n\nOfficials, Soldiers, and their families, staff and servants: In charge of the castle was the Bailiff (usually a member of the minor Swedish nobility). His main assistants were the Scribe, who supervised an assistant scribe and a copyist, and the underbailiff (The scribe was paid more. The castle had a hard time keeping underbailiffs. There was a high turnover for some reason.) There were also a group of Squires, who made up the castle’s permanent garrison, and also served as foremen and delivered tax monies to Stockholm, as well as daily guard duties.\n\nGenerally, this category of officials and their families, and permanent garrison, consisted of 15-30 people. In addition, there were almost always some cavalry or infantry troops in the castle. These were not troops assigned to the castle, but the castle formed a recruiting, training and re-supply base for local companies and regiments so they often had some troops based at the castle for weeks or months at a time. There would usually be 50-100 soldiers staying in the castle.\n\nThroughout these 31 years, at least 100 people lived and worked in Hame Castle. Frequently there would be up to 150 people based in the castle. During the decade of the 1560s there were generally 200-250 people in the castle, but this was because of extensive works to make the castle more defensible against cannon, and the generally higher number of soldiers making use of the castle for temporary periods in this decade.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe inhabitants of the castle probably lived somewhat better than most. The Baliff's table served its diners an average of 4,000 calories per day, with meat (mostly beef) at most meals. The Servant's table served its diners 2,800 calories a day and about 3,300 calories a day on holidays, with little meat except on holidays, but quite frequent fish as well as grains and vegetables.\n\nThe inhabitants of the castle probably never saw their 'master', the King of Sweden during these 31 years, as he never came to the castle. The castle would have probably run much the same as always when the Baliff was absent, as his subordinates would have kept things going.\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2k6zze/were_castles_really_occupied_as_living_quarters/clk21e3" ], [ "http://elektra.helsinki.fi/vilksum.html", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4me_Castle", "http://books.google.com/books?id=m-TqPC6cRNYC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=castle+garrison+size&source=bl&ots=7Gx2JWLr8U&sig=TaP-HLuPzEDuyLjfbOR1AV74Wto&hl=en&sa=X&ei=plTcU4quDsKGyATZmYKADg&ved=0CBwQ6AEwADgU#v=onepage&q=castle%20garrison%20size&f=false" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c8zl5lb", "c8zotrm" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "I'm more of an expert on the Eastern crusades, but from what I know about Spain:\n\n1. I imagine El Cid would have likely been an exception to the rule, though probably not an uncommon sight. Spain was a fairly mixed and cosmopolitan area during his lifetime. There would have likely been a good number of Muslim lords who were born into the service of or who pledged allegiance to Christians and vice versa. This could especially depend on who was winning a war. A weak Christian king or turmoil in Castille could lead some lords to throw in their lot with a powerful Muslim neighbor. \n\n2. Going off of that, yes. It is conceivable, though very unlikely, that one could switch his allegiance back and forth. To do so, you would likely have to be extremely cunning and also have a good deal of personal power. No run of the mill knight is going to be accepted by repeatedly either side like El Cid was. Lords almost never served more than one sovereign (or sovereign's family) in a lifetime. More likely, a very powerful lord could offer his services to a rival sovereign without renouncing his loyalty to the first. This would be seen as very duplicitous, but it was even rarer for a lord to completely renounce his king.\n\n3. Probably not. Especially in the early and high Middle Ages, there were likely many knights and lords fighting for a ruler who was not of their religion. The sovereigns at that time cared more about expanding their own power at the expense of their rivals, not enforcing personal religious purity among their vassals. \n\n4 No idea haha\n\nedit: fixed the formatting", "I recommend watching this documentary [When the Moors ruled Europe](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PM8HnvuKbAo#t=3985s" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "df77xro" ], "score": [ 27 ], "text": [ "Most historians believe in two apparently hard-to-reconcile ideas:\n\n* that the future is a direct product of the past\n\n* that the future is not over-determined by the past\n\nThe former is often called _historicism_ and the latter is called _contingency_. They are not paradoxical, to believe in both: they work together to create a nuanced approach to the way in which we think about historical outcomes, beyond simply \"anything could have happened\" (never the case) and \"everything had to happen exactly as it happened\" (a tempting fantasy when you only have one \"go\" at the past). \n\nAnyway. All of which is to say, ultimately you are asking something of a philosophical question, even if it is a philosophical question about history. The Versailles treaty created conditions in Germany that involved a lot of big trends, including but not limited to economic anxiety, rising nationalism, and appeals to non-democratic forms of government. Were the Nazis getting Hitler as Chancellor and him becoming the Führer the inevitable outcome of these policies? No. There were lots of places where different choices and outcomes might have happened. \n\nThe easiest example is to point to the actions of Franz Von Papen, who was the guy who convinced Hindenburg to make Hitler the Chancellor under the mistaken belief that he could be controlled. If Von Papen had not done that, something else would have happened. Maybe the Nazis would have found another route to power. Maybe not. But that's a place where _huge_ consequences came out of \"small scale\" (individual human) choices. If one looks deeply into any period or event one finds other places where people ended up making choices of various sorts that shaped the historical outcomes, showing that there was some \"flexibility\" with regards to the historical trends. \n\nMaybe the \"large scale\" trends would have still favored the Nazis; maybe another party would have ridden the trends to power (e.g., the Communists were another major anti-democratic force competing for power in the same environment). Maybe the Nazis would have played their hand too strongly afterwards. Who knows — we can't say for sure, obviously. But we _can_ say that the rise of the Nazis was not _inevitable_, even if we simultaneously say it was a consequence of the Versailles Treaty conditions. \n\nIf you are interested in these kinds of questions, Eric Carr's _What is History?_ is the standard undergraduate/grad school starting text for thinking about issues of historical causality (it is, I would emphasize, a _starting_ and not an _ending_ of that discussion — I think some of Carr's opinions are a little dated and have some obvious problems with them, but they do get you thinking about these things). You might ask, is this just a parlor game for historians? No: questions about cause and effect are _deep_ to historical arguments, and they often imply complex arguments about possible alternate (counterfactual) scenarios, whether they are consciously articulated or not. If I say, \"von Papen was crucial to Hitler taking power\" I am, in some way, acknowledging that if you somehow took von Papen out of the mix, then the past would change in some key way. (I am not under the obligation to try and say exactly _how_ that change would play out — that's the difficult or impossible bit — but identifying the importance of a variable _implies_ that removing or changing of the variable would change the outcome.)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cir200b" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "In the time line you provide, we must be more comfortable with the 1500 end of the spectrum than the 1200, but the point is well taken: the ballad has the appearance of being a medieval invention. Based on nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century ethnographies in Britain and Ireland, it appears that the singing of ballads was fairly ubiquitous. Obviously song was (as it is) more prevalent in some families than others, but people sang to entertain themselves and others - from children, to adults in the family, to guests in the household, to community events and parties. Professional singers made careers of traveling about with their skill, but there were also everyday singers - again, they were ubiquitous. " ] }

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[ "http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu//eng/child/index.htm", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "dep51jp", "depeg58" ], "score": [ 1770, 14 ], "text": [ "**Absolutely not,** but I can see where you're coming from on this. Nazi Germany was (literally) death on *inherited* disorders, but it had a completely different attitude toward battlefield injuries and casualties.\n\nFirst, let's go into a bit of background for folks who don't know what you do, /u/DallasDunn.\n\nOne of the core tenets of the Nazi system was a belief in \"racial purity.\" To this end, foreign and \"corrupting\" influences needed to be removed from Germany, the Nazis believed. This included religions and foreigners, but it also included those who suffered from inherited disease. In July 1933, just two months after the Nazis assumed total control of Germany with the Enabling Acts, the German government instituted [the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring](_URL_1_) a mass sterilization program that would continue through the Nazi era.\n\nAfter Germany began the war in September 1939, Hitler moved this program into a horrifying new phase by ordering the murder of disabled Germans. [The T-4 program, which began with \"mercy killings\" of the fatally ill, expanded into the forced murder of people housed in asylums and other institutions](_URL_0_). Ultimately, more than 200,000 disabled or ill people would be murdered under this program. \n\nNow that you know the horrifying groundwork for where /u/DallasDunn is coming from, let's talk about why Nazi treatment of veterans differed.\n\nI [wrote about this treatment two years ago](_URL_2_), and I'll again recommend James Diehl's *The Thanks of the Fatherland* for understanding this issue. To that, I'll add Carol Poore's *Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture.*\n\nAs Diehl explains, the Nazi belief system prized \"front experience\" (*Fronterlebnis*) above almost all else. This is largely because the founding myth of the Nazi Party was based upon the idea that the brownshirts were an extension of Germany's WWI army and thus were fighting (in the streets, and later on the battlefield) to avenge the \"stab in the back of World War I.\"\n\n\"The front soldier had always been a central figure in the ideology and mythology of national socialism,\" Diehl writes. \"In the Third Reich, soldiers were idealized: their exploits in the Great War were endlessly celebrated in popular literature and film, soldiers were presented as role models for civilian society, and military virtues ─ duty, obedience, sacrifice ─ were elevated to the status of primary, rather than secondary, values.\"\n\nDuring his rise to power, Hitler's experience as a soldier in World War I (and here I'll recommend Thomas Weber's *Hitler's First War* for some good myth-busting) was used as a promotional and political tool. As Weber artfully explains, Hitler's experience was as much a propaganda invention as it was fact. Furthermore, the Nazis leveraged the Weimar government's failures in veterans' care to advantage during their rise to power. Better treatment for WWI veterans was a key campaign promise by the Nazis, and they attempted to follow through on that with preferential treatment for veterans.\n\nAs Diehl writes, \"In the Nazi worldview, the Weimar Republic was accordingly depicted as the negation of all that the front soldiers had stood for, while the Third Reich was portrayed as the embodiment of their virtues and the vehicle for the realization of their ─ and the nation's ─ mission.\"\n\nUnder the Weimar government, Germany offered a pension system called the RVG, which offered benefits based on \"the degree of the victim's loss of civilian earning power\" (using Diehl's terminology), the WFVG, which replaced it in 1938, called for flat payments based on the severity of the injury. It was replaced again in 1939, for a wartime world, with the WEFVG, which increased benefits for soldiers injured in combat (as compared to soldiers injured in peacetime or behind the front lines).\n\nThe WEFVG also offered military retirement programs that included jobs for disabled soldiers, particularly noncommissioned officers ~~(likely based upon Hitler's on experience as a noncom)~~. The WEFVG envisioned employing these soldiers as teachers in primary schools (under the Nazi system, who better to influence the next generation?) and in the civil service. As the war progressed, these mustered-out soldiers instead found themselves employed in behind-the-lines military support. They worked as air raid wardens, telephone operators or paper-pushers, as well as in factories and other operations that were semi-governmental by that point in the war. The exigencies of war also forced the Nazi government to curtail its pension programs, which had the effect of forcing these disabled men to work if they wanted to avoid hunger and other privation. \n", "[Here are some good answers from when this was asked before](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007064", "https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007057", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2uqfxe/how_were_disabled_wwi_veterans_treated_in_nazi/" ], [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/45uhe2/what_were_nazi_plans_for_their_own_soldiers_who/?sort=top" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cb595o1", "cb59j06" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "Of course it was possible. The damage that World War II inflicted upon Germany in terms of devastation was unimaginable, and it was only in 1989 (70 years after Versailles) that Germany was a single nation again. In the meantime, they had lost East Prussia (to Russia) and all territory east of the Oder River to Poland after WWII.\n\nWhile the Weimar Republic was in serious trouble in 1933 when it fell, and Germany would have likely faced political instability and economic depression, that still would have been better than what happened to it in WWII: Millions dead, resulting in lost productivity and negative social repercussions, the destruction of its cities by Allied bombing, etc.\n\nOf course, a lot of this is hypothetical, and it is hard to say exactly. Maybe the ideal situation would have been a Germany that did remilitarize and challenge Versaille, but had the restraint not to create a World War (but that may have been unlikely, even with leaders like Chamberlain of Britain who was desperate for peace).", "Hey man, just letting you know that this question would do far better in /r/HistoricalWhatIf, as it doesn't pertain to [what actually happened.](_URL_0_) Best of luck!" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/rules#wiki_is_this_the_right_place_for_your_question.3F" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dkgoj5z" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "I'm sorry, but we don't allow 'First'/'Last' questions on /r/AskHistorians, so have removed this submission. It's not that the question is bad; it is simply that given the rules of this subreddit, these types of questions are ill-suited to its format. We've found that they tend to get responses along the lines of \"the first/last example *I know of*,\" or else many short, speculative responses in the case that the answer went unrecorded. This results in many removed comments, and very few answered threads.\n\nIf this is a question you still are interested in a response to though, you have options!\n\n* Consider the core of the question to rephrase and resubmit. Instead of asking, for instance, \"Who was the first person killed by a firearm?\", try \"What do we know about the early development and use of firearms?\". Asking about origins, developments, or declines is more likely to get in-depth, knowledgeable answers.\n\n* Every other Wednesday we run a \"[Short Answers to Simple Questions](/r/AskHistorians/search?q=flair_css_class%3Afeature+short+answers+simple+questions & restrict_sr=on & sort=new & t=all)\", and if you can hang on to your question until then, it can likely fit unchanged.\n\n* Finally, you could also try submitting your question to /r/History or /r/AskHistory, which doesn't have submission criteria quite as strict.\n\nThank you for understanding!" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cay6rrx", "cay72ah", "cay7hhx", "cay939l", "cayagad", "cayc8uh", "cayg3m6", "cayhdn4" ], "score": [ 15, 380, 46, 21, 48, 33, 5, 5 ], "text": [ "Austro-hungary fought against Italy on the Alpine front, and against Serbie, Romania and Russia on the Eastern Front. It is very probable that there were many Austrian soldiers serving in the German Army on the Western Front, Adolf Hitler being one of them, but since Austria doesn't share its borders with France, and their Soldiers were needed elsewhere, the Austro-Hungarian Army wasn't deployed to the Western Front. According to Wikipedia, they relied a lot on German support, and they kinda ended up being the \"Fascist Italy\" of WW1.\n\nSource: _URL_0_", "Austria-Hungary had a limited impact on the Western Front, since they did not have any territory near the Western Front, and there was no point sending troops to that front when they had several fronts to defend near their own territory. \n\nThe war originally began as a dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the city of Sarajevo by assassins with links to Serbia. Austria-Hungary, in response, issued an ultimatum that undermined Serbia's sovereignty, which Serbia rejected. Serbia was aided military by Russia, who pledged to defend its fellow Slavic nation.\n\nSo Austria-Hungary in the beginning of the war found itself invading Serbia, while defending against the Russian on the Eastern front (alongside the Germans). The Serbians initially defended well against the Austrian invasion, but by 1916, Austria Hungary had conquered both Serbia and Montenegro.\n\nAustria-Hungary also contributed significantly to the Eastern Front. While the German army saw most of the success, the Austrian-Hungarian army suffered more casualties overall on this front. \n\nOne campaign in particular was Russia's Brusilov Offensive in 1916, which was a massive push by the Russian army that resulted in 1.3 million Austrian-Hungarian casualties. After suffering such devastating losses, Austria-Hungary was never again able to mount a successful offensive by itself, and had to increasingly rely on German military support.\n\nLater, Italy joined the war on the side of the Allies and attacked Austria-Hungary on the Italian-Austro-Hungarian border. This mountainous battlefield became the Italian Front. While largely indecisive with little change in territory held (there were 12 battles of the Isonzo river, showing that the front lines changed very little during the war), it nevertheless tied up a good deal of Austro-Hungarian manpower and military resources in this front (about 61 military divisions, or about 8 million men over the course of the war). \n\nAustria-Hungary also took part in the defeat and invasion of Romania when Romania declared war on the Central Powers in 1916.\n\nThis map shows that Austrian-Hungarian forces primarily saw action in 4 regions / fronts: The Italian Front, the Balkans / Serbian campaign, the invasion of Romania, and the Eastern Front against Russia\n_URL_0_ \n\nAustria-Hungary finally surrendered on November 4th, 1918, after British and French forces invaded the Balkans and began to push the Austrian-Hungarian forces northward. At the same time, buoyed by Allied reinforcements, the Italians were pushing forward in the Italian Front, forcing the Austro-Hungarian emperor to sue for peace. The nation had suffered 1.5 million dead in the war, and 3.5 million more wounded. After the Treaty of Versaille, Austria-Hungary was broken up and ceased to exist as a nation.\n\nSource: Holger Herwig - The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary 1914-1918\n\n", "What is often overlooked is that the Austro-Hungarian Empire also had a substantial navy, based in Trieste, Pula (Croatia) and Kotor (Montenegro), with 4 modern battleships and 30 destroyers that saw limited action but managed to keep the Allies' Mediterranean fleets on alert for the duration of the war.", "Is the USA ever protrayed in popular culture in WW1? I'd say never in Europe.", "I know you are more curious about Austria-Hungary (Ironically, you left out the other main ally, the Ottoman Empire, who gets no love in the West.), but here's an answer to why Germany gets the focus.\n\nWorld War 1 was almost inevitable by the time the assassination took place due to the rise of the new German State. 50 years prior, the Prussians (under Bismark) created modern Germany, through three wars, including the Franco-Prussian war, which embarrassed the French State (also gave the Germans a little territory called Alsace Loraine). Meanwhile in the late 19th century the British Empire was failing, so they began systematically manipulating their currency to suppress other countries (Germany) manufacturing economies. Britain was still operating as colonial economy, importing raw goods to the homeland, and exporting finished goods to the colonies. German manufacturing had much fewer colonies to rely on, and therefore focused more on \"free trade\", than captive markets. \n\n**In traditional international relations theory we call the falling of one empire and the rise of the next as the Hegemonic stability theory.**\n\nBy the end of the war, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire had both fallen apart from monetary exhaustion and lack of purpose. Germany was the last man standing and got stuck with the tab. So if the real reasons weren't enough, at the end of WW1, the Allies made Germany sign a statement saying that WW1 was their fault. It was a somewhat accurate, but no less stinging accusation (see WW2). ", "**EDIT**: I completely misread the question. Continue reading if you want to learn about some interesting trivia about Serbia during WWI.\n\nI can't offer nearly as much insight as the scholars of this subreddit already have, but I think an important part to remember about Serbia's involvement is the fact that they lost roughly 25% of their whole population. They initially held off three(?) invasions mounted by the Austro-Hungarian forces. All the while the Austro-Hungarian forces had a significantly bigger army and had more advanced equipment. Eventually Serbia was forced to retreat through Albania and Montenegro. Where they met up with Allied forces and charged back into Belgrade to reclaim it.\n\nThe Serbian general, Dragutin Gavrilović will always be remembered for the speech he gave to his men before an ultimately unsuccessful charge in which he was badly wounded.\n\n*\"Soldiers, exactly at three o'clock, the enemy is to be crushed by your fierce charge, destroyed by your grenades and bayonets. The honor of Belgrade, our capital, must not be stained. Soldiers! Heroes! The supreme command has erased our regiment from its records. Our regiment has been sacrificed for the honor of Belgrade and the Fatherland. Therefore, you no longer need to worry about your lives: they no longer exist. So, forward to glory! For the King and the Fatherland! Long live the King, Long live Belgrade!\"*\n\n**Fun Fact:** When the Allied forces began their march back to Belgrade, it was said that the Serbians were so eager to get their hometown back that the French general (Louis Franchet d'Espèrey) radioed the Serbian general (Živojin Mišić) and said something along the lines of \"Sir, please tell the Serbian infantry to slow down, the French cavalry can not keep up!\".\n\nSorry if I am rambling on or some parts are unreadable, English is not my first language.", "The main depiction of AH in WW1 is probably in the satirical book The Good Soldier Swejk. Can anyone comment on how historically accurate it is? I assumed the author drew on his own experiences in the army.", "What about the Ottoman Empire? What was their role in the war, what fronts did they fight on, etc.?" ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary#Italian_Front" ], [ "http://www.wall-maps.com/Classroom/HISTORY/US-History/30_World_War_I_1914~1918.gif" ], [], [], [], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e2u2k8p" ], "score": [ 17 ], "text": [ "The idea that the Kamikaze pilots received large doses of methamphetamine prior to their attacks is a common claim in popular literature. Norman Ohler's questionable book *Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich* observes in a footnote that Japan's suicide pilots received crystal meth under the trademark Philopon/Hiropon. Likewise, many online exposes of the history of meth such as those by _URL_1_ casually mention the connection between these stimulants and the Kamikaze pilots. This drug use, however, is not the whole story, and focusing only on the stimulants used by the Kamikaze tends to obscure important facets of drug use by many combatants during the war. \n\nWhile surviving documentation from Kamikaze pilots tend not to mention either Philopon or Hiropon, it was possible that more than a few pilots for *Tokko* missions received these drugs. The same was also true for a number of Japanese who undertook conventional attacks. Philopon, which was more akin to benzedrine, was one of several stimulants the Japanese used to combat fatigue. Much as the term \"aspirin\" can be used as a placeholder for oral painkillers or the trademarked Bayer product, Philopon could refer to any number of stimulants available for Japanese during the war. There were a number of pills, often mixed with green tea and stamped with the imperial crest called *Senryoku Zokyo Zai* (drug to inspire fighting spirit) that contained a variety of uppers. This was not limited to combat troops. A number of night-shift factory workers and construction workers received uppers to complete urgently-needed projects. Aside from being issued by the state, these drugs were also available over the counter to the civilian population in the Home Islands. The result was that Japan at war's end had an enormous stockpile of uppers such as methamphetamine which filtered their way into the black market and led to a major drug epidemic in the postwar decade. \n\nThis above would seem to validate the at times hyperbolic claims that Japanese wartime excesses were built on the backs of illicit drugs like meth. The problem though is that examining Japanese or German drug use in isolation produces a distorted picture. The fact is the Axis were not alone in seeing the value of uppers for combat purposes. The British and Commonwealth forces used Benzedrine tablets in enormous numbers after reports filtered in on the effectiveness of Pervitin by German forces. The RAF conducted extensive studies on uppers and long-range bomber missions often had pilots hopped up on these pills. Bernard Montgomery was incredibly impressed by a 1942 field experiment between drugged and undrugged soldiers that he saw Benzedrine as a weapon to defeat Rommel and ordered massive quantities of the drug before el Alamein. The Eight Army in the Mediterranean theater would subsequently allow doses of amphetamine higher than the dose recommended by RAF studies on the basis that the drug improved morale and performance. The US followed a similar trajectory as their British allies. The US Army Surgeon General issued a cautious endorsement of amphetamine use by frontline troops in extreme situations, but frontline generals and combat troops often distributed these drugs in dosages much higher than the medical professionals thought advisable. The USMC troops at Tarawa received Benzedrine as did other troops during Pacific landings. The British and American medical studies of various uppers often found that they did depress anxieties and fear, amphetamines in their various forms were not war-winning tools. But the medical professionals' cautious endorsements of these drugs masked their somewhat more extensive use by Allied frontline troops.\n\nOne of the problems with books like *Blitzed*- and check out /u/commiespceinvader 's take on [*Blitzed* in their answer here](_URL_0_) - is that they present Axis drug use out of its full context. The implication of some of this pop history is that illicit drugs enabled the irrationality of *Tokko* suicide attacks or the *Einsatzgruppen*s' massacres. This is tapping into wider discourses about the connection between drug use and behavior harmful to society (eg *Breaking Bad*). Thus the irrationality and human rights abuses of the Axis become subsumed as part of a drug crisis. But the problem is that the Anglo-Americans used these drugs in significant quantities too and do not get the same treatment by pop historians. There are not many books out there ascribing the firebombing of Dresden to the use of Bennies by a number of Anglo-American bomber pilots and planners. While there is a productive line of inquiry and research into whether or not uppers contributed to the savagery of the war on both sides, extrapolating the abuse of uppers to explain major events in the war like Japan's suicide tactics is not very sound history. \n\n*Sources*\n\nCaprio, Mark E. *Democracy in Occupied Japan The U.S. Occupation and Japanese Politics and Society*. Routledge, 2009. \n\nDerickson, Alan. \"“No Such Thing as a Night's Sleep”: The Embattled Sleep of American Fighting Men from World War II to the Present.\" *Journal of Social History* 47, no. 1 (2013): 1-26.\n\nEdström, Bert. \"The forgotten success story: Japan and the methamphetamine problem.\" In *Japan Forum*, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 519-543. Routledge, 2015.\n\nRasmussen, Nicolas. \"Medical science and the military: the Allies' use of amphetamine during World War II.\" Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42, no. 2 (2011): 205-233." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5lxjb6/there_is_a_thread_on_rbooks_about_high_hitler_a/", "Vice.com" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cjxqkho" ], "score": [ 17 ], "text": [ "In WW2 they certainly did. This was not helped by the American defeat at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, in which large numbers of American soldiers broke and ran before the German advance. However, it is accurate to say that American leadership were themselves doubtful of their own capabilities. The British had been fighting the Germans for a year and a half by the time the US entered the war and were largely successful in dictating strategy until late 1943 when American confidence grew enough to insist on the Normandy invasion in 1944. Admittedly, soviet insistence on a second front in France played a role here, too. Upon joining the war, American planners wanted to immediately attach over the channel. However, the British convinced American leadership that they were not ready for such a committed attack and that they should instead invade North Africa almost as a training exercise. After success there, Churchill was successful in convincing Roosevelt that attacking 'the soft underbelly' through Italy was the best way to expedite the end if the war, even though many American generals (somewhat correctly) believed that attacking through Italy would have little strategic value and (more correctly) that it would be extremely difficult due to the mountainous terrain favoring the defenders and negating the armor advantage of the Allies. Italy was a complete slog, and while it knocked the Italians out of the war, it did not take as many German divisions as expected to slow the allied advance to a standstill until 1944 when the jig was already up.\n\nSource: Rick Atkinson, Liberation Trilogy" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cab716f", "cab955t" ], "score": [ 5, 20 ], "text": [ "I googled suseran and I didn't find anything relevant... only people's names.\n\nIs it a term for opponents or simply other knights in a melee?", "I imagine it varies greatly on the time, place, and people involved, but the consensus seems to be you would be in trouble. I only have a few late Medieval/Renaissance examples right now.\n\nFor example, Gabriel, comte de Montgomery, seigneur de Lorges, killed King Henry II of France in a joust around July 1 1559. The King absolved him of any guilt before passing on, but he was still disgraced and felt it prudent to retire to his estates. He was later executed as an enemy of the state after converting to Protestantism and leading an insurrection; though I feel the two events are not related. \n\nA slightly earlier incident involved King Henry VIII of England being injured while jousting against Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk in 1524. The King forgot to lower his visor and took a nasty hit to the head from the Duke's lance. Little else is known about what could have happened if the King had been seriously hurt, but a first hand account by George Cavendish, Cardinal Wolsey's gentleman-usher states \n\n > The duke immediately disarmed and came to the king, showing him the closeness of his sight, and he swore that he would never run against the king again. But if the king had been even a little hurt, his servants would have put the duke in jeopardy. \n\nIt seems the Duke would have been in some kind of trouble, but it's not clear what. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ea0z3if" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "Possibly, it is actually rather hard to know because the documentation of where money was spent during the Holocaust. The German budget did not include money set aside for the death camps, most likely because these camps paid for themselves. Though on the surface one would assume that diverting manpower, supplies, weapons, building material etc. would be a terrible idea for a country fighting a war. However when you take into account the amount of spoils taken from victims of the Holocaust, it starts to make more sense. Even in extremely rural, poor areas, victims were often forced to bring their valuables with them. Once they were (in rural areas in the East mostly through shooting) the Nazis would distribute these valuables. Things that weren't valuable, like ragged clothing were given to those non-Jews who assisted the Nazis in carrying out the killing such as the Lithuanian Shaulists. Better clothing, any valuables, and even gold teeth were sent back to Germany. Considering that well over a million people were shot in this way, even taking only this into account that is a huge amount of money. Beyond this, once Jews were killed their homes were looted, and in Germany their houses were redistributed among Nazis, and their bank accounts diverted to the state. And even beyond this, as much as the concentration and death camp systems were costly in men, building materials, etc. they were also enormously lucrative for the Reich. Auschwitz, the largest death camp complex had a number of factories, where slave laborers created wealth for the Nazis until they were too sick to work and either died or were murdered. IG Farben had an enormous factory near the Monowitz subcamp of Auschwitz. Every industry benefited from slave labor. They didn't have to pay for this labor, and they didn't pay for a normal amount of food for those workers so the wealth created was much higher than normal. On top of the goods of every one of the 6 million Jews, and the goods of at least a few million others was diverted to the Reich. In the death camps of Birkenau, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Treblinka, sheds were created, often known as Kanada by the few prisoners left alive, to divert everything taken from the dead to be sent to Germany. The Germans made sure that people were likely to bring valuables with them at deportation to maximize their spoils. Sonderkommando, those prisoners forced to handle the dead were even forced to mutilate the bodies to make sure any gold teeth or valuables hidden inside bodies (swollowed or hidden in mouths etc) were handed over. With these various methods of wealth exploitation the Nazis probably considered the Holocaust more of an economic win than we would expect. Many of the Nazis were somewhat concerned by the diverting of transportation, men, and bullets, but they didn't worry about it economically. Even those who worried about this were not really paid attention to because the Holocaust was seen as an integral part of having won the war. If they won the war without killing their 'enemies' it would not have been seen by many as really having been won." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cf6x00z" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "They made extensive use of snitches (Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter - IM), which were either intimidated or rewarded with easier access to universities or luxury goods normal \"socialist brothers and sisters\" had to wait for a long time.\n\nIn general they used a lot of manpower for their activities, so they had lots of photographing and sound recording technology, but mostly what you would expect: bugs, wiretaps, small and silent cameras, cameras to make photos around a corner. Telephones were rare and telegrams were used mostly for communication, so they were wired though the MfS headquarters so they could just print out everything going through.\n\nThe Stasi opened a lot of letters, not only from/to west germany but also in the DDR itself. They even had a \"Handschriftenspeicher\", a database with lots of writing probes, so if a antisocialist letter was found they could compare the handwriting with that of thousands of citizens and find out who wrote it.\n\nThey even collected smell sampled in jars, so a trained dog could be used to check who had been in a room, although it's doubted this method was reliable or efficient.\n\nthe german wikipedia article has some photos and desciptions of the used equipment (_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerium_f%C3%BCr_Staatssicherheit#Ausr.C3.BCstung" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "diven2l" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "Greek calendars are pretty complicated. Each city had its own calendar, and while many cities had similar calendars it was not even certain that an individual city might have only a single calendar. At Athens there were two state calendars and then a sort of agricultural calendar based on the seasons. The festival calendar was pretty bonkers as far as we can tell. It began with the first new moon after the summer solstice. In order to connect the lunar and solar calendar for the festival calendar several complex systems of intercalary days and months probably existed but it's poorly understood. The state (or democratic, due to its foundation after the democracy) calendar was a complex system which divided the solar year into ten months, with no regard for the lunar months. Likewise, the modern notion of years as a fixed chronological sequence did not exist in the Athenian calendar, or any other Greek calendar. The Athenians generally designated their years according to the names of the eponymous archon of that year. 356, the year of Alexander's birth, was therefore the year when Elpines was archon. Fixing dates was therefore rather difficult for much of the Classical Period. Thucydides, for example, dated events by listing a string of local years, including the ephors at Sparta, the archons at Athens, and for heat ever reason the tenure of Chrysis as priestess at Argos. By the Hellenistic Period, under the influence of Timaeus and Eratosthenes, scholars began using Olympiads to date historical events. But this was a scholarly convention, not one that most people recognized and used, in much the same way that AUC was used by scholars but pretty much never by ordinary people, who continued to date according to consular years into late antiquity " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cee590e", "cee5cx6", "cee5ebg", "cee6xas", "ceea3zu", "ceebsfk", "ceef0z8", "ceeggp7" ], "score": [ 21, 96, 7, 15, 11, 4, 2, 6 ], "text": [ "With any other scientific field, you can control and test assumptions. This is not the case with historical events, for even those which seem on the surface similar are, when examined closely, radically different. In other words, it is a common truism that history repeats itself, but this is true in only the vaguest of generalities. All this is dealt with more than adequately in Herbert Butterfield's \"The Whig Interpretation of History,\" a short read and the foundation for modern historical theory.", "It has been the standard position of historians for a long time (we are supposed to tell how things were, \"Wie es wirklich gewesen\", not how it might have been), but opposing views are becoming increasingly popular and I'll try to argue for the merits of counterfactual history here:\n\n* One of the most important things to consider when talking about the merits of counterfactual history is this: Every historian uses (indirectly) counterfactual arguments. If I make a claim such as \"The resignation of Bismarck caused the eventual downfall of the German Empire\", what I am saying also is \"If Bismarck had not resigned, the German empire would have survived.\" Seems obvious, but often gets missed in discussions about counterfactuals. A counterfactual history can help you to analyze such claims as well.\n\n\n* To create a counterfactual, you are forced to analyze the forces (societal, political, economical et c.) at work at a certain point of divergence to get an idea of how events could have continued with changed variables. You are forced to consider all influences on a certain topic and evaluate them for their importance and for how they could have varied. This should be obviously useful.\n\n\n* Counterfactual history forces you to evaluate the importance of certain historic events. One of the most popular and most considered examples is the assassination of the Austrian crown prince in Sarajevo 1914. If you come to the conclusion that WWI would have erupted anyway, that event is probably not very important as a catalyst. If you come to the conclusion that it wouldn't have, it might have been one of the most important events of the 20th century. In any case, you get a fruitful mental exercise. \n\n\n* Counterfactuals are the closest thing we as historians have to an experiment. \n\n\nFinally, two quotes: \n\n & gt;We can avoid counterfactuals only if we eschew all causal interference and limit ourselves to strictly noncausal narratives of what actually happened (no smuggling in causal claims under the guise of verbs such as ‘influenced’, ‘responded’, ‘triggered’, ‘precipitated’ and the like). (Philip E. Tetlock/Aaron Belkin (eds.): Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives, in: Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives, Princeton 1996.) \n\nHistory would be devoid of any discovery aside from a straight description of facts without counterfactuals: \n\n & gt; Perhaps all one can truly say in the end is that World War I was a twentieth century diplomatic crisis gone wrong, the one gamble, or rather series of gambles (of how many in all, before and after?) that did not work out. Such things happen. (Remak, Joachim: The Origins of World War I, 1871-1914, New York 1967, 150.)\n\nOf course this is all quite controversial. You can find opposing opinions from Historians that consider counterfactual histories as meaningless, since they cannot be verified in any form (f.e. Adam Wandruszka; Edward Carr or Paul W. Schroder: „a historians purpose is not to speculate on what might have happened in history, but to shed light on what actually did happen, why it did, and what it means“).\n\nInterestingly, one of the earliest proponents of such ideas (that I know of) would be Nietzsche, who criticized contemporary historians for their lack of imagination in considering what might have been; also Max Weber voiced such opinions a bit later. I think it is also a philosophically fruitful position. Often, political decisions are presented as \"without alternative\". If you consider history as \"without alternative\", too, these positions will hardly be overcome.\n\nOf course this whole topic opens up a plethora of other questions, such as the importance of individuals in history, the possibility of individual decisions to influence it, the possibilities of different decisions and last not least the question of free will itself, linearity vs. nonlinearity of history and determinism, but trying to discuss that too would go too far. ", "It sounds like you might be more interested in sociology, which has more to do with modeling human behavior. Even then, it is a science and doesn't engage in speculation. In history, trying to predict actions or behavior tends to lead to blanket statements and generalizations that miss nuance and details in favor of that larger universal idea.", " > My \"ideal\" version of the field of history would attempt to find patterns of human behavior that allow for prediction and modeling.\n\nLike most of our ideas in life, we aren't the first to think of them, nor do our thoughts exist outside a continuum of options. History isn't opposed to prediction and modelling, it's just that we usually call it political science when it does so. And the 'science' indicates that there are attempts to do what history cannot do: control and test, synthesize data points to predict results, even if they are thought experiments.\n\n\n", " > My \"ideal\" version of the field of history would attempt to find patterns of human behavior that allow for prediction and modeling.\n\nWhat you're describing is political science, which uses a very different set of tools and methodologies than academic history to develop more generalized predictions and models. Of course, the process can (and often does) result in bad history, since simplifying cases to develop general theories necessarily ignores the specific circumstances that historians are most interested in exploring. \n\nCounterfactuals themselves still aren't very useful in developing theories or models except maybe as a brainstorming exercise, since they can't be disproved. That said, testing a theory or models predictions against the historical record is an important part of political science. If your model results in a counterfactual prediction, it's important to investigate why.\n\nFor example, take Stephen Biddle's [Military Power](_URL_0_). Biddle examines existing models for predicting military performance in war, argues that their predictions are wildly inaccurate compared to historical results, and proposes a new model that he argues better predicts real world outcomes. \n\nIt's all good political science. However, his model simplifies THOUSANDS of footnoted pages of military history into just 20 inputed variables and ~150 pages summarizing his three test cases--Operation Michel in WW1, Operation Goodwood in WW2 and the first Gulf War. \n\nBoiling reality down to 20 variables might be a good way to develop potentially useful predictive models--which is the goal of political science and other social sciences--but 20 variables alone are not enough to understand exactly why Operation Goodwood specifically failed--which is the goal of historians.\n", "Economic history is more prone to exploring general laws and using counterfactuals. Like /u/Astrogator said, these counterfactuals are often latent, but not so much as in 'pure' history. In a lot of ways, this is connected to economic history's use of quantitative models that are meant to explicitly uncover the 'law's of relationships, and the general discouragement of an 'historical' approach that focuses on a unique outcome. That is, economic historians are not supposed to examine a single event and ask 'why did this happen?' as much as they are supposed to ask 'what happens when x happens?'", " > There is no record of things that didn't happen (counterfactuals) or might happen (predictions)\n\nIn case this isn't a joke, why would you think there should be records of things that didn't happen?\n", "As an historian, I happen to hate speculative or counter-factual history. Here's why: is there \"counter-factual\" chemistry? Counter-factual engineering? Counter-factual medicine? No, there isn't. History deals in facts; yes, those facts are open to a certain amount of interpretation, but at the end of the day, you have to prove that something happened in order to cite it. \n\nIf, for example, you want to prove the historical validity of *Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter*, you should be able to prove the existence of vampires, and find proof that Abraham Lincoln was roving the Civil War-torn US hunting and exterminating said mythical undead (i.e. old Dageurrotypes, a paper trail, his collection of throwing axes, etc.). Failure to prove that something happened is poor history and worse, an attempt to mislead, obfuscate, and hinder human historical understanding. Losing our past is like losing our way in a dark, deep forest - you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been.\n\nWhat you're saying with this question is, essentially, \"I really like fiction! Why isn't reality based more on fiction?\" I'd suggest, however, that you do a little more digging into true, real, peer-reviewed historical books and articles; some of these stories are even better than much of the speculative fiction out there. For example, isn't it more exciting to think that the Mohejo-Daro people of the Indus valley had well-planned cities complete with running water and sewers through human experimentation and wisdom rather than speculating that aliens did it all for us? Isn't it fascinating that Leif Ericsson and other Viking explorers discovered new lands because of wonderful, insatiable human curiosity combined with human ingenuity and dislike of authority rather than following an old map handed down by some Atlantean? \n\nThink of the agency we lose as a species when we allow people to speculate that the gods, ancient non-human races, aliens, or mythical critters guide us rather than realizing that we are very, very smart monkeys as a group - dangerous, deadly, beautiful, ingenious, collaborative monkeys who can (and sometimes do) accomplish amazing things." ] }

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[ "http://www.amazon.com/The-Killing-History-Theorists-Murdering/dp/1893554120" ]

[ [], [], [], [], [ "http://books.google.com/books?id=UjRY3kti18UC&printsec=frontcover&dq=explaining+military+power&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vxTDUqSNFOfRsATz4oHIDQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=explaining%20military%20power&f=false" ], [], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cqa9gkv", "cqadw0e" ], "score": [ 2, 2 ], "text": [ "No other country was willing to take them.", "There are a couple issues that were important that were not depicted in Woman in Gold.\n\nThe Nazis spent a lot of time in the earliest years of the Holocaust trying to maintain a veneer of respectability. For that reason, they passed laws and they imprisoned people and oppressed Jews, but at the same time they didn't want it to seem like wholesale slaughter was underway. There are a lot of details that I could give month-to-month and country to country about what the Nazis did in this regard, but I'll just restrict my comments to Austria at this time period. Austria had just been annexed by Nazi Germany. There were many anti-semitic laws established, and while they were unfair, they had the veneer of legality. Jews were accused collectively of various crimes and compelled to give up all of their property as \"fines\" and \"taxes\". Many were taken into custody on trumped up charges in order to help expedite the process of theft and killing. You may remember that when the Nazis came to the Bloch-Bauer household in the film, they immediately informed the Bloch-Bauers that they owed a huge fine and the Nazis then began cataloguing and ultimately seizing many of the assets of the Bloch-Bauer family. They used various techniques to compel the Bloch-Bauers to sign over their assets to the Nazis. Had they simply seized the the assets without getting this legal cover, they could be open to international criticism and there might be more sympathy towards the Jews and the complaints that Jews worldwide were having about Nazi activities. There was also the issue of gaining control of international assets that the Nazis couldn't directly seize. So as you may recall in the film, the Bloch-Bauers were placed under house arrest and they were watched at all times by Nazi guards, who lived in the home with them. This was extraordinary behavior that was based on the fact that the Bloch-Bauers were extremely wealthy--the vast majority of Austrian Jews would not have been subjected to it. Not shown in the film is that the Nazis took Maria Altmann's husband's brother (Bernard Altmann) into custody at the concentration camp Buchenwald around this time in order to blackmail his family into signing over to the Nazis the ownership of the Altmann family textile mill. Which he did. Likewise, the Bloch-Bauers were being compelled by this harassment to sign over ownership if their sugar mill--they controlled about 20% of the sugar in Austria. The family did still manage to get some assets out of the country, and Bernard Altmann opened up a new textile business in England, and then Maria Altmann, now a refugee in the US, worked for the company to promote it--she became a purveyor of the cashmere sweaters being made at the Altmann factory after she arrived in the US. After the war, as the film implies, some of these coercive methods of the Nazis were nevertheless used to justify Austrian ownership of properties that had been seized from Jews during the war. \n\nBut this type of treatment was not typical for Jews in Austria or any other countries controlled by Nazis. Mostly, Jews were free to leave at this point in time and in Austria... IF they could find any country willing to accept them. But virtually no countries were willing to accept any Jews into them. As it became clear that Jews were under great peril in Europe from the Nazis, there was an international conference by many nations on what to do about all the potential Jewish refugees. It was called the Evian Conference, and was held July 6-15, 1938, and the result was that basically all countries there made it clear they would not be accepting Jewish refugees. The US had a small quota of Jewish immigrants that it said it would continue to accept, but in fact it never even came close to approaching accepting as many people as the quota allowed." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dlhgu4s", "dlhz7j7" ], "score": [ 44, 6 ], "text": [ "Appeasement, as a policy, assumes that the party being appeased has a limited set of demands and that meeting those demands will make the appeased party back down from further demands. Simply put, that was a false assumption when it came to the Western powers' interactions with Hitler. \n\nThis was the basic idea. Hitler claimed that he was only demanding justice for the German people (both inside and outside of Germany). To this end, the Western powers were willing to appease Hitler so long as Hitler's moves seemed reasonable. When Hitler re-militarized the Rhineland, that was seen as a perfectly reasonable action, despite it being in violation of the Versailles Treaty. The Rhineland is German territory, after all, why shouldn't the German army be allowed to go there? When he occupied Austria, the same thing. Austrians are ethnic Germans, and despite what they'll tell you today, there was a broad base of support (although certainly not the high 90% that was claimed in the plebiscite) for the German occupation of the country. In Munich, Hitler demanded only the Sudetenland, which was populated mostly by ethnic Germans. This was, after all, one of the main articles of Wilson's 14 points - self-determination. Why shouldn't Germans be governed by Germany? Yes, it's deeply unfair to the state of Czechoslovakia, but when you're trying to avoid a World War, you make ugly concessions, which is what happened at Munich. \n\nThe reasonableness (and I'm speaking from a purely pragmatic point of view, not from a moral point of view) ends with Hitler's invasion of the rest of Czechoslovakia in early 1939. There really is no defense of that and, if anything, it tipped the Western allies off to the fact that Hitler was not really making reasonable demands anymore, nor would his demands cease, but rather he was engaging on a course of expansionist conquest in East Central and Eastern Europe. They, the Western powers, drew the line at the next step - the invasion of Poland. I can't remember where, off the top of my head - I think it's in his Table Talks - Hitler even mentions to his subordinates that he was afraid that the Western Powers would appease him in the invasion of Poland, thereby not giving him (Hitler) the war that he really wanted. \n\nTo answer your question directly, appeasement didn't work because Hitler never had as his end goal the motives which he proclaimed publicly at the time - incorporation of Germans into Germany and self-determination for Germans living outside of Germany. Rather, his goal was an expansionist war in the East against Poland and especially the Soviet Union. Once it became clear to the Western allies that these were his real goals, appeasement as a policy ended and the war began in earnest. ", "I think that to answer this question we need to look a few years back. Europe has for centuries functioned with many states which accept the legitimacy and sovereignty of each other. Up to WWI, the general consensus was that there needs to be a balance of power in between European states. This was achieved to a large extent after the end of the 30 year war and held up for many years (with the exception of Napoleon, but that would be a topic on its own). \n\nThis dynamic balance, which successfully kept Europe without large scale conflicts, was mainly based on the fact that there were many smaller German states. These states alone were too weak to be able to threaten another state, and if needed, they could've easily formed an alliance strong enough to defend themselves. \n\nThis was very important for the whole of Europe - but this changed drastically after Germany united into one state. They easily became the most powerful state in Europe, with the slight exception of English naval dominance, however even that was threatened.\n\nThe balance has changed - Germany suddenly could've reached much further than before, considering both colonies and their main state borders.\n\nThis and a few other factors then resulted in WWI, after which the treaty of Versailles was signed. This is the most important factor, and has been described as one of the worst treaties ever signed in history. The treaty itself should've put balance of powers back in place, however it did not consider the fact that Germany still was a powerhouse. The treaty had no one to overlook and guard it. France was decimated by the war, the British took a step back from Europe, Italy became an ideological ally and both Czechoslovakia and Poland lacked the political and military power to be able to really punish Germany if they did not play along. \n\nAnother option was the actual use of force in some form of \"preventive strike\". With France lacking the power and England so opposed to war, there was no possible coalition that could strike fast enough to prevent any German attempts to gain power. During all this, Germany still had the same capacity as it had before WWI, if not greater. That meant that any possible appeasement wasn't relative to the actual power of Germany (as we saw during WWII, when Germany almost fully controlled Europe). \n\nAdditionally, ideologically it wasn't possible to appease Hitler. He wasn't looking for the best \"deal\" for the German state, he was looking for a new world order (something no appeasement could have ever given him). \n\nHopefully this answers your question, if I wasn't clear in my answer feel free to ask anything :)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dljpz76" ], "score": [ 20 ], "text": [ "Definitely not my area of expertise, but this might help a little. \n\nI read [a biography of Harriet Tubman](_URL_0_) by the historian Catherine Clinton some years ago and was equal-parts surprised and horrified to learn that her owners first hired her out when she was only five or six. (Her date of birth was never formally recorded, so Tubman didn't know exactly how old she was, and historians continue to disagree on her most likely year of birth.) She was still a very small child herself, but was expected to care for the infant of a neighbor to her owners and was beaten whenever the baby cried. From that point on, she either worked full-time for the Brodess family (her owners) or was otherwise hired out to other plantations in the area. It was her owners who were paid for her work, so there was certainly an economic incentive to get a slave working as early as possible. If I remember correctly, Tubman was allowed to keep a very small portion of her wages for day-work as an adult, but not as a child, so of course the incentive to hire out a child slave was just as strong even if they didn't bring in as much money.\n\nTubman's brothers and sisters were first hired out at similar ages (again, near as we can tell). Greater age and maturity required more mentally and physically demanding work, but even small children were considered perfectly capable of plucking game birds, hauling firewood, checking traps, and carrying water for field workers. Tubman seems to have trained for a number of different tasks both inside and outside the house as a child/adolescent so she could hire out for a wide variety of work, which increased her economic value.\n\nI'm unwilling to extrapolate beyond that, but this doesn't appear to have been an unusual practice on the Eastern shore of Maryland in the 1820s and 1830s, at least." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.amazon.com/Harriet-Tubman-Freedom-Catherine-Clinton/dp/0316155942" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ck61kq9" ], "score": [ 13 ], "text": [ "It empahsis both his animalistic, childish behaviour with urination as well as his humanity and 'god hood' with his ability to write his own name. The story of Journey to the West, especially in the more modern takes of it, is about the duality of all of the characters, but especially the Monkey King in his ability to achieve enlightenment by overcoming his animal instincts. \n\nRemember, the Journey is his penance, in the sense his release from Five Finger Mountain was paroled on the condition that he kept the Monk safe all the way to India. \n\nEDIT: Don't just take my word on it; I only have a passing knowledge of the buddhist belief behind the folktale. \n\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c8uq5t4" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "The trusts were when a single company or group controlled an entire industry, like Standard Oil circa 1910. In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was an illegal monopoly and forced them to divide into smaller companies. Monopolies can be anti-capitalistic as the monopoly is without competition. In a monopoly, a large corporation might overtake a \"mom and pop\" business by offering much lower prices and starving out the smaller business, like a siege tactic. Now without competition, the trust is free to raise its prices without fear of loss of sales. \n\ntl;dr monopolies/trusts use their assets to control and industry and keep competitors out of business" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e3ltfp5" ], "score": [ 20 ], "text": [ "Part 1: Doctrinal impact of the Battle of the Frontiers:\n\nIn 1914, when the war broke out, the backbone of the French Army was still the “Régiment d’Infanterie de Ligne” (shortened as RI) inherited from the Second Empire. Each regiment was composed of 3 Infantry Battalions of 1000 men (4 for the Chasseurs), themselves divided in 4 Infantry Companies and 3 machine gun sections.\n\nThe first hostilities of the Great War between France & Germany quickly revealed the flaws of the New School ideas but also prefigured the drastic mutations that the French Army would soon be forced to undergo: The 14th of August 1914, near the Village of Plaine, repeated bayonet frontal assaults from the 13ème DI were shattered by German artillery and machine gun positions hidden in the heights of Donon. The same day, two batteries of 75mm guns disregarded the rules established by the RMA (Artillery Training Instructions) and chose instead to orchestrate a joint-action with the Infantry combining a fixation barrage with outflanking maneuvers, forcing a German withdrawal.\n\nOn the strategic and operational levels however, the New School precepts of systematic assault, aim for central breakthrough and primacy of speed over surprise or caution failed utterly: A good example can be seen with the 4th Army of General Langle de Cary, which was ordered to attack the flanks of the IVth German Army led by the Duke of Württemberg through the Ardennes on the 21th of August. Having sacrificed adequate reconnaissance and rearguard coverage to maximize speed, the 11th, 12th and 17th French Army Corps were fixated and beaten back by the lone German 18th Army Corps despite their numerical advantage.\n\n“The same day [22th of August] on different terrains, at different hours, all of the French divisions made the same mistakes: lack of communication, disdain for long range reconnaissance, disregard for rearguard defense, absence of lateral liaisons and a reckless reliance on infantry attacks unsupported by artillery against a foe willing to fight on the defensive.” – Emile Wanty, the Art of War.\n\nAs such, from August to December 1914, the French Army as whole was forced to adapt & evolve almost as spectacularly as the 13th DI. After the bloody August of the Bataille des Frontières came the reversal of the Marne in September and then the race to the sea of December where the last of the great German offensives before 1916 would be checked by the French.\n\nIf anything, the doctrinal emphasize on quantity and morale of the New School did provide the French Armies with soldiers, who although on average older and less tactically educated than their German counterparts, were capable of withstanding and fighting on despite terrible losses, grueling retreats and the looming perspective of a national disaster.\n\nUltimately, more than 40% of French large units commanders (162 Officers) were relieved of their command for incompetence or insufficiency during this period. For French military historian Pierre Rocolle, this “Hécatombe des Généraux” was a consequence of the numerous politically driven nominations that happened during the Dreyfus Affair, as well as age, since many of the high-ranked officers sacked by Joffre had never attended the ESG (French Academy of War, created in 1876). \n\nBut despite those setbacks, fortunately for the French Army, the GQG (Supreme Headquarter) was swift and efficient in processing the battle reports precisely and diligently written by field officers, no matter the situation.\nBetween the 16th and 24th of August 1914, 2 weeks after the beginning of hostilities, the GQG thus issued its first corrective notes at the attention of all Army Group leaders:\n\n* Conquered territories must be manned and defended with artillery, to prevent counter-attacks.\n* The enemy must first be engaged with skirmishers and artillery before launching the assault.\n* The infantry must wait for artillery support, do not let the troops needlessly expose themselves.\n* Generals must remain aware of the direction of battle at any given time.\n* The infantry must use terrain to its advantage during both the attack and defense.\n* Attacks will be all the less lethal the more carefully prepared they are.\n\nHowever, it would be naïve to believe that such orders could be received and applied immediately, especially since, by this point, skepticism towards written rules had become widespread.\n\n“It was too late to benefit from those observations. The gruesome work of adaptation had to be done in the midst of battle, to be completed only in a near future that we had to preserve.” – Commander Larchet, 10th Corps.\n\nAlthough they would eventually yield good results, it would not be before late August to early September, during the Battles of the Trouée des Charmes* and Grand-Couronné* that the harsh lessons of the Bataille des Frontières would be assimilated as a whole by the French Army. The 3rd September, new instructions were issued advocating the construction of trenches, with a light forward line, a deep second line and observation towers as well as the need to dissimulate one’s reserve from artillery fire. It thus took half-a-month for the French military leadership, dominated by infantry-minded Saint-Cyriens to finally concede that “le feu tue” –firepower kills. The era of bayonet warfare and morale-centric shock & awe was over.\n\nThis assimilation process would remain a work-in-progress during 1915 however, as the French leadership struggled to undo the damage done by pre-war military education. On the 23rd of January 1915, General Fayolle wrote:\n\n“I’m having a lot of difficulties trying to organize the construction of trenches by the troops… My men are more interested in dying than working…”\n\nTo make the learning process even more difficult, the officers and soldiers most enamored with the concept of Attaque à Outrance would, in their frustration, often adopt a counter-productive stance of stubborn defiance to the last man or refusal to let go of terrain ill-suited for defense. The most remarkable, perhaps even embarrassing, example of such mindset would be General Duchêne, whose refusal to apply the defense-in-depth doctrine advocated by Pétain’s “Directive N°4”, issued the 22nd of December 1917* during the German offensive in the Aisne the 27th of May 1918 nearly led to the collapse of the French 6th Army. This near-defeat would prove to be one of the biggest setbacks suffered by the French Army during the War.\n\nBy the 6th of December 1915, Fayolle would further still remark:\n\n“Why is it so difficult for me to convey my ideas and enforce their practical application? […] The truth is that nobody was prepared for this war of positions. Quite the contrary, we all had the greatest disdain for fortifications and entrenching works. Our whole education has to be reworked and such a task cannot be accomplished in one day. War cannot be improvised.”\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nBattle of the Trouée des Charmes (24th-26th of August 1914) and Grand-Couronné (4th-13th of September 1914): \n\nDefensive battles led by the 2nd Army of French General Castelnau against the offensive of the German VIth Army led by Kronprinz Rupprecht of Bavaria in Lorraine following the initial victory of German forces during the Battle of Morhange. Those confrontations saw General Castelnau learn from his initial setbacks and order the defensive organization of the battlefield and careful preparation of both defensive & offensive artillery barrages. German Chief of Staff Moltke’s hopes of an easy breakthrough to open the flanks of the French 4th Army were dashed as the Bavarians were beaten back with heavy casualties in both instances. The “Miracle of the Marne” would doubtfully have been possible without Castelnau’s tactical readjustments and the success of the 2nd Army gave the necessary credence needed by the advocates of firepower and safety over speed to enforce tactical reforms within the French Army.\n\nPétain’s 4th Directive (22th of December 1917): \n\n* The conditions of battle on the western front are temporarily modified by the Russian surrender; a new orientation must be assessed in the management of our operations.\n* The Entente will recover numerical superiority in fighting strength only when American forces become capable of fielding large units. Until then, we must adopt a bracing stance and prepare ourselves to reassume, as soon as possible, a great offensive that shall bring us final victory.\n* In the event of a large scale enemy offensive, Armies and Army Groups commanders are expected to fight according to the following guidelines: Hold the first lines only with the necessary amount of defenses required to slow down the enemy while preparing the second and lateral lines. Ensure the integrity of the second and lateral lines at all time. Coordinate fire and counter-attack within the enemy’s area of penetration with the lateral lines. The Commander in Chief’s reserves can be committed to reinforce an attacked army or launch a decisive counter-attack if the situation and terrain are deemed favorable.\n* Our High-Command must seek to lessen our first line casualties, or if these have fallen, the amount of efforts required to retake them through adequate preparation of the ground and coordination with every lines so that initiative and aggressiveness remain on our side even in defensive operations.\n\n--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\n\nSource: La Chair & l'Acier, Michel Goya." ] }

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[ "https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3gqgex/on_august_22_1914_during_the_battles_of_the/" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "d9pj7yy" ], "score": [ 17 ], "text": [ "This is kind of a huge question, and there's obviously going to be a great deal of variation, but I'm going to give it a go. I'm not 100% sure what you're looking for in terms of an answer, so I'm going to write about something along the lines of 'how did the rest of society see monks and monasticism in the Middle Ages?' - if you had something else in mind, then of course feel free to correct me.\n\nIn short, yes, monks and monasteries were respected in the medieval period, but in fact I'd go even further and say that monasticism and its central role in society was one of the defining features of the middle ages. The played an unparalleled spiritual role in the minds of medieval people, as they were on the front lines of an eternal spiritual war between heaven and hell. Monks were the archetypal oratores, those who prayed, renouncing all wealth, relationships and even legal personhood in order to devote their lives to prayer for the souls of the faithful. There were the original milites Christi - the soldiers of Christ - fighting Satan and his demons from within the confines of the cloister in order to save mankind from eternal damnation. As a result, they were enormously respected and trusted on the whole within society: people sought to be associated with local monasteries, to have the monks pray for them, to be buried there, to be considered a part of the community. Good Christians donated land and wealth to the monks for the good of their souls and to aid the monks in their pious duties and kings and nobles routinely consulted with great abbots and monastic leaders on matters of importance. Monasticism became so important that by the end of the middle ages (in continental Europe, in any case) it was difficult to find anywhere that was more than a days walk away from some sort of collective religious establishment, whether it be an abbey, priory or collegiate church.\n\nBut, of course, this is /r/AskHistorians, so nothing is ever as simple as it looks. Part of the reason we have this picture is that the vast majority of our written sources come from ecclesiastical writers, and the majority of those writers were monastic. So it's only natural that we're presented with a view of monasticism which puts it at the centre of the medieval world, so to speak. Much of the viewpoint I've expressed in the previous paragraph is the product of the tenth and eleventh centuries, which saw huge upheavals in the Western Church. Before and after that, things did and could look different.\n\nIn the Early Middle Ages, although monasticism was certainly present in Europe it had nowhere near the prominence that it would come to acquire in later years. Many monasteries were hugely important locally, both socially and economically, but on a wider level had very little influence, either materially or spiritually. This social and economic role is not to be underestimated however: early medieval monasteries such as San Vincenzo al Volturno in Central Italy, Redon in Brittany or St Gall in Swabia (modern Switzerland) all preserve records that show the vast wealth that monasteries could amass in this period and how access to, connections with and control of that wealth was often a focus for local politics. The epitome of this phenomenon are probably the early Irish monasteries, such as Clonmacnoise or Glendalough, which became essentially proto-urban towns, large enough to be politically significant in their own right. This is an exception to the rule however, as in general European monasteries before the central Middle Ages had little independence. Abbacies and control of monasteries were often vested in powerful outsiders, particularly bishops, nobles and kings. This was often seen by the church as important to maintain control of religious sentiment and power, embodied in the local bishop and count (as one can see, for example, in the works of Gregory of Tours). Abbeys were also often founded as a local centre of power by aristocrats (including royalty): a place where the family could be buried and land could be held in trust for the family and controlled through the appointments (usually of family members) to the abbacy. It eventually got to the point that, in the tenth century, most monasteries were openly controlled by laymen, either as lay abbots (common in the lands that would become France; the Robertian family, who would become kings of France in 984, based much of their power on control of a string of lay abbacies in the Loire valley and around Paris) or as advocates (lay persons appointed to deal with an abbey's temporal and legal affairs, since men of God shouldn't deal with such things; a position much more common in German-speaking areas than further west).\n\nJust as this trend came to a head, however, things began to change. The process known to historians as 'Monastic Reform' was actually a series of independent, though linked, reforms of monasteries based on the idea that they should be independent of secular control, or even the control of local bishops: abbots should be elected by their monks, not appointed by outsiders and the property of the monastery belonged to that monastery's patron saint, and should therefore never be alienated or controlled by lay persons. From several notable centres in the tenth century (Cluny in France, Gorze in Germany and Ely and Ramsay in England), these ideas gained huge currency and popularity by the middle of the eleventh century, and were the basis of what would come to be known as the 'Papal Reform Movement' (sometimes called the 'Gregorian Reform'). It's notable that many of the biggest intellectual leaders of this wider movement for church reform were monks themselves and many of the movement's aims could be classified as making the church as a whole more 'monkish', such as removing secular appointments to bishoprics and forbidding clerical marriage. The eleventh century reform movements were much broader than just monasticism, but they held up the monk as a spiritual ideal for the clergy and for society at large. Monks produced huge amounts of history, hagiography and theology which all promoted the ideal of monks which I outlined in the opening paragraph, and people, by and large, seem to have bought into it. Bishops, archbishops and popes were all much more likely in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to have started their careers as monks, which only helped to spread the ideas and ideology of monasticism. New monasteries were founded across Europe in huge numbers, and older, crumbling ones were reformed and re-founded to great fanfare. People, not only aristocrats but ordinary farmers and peasants, donated land and wealth to monasteries on a scale never before or again seen and the most famous monasteries became veritable mini-cities: at its peak, Cluny had 300 monks and thousands of support staff. New monastic orders abounded in the twelfth century too, as people sought to find new and purer monastic ways of living: here, the Cistercians are notable for their encouragement of commoners and peasants to join the monastic life as *conversi* (sometimes translated as 'lay brothers'), who joined the monastic orders but spent the majority of their time working for the monastery in its fields, rather than praying in its chapels. The economic effect of the monastic boom is important to note too: there was a huge investment by monasteries in building new churches and support buildings, as well as considerable investment in the productive capacities of the land they owned, particularly converting un- or under-productive land to be used to produce marketable goods (the Cistercian order are the most famous for this, but they were by no means alone in their practices). The social role played by the monastery locally continued unabated, where it remained the biggest local landholder, giving patronage, aid and promotion to those people or families who were close to it. The late tenth to the early thirteenth centuries can be characterized as the golden age of Western monasticism, where my opening description is most fitting.\n\nIn the later middle ages, this picture begins to dim a little. I won't speak as much about it, as I know a lot less about later medieval monasticism (hopefully a medievalist with a slightly later area of expertise can chime in?) but on the whole there's evidence that people were becoming more and more dissatisfied with traditional monasticism. This can be seen in the rise of more specialised or personalised devotional practices among the laity (particularly the urban classes) and the rise of new religious movements which emphasised poverty and apostolic living to a much greater degree than pampered monks did (both orthodox movements like the mendicants and heretical movements). The respect for monks and monasticism never disappeared entirely during the middle ages, however, and that golden ages of central medieval monasticism gave us some of the ideas which continue to define Western Christianity to this day." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "djtt1dv" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Pistols were common enough in certain areas that towns (like Dodge City) passed city ordinances forbidding people from carrying weapons within city limits. Depending on where, when, and who you're talking about, you'll get a lot of variance, however. For example, a person working in the mines, or a farmer, banker, or farrier wouldn't have had much use for one at any time or in any place out \"West\" so it would have been rare to see them carry a pistol. On the other hand, a person in law enforcement, a professional gambler, or a cattleman (often called a \"puncher\") would usually be packing, as their profession deemed it a necessary tool of the trade. A cattleman or puncher, for example, carried a pistol because when on a drive, it was a useful tool for killing snakes, putting down sick or injured livestock, and protecting your investment. \n\nNow, depending on when and where you're looking, things varied. To take another example, someone in Denver in 1890 might have never needed a pistol, and therefore would not have carried one, while a person in 1875 Abilene, whether he was a bartender or a bandit, would have likely carried a pistol regardless of their profession. \n\nIt really did depend on who you were, where you lived, and what you did for a living. Shootouts did happen, and face-offs like you see in the movies, while far more rare, did also take place every once in a while. Pistols had many uses in the West, however, and while they are an iconic symbol of violence between people, more often than not, they were used to intimidate rather than kill, and even more, as a tool for keeping animals under control (snakes, livestock, etc). Ammo was expensive, and if you wanted to use your pistol with any kind of proficiency, practice was absolutely necessary. Not many people could afford such an investment, so while violence as a result of pistols did occur, it was usually a messy, quick affair that involved a lot of ambush-style attacks.\n\n[Source: Michael Denning, 'Mechanic Accents']" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d13npvi" ], "score": [ 23 ], "text": [ "Early military planes were primarily designed for observational purposes. By having the piolet in the back the passenger (observer) would have the best possible view.\n\n-\n\nAs a matter of fact in early aircraft in Germany the passenger would be a officer and the pilot would be a lower rank and their job was essentially to chauffeur the officer around.\n\n-\n\nThe positioning of the two seats is designed to balance the aircraft and prevent it from becoming too nose heavy. (It is designed to be slightly nose heavy." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cotnay5" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The Soviet Commissars told their men to fight to the death and if they were captured, to commit suicide. The Russians hated the Germans so much, that this wasn't a really uncommon occurrence. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "eyayqre" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "For the Roman empire, there really was no \"border\", at least not in the sense of a modern nation-state. Theoretically, Rome's imperium had no terretrial limit: the barbarians were, on paper, under Rome's authority as well: they simply weren't incorporated into the provincial organization of the empire. Of course, in reality that wasn't the case. Anyone actually living in the frontiers would know that if you kept walking away from Rome, at certain point you were in *barbaricum* outside of Rome's control. Especially in the East, no one would have been delusional enough to believe that Parthia/Sassanid Persia was a Roman subject. But when would that person know that? For the frontiers along the Rhine, the Danube and the Euhprates, the great rivers were both religiously symbolic and visible signs. All Roman forts were on one side of the river, so crossing would have been a good indicator of stepping into the \"other side\" as well. Still, trading, traffic and military patrols between both sides were very common, so it's difficult to say just how much of a big deal that was, although Roman writers like Tacitus did see the great rivers surrounding and bounding the empire (Tacitus, *Annals* 1.9). Things would have been even more blurry in the North African and Arabian frontiers, which didn't have any rivers as a visible sign of demarcation. It's probably more easier and accurate to perceive the \"border\" between the Roman empire and the barbarians as a zone rather than a linear line.\n\nThat does not mean however, that the Romans had no sense of linear demarcation. Indeed, the very idea of a boundary was an integral part of the foundation myth of Rome, symbolized by the boundary (*pomerium*) of Rome ploughed by Romulus.\n\nThere are many examples of *termini* stones, or border markers, between individual provinces and cities. Such markers would be an easily recognizable sign of demarcation. \n\nIt is also important to note that there were many different layers of borders within the empire. The administrative, judicial, economic and military borders were all placed separately inside the empire. For example, the *portorium*, the dozen or so tariff/road toll zones of the empire, were set up independently from the provincial boundaries. In some areas, it would have been possible to walk into a different tariff zone even if you were within the same province. \n\nTLDR: there really was no linear \"border\" in a modern sense in the Roman empire. The border was a lot more zonal and gradual. The great rivers along some of the frontiers was both a symbolic and visible sign of demarcation, but for frontier areas without the border would have been even more blurry. However, there were clear demarcations within the empire, which were administratively, judicially, economically and militarily set up independently.\n\nSources\n\n: David Braunt, \"River frontiers in the environmental psychology of the Roman world\", in David Kennedy (ed.), *The Roman Army in the East. Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series no. 18,* (Ann Arbor, 1996), pp. 43-7.\n\n: Hugh Elton, *Frontiers of the Roman Empire* (Indiana UP,1996)\n\n: Boris Rankov, \"Do Rivers Make Good Frontiers?\" in Zsolt Visy (ed.), *Limes Xix. Proceedings of the Xixth International Congress of Roman Frontier Studies Held in Pecs, Hungary (September, 2003)*, (University of Pécs, 2005), pp. 175-81.\n\n: C.R.Whittaker, *Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study* (The John Hopkins UP, 1994)\n\n: C.R. Whittaker, *Rome and its Frontiers: The Dynamics of Empire* (Routledge, 2004)" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cfdmgvw" ], "score": [ 35 ], "text": [ "I'm not so sure that people in the past would have been \"fine\" with public executions _per se_, but rather you seem to be asking why was it an accepted practice that executions were performed in public.\n\nThe answer to that is going to differ based on the time period and geography, but at least for medieval and early modern Europe a public execution served a judicial purpose: it sent a message that the sovereign and/or state could and would exercise lethal power in the event that laws were broken. Executions were staged as a theatrical event intended to induce fear of the state in those who saw it.\n\nThe book most often cited as a theoretical basis for this claim is Michel Foucault's [_Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison_](_URL_0_) (1975). The study is an explanation of how the modern prison system emerged, but Foucault points out that early modern forms of justice were publicly administered for \"juridico-political\" reasons:\n\n > A successful public execution justified justice, in that it published the truth of the crime in the very body of the man to be executed...The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested (44, 47).\n\nThis extended beyond capital punishment; the purpose of many judicial sentences was precisely to send a message to _others_ about justice and the law. Being sentenced to the [stocks](_URL_6_) served a similar function - public humiliation intended not so much for the accused as for those watching. Foucault's argument is a bit more complex and has additional facets (e.g. crimes against the law were seen as attacks on the sovereign body, and thus an execution reconstituted that sovereignty), but that's his argument in a nutshell.\n\nThe rest of the book addressed precisely why Foucault thinks that process changed. According to him, public executions had unintended consequences. They sometimes garnered sympathy for the accused and fueled resentment toward the state, as excessively violent punishment might be viewed as an arbitrary exercise of power. It's notable that the context Foucault draws on is that of early modern France, where [breaking on the wheel](_URL_4_) was a sanctioned form of execution. It was, as Foucault puts it, \"inefficient.\" \n\nAt some point in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century, the focus shifted from controlling public sentiment to controlling individual bodies. In other words, states stopped controlling crime by \"setting an example\" and started controlling it by locking people up in prisons so they could be monitored around the clock. This was considered a more direct, and thus more efficient, method of control. \n\nOne of Foucault's most well-known concepts is [panopticism](_URL_1_), exemplified by Jeremy Bentham's [panopticon](_URL_5_) - a penitentiary design intended to ensure that inmates are being observed at all times:\n\n > Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (201).\n\nIf prisoners could be watched constantly - or even more efficiently, if they could be made to _think_ they were being watched constantly - they would be less likely to engage in \"criminal behavior.\" The intention of the prison was to reform the individual, not send a message to the collective. \n\nThat's the big message of Foucault's book: early modern systems of justice may have been physically brutal, but modern forms are no less insidious in their attempts to institute control. Though it should also be pointed out that this process was neither clean nor immediate; France, for example, [held its last public execution in 1939](_URL_3_), and the last one in the U.S. [was in 1936](_URL_2_).\n" ] }

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[ [ "http://books.google.com/books?id=6rfP0H5TSmYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticism", "http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2001/apr/010430.execution.html", "http://www.executedtoday.com/2010/06/17/1939-eugen-weidmann-last-public-beheading-france/", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Breaking_Wheel.jpg", "http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/11/Panopticon.jpg/544px-Panopticon.jpg", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stocks" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e9ovedz", "e9ox19o", "e9piskd", "e9pkgs2" ], "score": [ 19, 140, 11, 6 ], "text": [ "I'd like to extend/clarify the question if that's permitted, OP are you thinking in terms of modern industrial processes or hand forging with the benefit of modern tools and knowledge? I'd actually be interested in the answer to both of those.", "Overwhelmingly inferior.\n\nBefore the industrial revolution and modern steel manufacturing processes, making steel was a very difficult process to control. Iron was made in bloomeries, and bloomery iron contained a very high amount of impurities that made the metal hard but brittle. Steel was made by working the iron billets to remove as much non-metallic slag as possible, then adding carbon in a \"controlled\" manner by mixing in pieces of high carbon bloom or applying a carbon source to the surface.\n\nThe end result still contained significant amounts of phosphorus or sulfur slag, as well as uneven distribution of carbon. All of which disrupted the crystal structure of the iron and weakened it.\n\n[This study compares reproduction bloomery steel with a modern structural steel.](_URL_0_)\n\nThe results on page 3 showed that the structural steel could handle between 2.5x to 10x the impact energy of reproduction steel. While the impurities in the reproductions and overall higher carbon content made them harder and gave a greater yield strength, they were much much more brittle. The reason why should be apparent in the microscope pictures on page 2, contrast the irregularities the bloomery steel to the homogeneous modern steel. Note the bands in 2 of the reproductions created by pattern welding (folding).\n\nKeep in mind that the steel used was a low carbon structural steel, the kind you find in girders (yield strength: 205MPa). Modern tool steel alloys can much harder (ex, high quality tool steel can have a yield strength of 1500 MPa) , too hard for modern blacksmiths to make into weapons. Reproduction blacksmiths use softer steel to make their weapons, since their goal is aethestics and not making the \"toughest\" weapon.\n\nEdit : seeing your clarification, any modern blacksmith making weapons from modern billets is going to have a decisive advantage. If they go full authentic and make their own steel out of raw materials, the results shouldn't be that much different.", "We have two advantages with modern steels. First, modern steels are consistent in composition, very low in slag compared to Medieval steels, and homogeneous. In the paper linked by u/angry-mustache this translates into modern steels having about double the impact toughness (i.e., twice as much energy is needed to fracture them). This is consistent with other studies.\n\nSecond, metallurgy is now a science. One either knows the composition of the steel one is working with because the manufacturer has made it to standard specifications, or one has measured it (e.g., with a mass spectrometer). For a given task, an appropriate alloy and heat treatment is chosen. I one is aiming for high strength/durability, shock-resistant spring steels are available which will outperform low-alloy steels, often by a large margin. The initial factor of 2 improvement due to low-slag modern steel can turn into a factor of 6-10 in impact energy. A key part of this is that for given alloys, the heat treatment to obtain various combinations of hardness and toughness are known. With modern temperature controlled ovens, the heat treatment can be done controllably and predictably.\n\nIn comparison, Medieval heat treatment was an art. For quenching, temperature could be judged by colour. Much more difficult to control than quenching was tempering (re-heating the piece after quenching to reduce brittleness), which was often done via autotempering after slack-quenching (quench briefly, so that the blade retains enough heat to temper itself). The difficulty of reliable tempering is why differential hardening methods such as differential quenching were common, and was an important reason for laminated construction.\n\nWhich brings us to another point: laminated construction is a good pathway to making very tough blades. A low-carbon body with high-carbon edges will give a blade with a soft tough body and hard (but brittle) edges straight from quenching, with no tempering (other than auto-tempering). A blade like this can have very high fracture resistance. Further, the welds in laminated and pattern-welded blades impede crack propagation, and even if the edge cracks, the blade is unlikely to fail completely. The disadvantage is that, with the low-carbon body, the blade can be bent past the elastic limit, thus taking a set, relatively easily (because the elastic limit is lower). In principle, the modern smith can take advantage of both worlds, and use laminated construction, with a shock resistant spring steel for the body, and harder edges.\n\n\n\n", "Generally the steel used in medieval times were of vastly inferior low carbon steel, some are almost entirely made of iron. Because someone already gave an excellent answer on the low quality steel that was normally used, I thought I might talk about the exceptions.\n\nIn contrast to the European methods that could only heat steel to 1200°C, an entirely different process, known as crucible steel, developed in several places in Asia. Pieces of bloomery iron were heated for days in sealed crucibles with a carbon-containing material until enough carbon had been absorbed for the steel to be formed as a liquid, at 1300–1400 °C, and so separated entirely from the slag. A special application of crucible steelmaking was the production of ‘Damascus’ steel.\n\nThe earliest production of crucible steel can be found in Sri Lanka (6th–12th century) and the area of modern day Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (9th–12th century). A famous instance of this type of steel arriving in Europe are the swords known as Ulfberht-swords. These were swords decorated with variations of the inscription \"+Vlfberh+t\". 176 swords with these inscriptions have been found, mostly in Scandinavia, dating from mostly around 800-1100 AD. Several of these are found to be made of high carbon hypereutectoid steel, comparable to the steel made during the industrial revolution.\n\nSources:\nStalsberg, Anne. The vlfberht blades reevaluated. 2009.\n\nWilliams, Alan. Crucible steel in medieval swords. 2012." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.bucavasgyuro.net/data/publikaciok/Folyoi%2Bkonfk/2015PP_Mech_props.pdf" ], [], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "fmpb52f" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "It was a little bit of national prestige, but the primary benefit of colonial possessions is spatial in the sense of military projection. \nThey provided bases for local power projection, which otherwise would have been obviously impossible. \n\nIt is not a coincidence that almost every colonial possession was associated with naval and military bases. \nThe British took Egypt not because it was valuable economically, but because it gave them control over Suez which was a crucial line of communication for their fleets between the Home Islands and the Indian Ocean/Pacific. \n\nExamples exist in abundance. Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishihara and Colonel Seishiro Itagaki as one example. These two officers of the Japanese Army had fixated upon the annexation of Manchuria by Japan in 1931, as an answer to Japanese economic woes during the Great Depression. \n\nHowever, as written by Radhey Shyam Chaurasia:\n\"Financially, the provinces of the north would afford a market for Japanese goods a lucrative field for the investment of Japanese capital and would thus to a certain extent relieve the economic difficulties of Japan. In this connection it should be noted that the Manchukuoan (Manchurian) adventure did not yield the financial results which Japan had expected. The cost of defending the new state and policing it against internal troubles was very great, so instead of an asset, it was a liability.\" - Radhey Shyam Chaurasia, \"A History of Japan,\" pages 144-145 \n\nThe total costs of colonies exceeding revenue was noticed as early as Adam Smith towards the end of the eighteenth century. Even before him, it was noticed by Voltaire during the Seven Years' War. In 1758 Voltaire observed in his famous novel, Candide; \n\n\"You know that these two nations are at war about a few acres of snow somewhere around Canada, and that they are spending on this beautiful war more than all Canada is worth.\" - Voltaire, \"Candide,\" chapter 23\n\nIt is unlikely that even India was worth the expenditure of British finances in schemes to defend it from French or Russian initiatives, which included, besides the maintenance of an expensive local army and navy, the acquisition of strategic (but economically worthless) buffer territory like northwestern Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, and the failed attempts at the incorporation of Afghanistan. Added to this was the cost of defending India against Japan during the Second World War. After all, did not the East India Company go bankrupt because costs had long since exceeded revenues? Even by taxing the population of India the Company could not remain solvent and had to transfer all of its holdings to the British Government.\n\nSimilarly, the Cambridge Economic History of India points out that defence absorbed a third of the Raj's expenditure, which was a result of the serious threat to India posed by the rebellious natives internally, and externally the Russians, strategic forays into the mountains of Afghanistan and Persia, into the jungles of Burma and Siam, and for the defence of outer posts like Aden and Singapore to which India's security was intimately attached. India's wealth was consumed in the necessity to defend the country, and as the Raj consistently spent more than it earned, it was forced to turn to the metropole for assistance (see the table on \"The Cambridge Economic History of India: Volume II,\" page 926, which shows the period from 1900-1947, for the entirety of which expenditure exceeded revenue)." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d59hy1t" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "_URL_0_\n\n/u/The_Alaskan gave an awesome answer that I still remember reading, one year later.\n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3fkw9r/what_happened_when_black_diplomats_went_to/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cggh2zj" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Well I wouldn't say anyone was to blame. They were just more or less expecting a different kind of conflict. They were expecting a return to the static fighting of world war I. The plan was that when the German offensive started, the French and British would move into Belgium into a position that was more easily defensible. They thought this was the only invasion route the germans could take as they were unlikely to assault the maginot line directly. In fact the Germans were planning on doing just what the allies expecting when a small German plane got lost and crashed in Belgium with a copy of the invasion plan. German high command now had to come with something else. What they came up with was a daring plan to send the bulk of their army and panzers through the what was thought to be the unpassable ardennes forest. The allies had not expected this at all and the Germans were able to come out behind them and almost completely encircle them in Belgium. If it weren't for the fact that the German offensive was out running it's supply lines and was forced to slow down, the whole BEF probably would've been wiped out instead of rescued at Dunkirk. \n\nSo the answer to your question is that no one is really to blame. The British and French had planned for what they expected the Germans to do. Which was what the Germans had expected themselves to do. You could argue that an outdated understanding of what the role of tanks was in modern warfare was as a major misstep on the part of the French, but they did create three armor divisions (albeit very hastily) with little effect. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cop4lxk" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "RIP originally stood for R(equiescat) i(n) P(ace), which is latin for \"may he/she rest in peace\", coincidentally offering a similar emendation in English. As such, it was commonly found on christian tombstones of the Roman world in late antiquity. However, it was rarely abbreviated and rather written out - which is significant, since Christian inscriptions tend to get creative with abbreviations, even more so than Latin inscriptions in general. It was however markedly a late antique practice, only found after the fourth century, and never really prominent - a quick search yielded 35 results for 'requiescat' in various combinations. However, much more common is the form *requiescit in pace*, which simply means 'he/she rests in peace', with more than 2300 results for its various forms and combinations in antique Latin inscriptions, roughly half of which follow the exact formula *requiescit in pace*, usually prefaced with *hic*, 'here'. \n\n[Here](_URL_1_) is an example from Bergamo, it says \"Here rests in peace the well-deserved Maxentia, who lived 40 years more or less, interred on the day before Kalends of July, 11th indiction (a 15-year circle for tax purposes, but often used in dating, which makes us unable to date it directly other than roughly 4th-5th century).\n\n[Here's](_URL_0_) another christian example, from Rome, where the formula is found at the end.\n\nIn the late medieval period the formula seems to change to *requiescat*, formulas such as *hic requiescat* or *cuius anima requiescat in pace* are a Medieval phenomenon and seem to begin to pick up after that, and I would venture a guess that modern popularity of the term (though not here in Germany, where it has virtually disappeared from tombstones and funerary contexts) builds on this tradition. I'm really out of my field by this time, though, so I hope someone else can add to that or correct me. \n\nRegarding the second part of your question: Absolutely! In the world of Roman tombstones, the most common and prominent formula would be DM. This was usually set prominently in the beginning on top of the rest of the inscription (and thus is an easy way to tell what kind of inscription you are dealing with), and stands for D(is) M(anibus), sometimes with an added S(acrum). This has been translated differently, examples are \"to the divine shades\" \"sacred to the departed spirits\" \"to the ghosts/gods of the dead\". In any case, the general gist is that it was a dedication to the shades or spirits of the dead (or 'souls', if you will), the *di manes* (thus the Dative case). Sometimes, it just was a general introductory formula (when the name of the deceased followed in the Nominative case), a dedication specifically to the *di manes* of the deceased (+ Genitive) or to the spirits in general and the deceased (+ Dative). \n\nWe can also see a trend for this practice, since it only picks up in the julian-claudian period (after Augustus) and is unknown before that, and it becomes less prominent in Christian times - though it is sometimes found together with typically christian elements, probably the idea of *di manes* could be easily reconciled with christian belief in a soul. \n\nOther typical phrases in a funerary context are HSE, *h(ic) s(itus) e(st)*, 'here he/she lies', BM, b(ene) m(erenti), 'to the well-deserved', *bene requiescat in deo patre* is also known.\n\nI can't speak to the modern history of the term RIP, but I'm sure others on here can! \n\nEdit: [Here's](_URL_3_) an example for a prominent DM (they're often found offset from the main inscription field to give it prominence), and [here](_URL_2_) it's written out." ] }

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[ [ "http://db.edcs.eu/epigr/bilder/$ICUR_02_05195.jpg", "http://www.edr-edr.it/foto_epigrafi/immagini_uso/92/092100.jpg?dummy=1424259652", "http://db.edcs.eu/epigr/bilder/$AE_1931_00092.jpg", "http://db.edcs.eu/epigr/bilder/$K_IKoeln_00358.jpg" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ct06d38" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Egg Tempera wasn't really established until the 13th Century. Until then, people had used a variety of mineral and earth pigments such as [Umber](_URL_1_), which has been around for a long time. The [process to making Umber](_URL_5_) is rather simple. All it is is mined earth that has been washed, dried, and ground to powder. It can be used raw, which gives a yellowish tint, or roasted to give a brown-red colour. There are other pigments that can be found anywhere, as well. Such as the colour [Lime White](_URL_2_) and it's process is just as simple. Simply take some lime stones, and have them soak in a bucket of water for eight days. You also have to change the water out every day, though. Once it's finished soaking, dry it out, grind it into powder, hydrate it, and there you go. In some cases, stones were used in the process of making paints. Such as Malachite and Azurite.\n\nOne other way, and possibly the most dangerous, of making paints was the use of Lead. This is under the category of \"Manufactured Pigment\", whereas the paragraph before was more towards Earths and Minerals. A manufactured pigment is just a pigment that has been processed in order to gain a new colour. It's also dangerous, I wouldn't recommend it, to be honest. Anyways, one such process is for Lead White. Since classical times, this pigment was created by placing strips of lead over a vase of vinegar and/or urine, which is then sealed and placed into a dung heap for several days. After a few days, the artist(s) would then scrape off the formation around the seal, and grind it for use. Lead is a poison, and must be handled with care at all times, however, back then men and, especially, women would place lead based pigments onto their skin for cosmetic reasons.\n\n**Sources:**\n\n* [Common Medieval Pigments PDF](_URL_3_)\n\n* [Egg Tempera Recipe](_URL_0_)\n\n* [Pigments Through The Ages (500 - 1400)](_URL_4_)" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.stormthecastle.com/how-to-make-a/how-to-make-medieval-paint-egg-tempura.htm", "http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/overview/umber.html", "https://www.castrads.com/workspace/images/colours/fb-lime-white.jpg", "http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/11954/1/a-baker-04-pigments.pdf", "http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/medieval.html", "http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/recipe/umber.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "dg4jwoe" ], "score": [ 12 ], "text": [ "This is my first answer here, and I am only a student of history, so please remove this post if it isn't up to snuff.\n\nThe First Crusade largely started as a result of the expansion of the Seljuk Turks into the Levant and Anatolia. The Byzantine Emperor Alexius I exhausted his troops, many of which were foreign mercenaries, fighting the Turks in order to take back Anatolia. Alexius I decided to ask the Catholic Pope, Urban II, to help recruit western Catholic soldiers to serve as mercenaries in the Byzantine campaign against the Turks. As a result Urban II called upon Catholics to help rescue Jerusalem from Muslim occupation, and turn it over to the native Christian population living there. Urban II used the mistreatment of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem by the Turks in the first few years of their occupation as justification for retaking the city, though by the time the Crusade was called missionaries were largely left unmolested once again. The idea was to help the Byzantines along the way, reclaim Jerusalem for the Christians, and head back home. That's not exactly how it turned out. \nThe declaration of the First Crusade inspired a wave of religious zeal amongst Western European Catholics, and the fight to save Jerusalem quickly took precedence over assisting the Byzantines. While the proper Crusading army was made up of the armies of nobility, the first wave of crusaders to travel east were peasants led by charismatic figues such as Peter the Hermit, who inspired peasants, criminals, low-ranking knights, and other common people to take the cross. This rag-tag army caused all sorts of trouble as they travelled across Europe and Byzantine territory, and ended up getting slaughtered by the Turks in Anatolia. This left a fairly poor impression on the Byzantines. As the \"official\" Crusading armies travelled through Byzantium they did not behave much better. Raiding of Christian cities in order to procure supplies was fairly common. Moreover, the Catholic nobility did not trust one another to properly cooperate in assisting the Byzantines. They certainly didn't trust the Byzantines. There are reports in the Alexiad of a fair amount of hostility between Alexius I and many of the Crusaders. Furthermore, many key members of the First Crusade were Normans, who had previous bad blood with the Byzantines due to expansion in Sicily and the Balkans. As a result the Crusading Army was unable to cooperate with the Byzantines in order to take on the organized Seljuk Turks. That's why you probably don't hear much about the Byzantine angle on the start of the Crusades. \n\nThe Crusaders were able to take Jerusalem due to the fragmented Muslim factions present in the Levant. After traveling through Anatolia they no longer had a strong, centralized force to deal with. Many died of starvation while traveling through the Levant rather than dying from fighting. Upon taking Jerusalem the Western Europeans found the native Christian population unacceptable to take over the city, as was planned. They simply found them and their customs too foreign, and instead decided Western Europeans needed to stay behind in the Levant. This led to the creation of the Crusader States. Following the creation of these Crusader States the Muslim powers in the Levant began to consolidate under a series of powerful leaders. The newly strengthened Muslim powers in the Levant began chipping away at the land claimed by the Crusader States. This would culminate in the retaking of Jerusalem by Saladin, which would trigger the Third Crusade. Following Crusades were largely aimed at reclaiming former Crusader State land lost to the Muslims. \n\nThis answer does not cover Crusades in Europe, which are a whole other ball-game. I also gave a rather simplified view of the creation of the Crusader States. I can expand upon these some if requested. Again, this is my first answer, and there are definitely people here more qualified than I am so please remove this if it is not up to quality standards. \n\nSource: *The New Concise History of the Crusades* by Thomas F. Madden\n" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fbhfi1f" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "They didn't. Injuries were completely normal thing just as they are today and unless they were severe, people usually did not make much of them. Please note that the first antibiotics and other artificial anti-bacterial agents like sulfonamides were only invented in the late 1920s and entered a wider use in the beginning of the next decade. It does not mean that prior to that, any small cut would mean infection and potential death, because if this was true, the casualties of say, the Great War would have been far higher. In general, a healthy, adult or slightly younger individual does not really need any support in case of small lacerations as their immunological system manages the potential risk of infection just fine. This also applies to larger wounds, especially if wound is cleaned and dressed to prevent contamination.\n\nIn such discussions the example of John Bradmore, court physician to i.a. Henry IV and Henry V is often invoked, as he is known to fully cure people who have suffered serious would. The first was the aforementioned Henry of Monmouth, soon to be king, wounded in the mouth and neck with an arrow during the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. The other was one of Henry V courtiers who was stabbed in an abdomen with a dagger (the circumstances are vague, some sources suggest a suicide attempt). Needless to say, both injuries were pretty dangerous even in modern times, especially the latter ones, as the wound perforated the intestines causing a very high risk of peritonitis and general sepsis. Bradmore managed to nurse both men to full recovery in the matters of few weeks using probes, sutures and application of various substances. He used wine and vinegar to wash the wounds and then applied mixture of honey and natural resins (alcohol, acetic and malic acids and resin derivatives, such as pitch are very good antibacterial agents) and insisted that the dressings are to be changed at least daily (preferably twice) and always when they are soaked with blood. This shows that physicians in early 15th century had very good grasp on the idea of hygiene and used anti-bacterial agents that were proven to work. Even though they possibly did not know about microorganisms, they found out which substances facilitate healing what was good enough for medical application.\n\nAntiseptics are described in length by Galen of Pergamon (2nd-3rd century CE) who had an extensive practice with wounds, especially ones incurred by combat, as he was for employed for four years in a ludus (gladiatorial school) in the capacity of a resident physician. He notices that wine, honey and resins (such as colophony) facilitate healing (use of honey for this purpose is also mentioned in some papyri as early as the New Kingdom period, i.e. 16th century BCE). Medieval doctors used similar techniques, although many of them also put a stress on proper evacuation of pus and suturing, what necessitated proper wound dressing and were also quite adept at differentiating festering wounds from those healing properly. Given that there are many accounts of ancient and medieval surgeries that led to recovery, assumption that even serious wounds inevitably led to an infection and death lack any factual basis.\n\nOf course, there was always a danger of the tetanus infection, especially in case of the injuries during work and warfare. Sources suggest that this condition was well-known even as early as 25th century BCE in Ancient Egypt and was widely known throughout ancient world. Unlike minor infections that could have been easily fought by the immunological system, infection by *Clostridium tetani* is very dangerous, as the untreated condition has mortality rate of 25% at the very least, often reaching 50%, and before introduction of the ana- and antitoxin in 1890s, there was no good treatment. On the other hand, as we did not have accounts of the mass gruesome deaths (most common symptoms of the condition include easily discernible severe muscle spasms) of people exposed to the risk of injuries in 19th century, it is safe to assume that the risk of infection was not that high both then and earlier." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "fehwbyz" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "\"Distillation\" is actually the key word there. The alcohol that caused so many problems for Native Americans was not pulque or corn wine, but whiskey and rum.\n\nThere's currently no evidence that Native Americans independently discovered distillation, which is the necessary component to produce hard liquor. While low-alcohol wines and beers were relatively prevalent in some areas, whiskey and rum are 8 to 10 times stronger. It takes only a few ounces to equal several large mugs of native alcohol, which means that you can get someone *else* drunk very quickly on it. European settlers became notorious for not only selling liquor as a trade good, but taking advantage of their unfamiliarity with its strength to get them drunk during negotiations.\n\nSome of these tribes also had no alcohol whatsoever before European contact, which made them very naive to the effects and potential for addiction. Rum and whiskey were cheap for the colonists to make and could easily be traded for furs and other resources. They had no social or legal framework for handling alcohol, especially not something that can get you trashed with a few shots, which led to rampant alcohol abuse when these communities encountered it. Accounts as early as the 1730s indicate that alcoholism was starting to ruin Indian communities, which many colonists treated as a sign of their inherently uncivilized nature. A quote from Benjamin Franklin:\n\n > \\[They\\] are extremely apt to get drunk, and when so are very quarrelsome & disorderly...indeed if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed Means. It has already annihilated all the Tribes who formerly inhabited the Sea-coast. \n\nIt only got worse as the newly formed United States began moving west, forcing tribes to relocate at gunpoint. Fractured and devoid of prospects, alcohol became a coping method just like for anyone in poverty. They would trade valuable items like buffalo hide for alcohol at a fraction of their commercial value, encouraging Americans to keep supplying them. When reservations tried outlawing liquor, they switched to beer and even alcoholic stomach bitters products. This was taken advantage of to create myths that Native Americans had a predisposed appetite for alcohol and unusually high level of violence when drunk, encouraging their eradication and assimilation into Eurocentric civilization.\n\nToday, alcoholism remains a chronic problem. A 2012-2013 survey found that 19.2% of Native Americans had an alcohol use disorder in the prior 12 months and 43.4% had one at any point in their lives (compared to 14.0% and 32.6% of whites). While this has dropped in years since, it follows a pattern of a general decrease in alcoholism among the US population and Native Americans are still at a higher rate of alcoholism." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cicem2j" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Definitely. The strongest attempt to reject revolutionary authority came from the area known as the Vendée, just south of Brittany, which was known for its conservative Catholicism and was in basically permanent resistance for three years, with sporadic subsequent outbreaks of revolt, notably during Napoleon's Hundred Days. The war in the Vendée was long, bloody and inconclusive, and was fought by local French counterrevolutionaries almost entirely without outside help except for a few weapons smuggled in from Britain.\n\nA good book on the subject in English is called \"No Surrender\", by G.A. Henty. Be warned, though, the Vendée war is a pretty controversial topic, especially in French historiography, with claims of genocide even being made." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dx68kt6" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Most waste from sailing ships was just thrown over the side. If animal waste was a problem, someone would have been assigned to deal with it." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cg4hs35", "cg4mwpi" ], "score": [ 11, 22 ], "text": [ "I'm not sure what you're asking-- are you asking if there was a time when race theory was seen as a socially-acceptable ideology in the Western world? Yes. Discourses of race developed along with Western science and colonialism starting in earnest in the 18th century, and while overt racism in the vulgar sense (ie. \"sub-humans\") became increasingly taboo in the early 20th century, and especially into the Cold War, the fundamental tenant of racism is *not* that such-and-such a group is inferior, but rather, that humanity can be divided cleanly into essentialized races (\"Caucasians\", \"Mongoloids\", etc.), each with particular characteristics. This sort of thinking is not supported by genetic research and has been largely discredited by more recent scientific research, however, plenty of people still talk openly about humanity in terms of races.", "Yes, there were persons who proudly described themselves as racist.\n\nAfter serving in both World War II and the Korean War, George Lincoln Rockwell worked to peddle hate, founding the American Nazi Party in 1959. Rockwell, who once attended a rally held by the aptly named minister of hate Gerald L. K. Smith, was an ardent believer in white supremacy. He truly believed that were a Zionist plot afoot and claimed that he could recite, from memory, every line of *Mein Kampf.* In the 1960s, he felt as though the Civil Rights Movement were a Communist scheme: \"Those who are trying to help the Negro are engaged in a Castro-Mao-Communist revolution.\"\n\nRockwell organized a counter protest to Martin Luther King's campaign in Chicago. King was moving in the direction of his Poor People's Campaign, and Rockwell saw this as an opportunity to organize working-class white. On August 5, 1966, Rockwell's forces met King at Gage Park. While waving Confederate flags and Nazi flags and changing \"White Power\", the crowd pelted King and the Civil Rights activists with bricks and bottles. Andrew Young remarked on Rockwell's crowd: \"The violence in the South always came from a rabble element. But these were women and children and husbands and wives coming out of their homes and becoming a mob--and in some ways it was far more frightening.\" Rockwell masterminded the crowd, enticing them and directing his stormtroopers. Rockwell was later arrested for disorderly conduct. \n\nRockwell toured the nation to drum up support for his cause. At lectures at college campuses, he proudly and unabashedly described himself as a racist. For example, after a lecture at Fort Hayes University in Kansas, Rockwell baldly stated [\"I am a racist.\"](_URL_0_) For Rockwell, this was a source of pride. \n\nBut George Lincoln Rockwell is not alone in his affirmation of the label racist. Tom Metzger was originally a member of the David Duke led Ku Klux Klan. But Metzeger eventually left Duke's national Klan to form the California Klan. Metzger had political ambitions, and found that Californians were not willing to elect a known Klansman to congress. He left the Klan and tried again, but he only earned 2.8% of the vote. He then formed the White American Political Association (WAPA), but then changed the name in 1983 to the more militant sounding White American Resistance and then to White Aryan Resistance (WAR), because he wanted to exclude Latino/as and Jewish folks and any other non-whites in the US. Any who, in Metzger's own chilling words in 1993:\n\n > Are you designing hate material for your community? Yes, I said hate. WAR seems to be the only group around that honestly embraces hate as well as love. Our enemies hate us and we hate them. WAR hates any individual, group or institution that fights racism. Yes racism. I am a full blown racist and I believe in race--and specifically my own race. Anyone that stands in the way of the best interests of my race must be hated with a perfect hatred. At the same time love for ourselves, our families, and our racially conscious associates should be boundless. Reserve love for those that benefit your cause--reserve hatred for those that would sidetrack your mission. Properly thought out forms and focused hate is a great revolutionary ally. If hatred is not your ally, it is an enemy to be feared.\n\nBarry Black, who founded the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, put it proudly:\n\n > Be proud to be white. Be proud of white America stands for. The Ku Klux Klan does not stand for hatred. It stands for heritage. It stands for the love of the white race. I am a racist and I am a prejudiced person and I am proud to be a white supremacists and I have no doubt in my mind. I don't apologize for anything that's happened in the past because the past has a way of repeating itself and it will repeat itself again. American will wake up and the white race will survive and take over--take back what's rightfully ours.\n\nSources:\n\nBarkun. *Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement*. 1996.\n\nDobartz and Shanks-Meile. *\"White Power! White Pride!\" The White Separatist Movement in the United States.* 2000\n\nSimonelli. *American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party*. 1999.\n" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/61162035/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cj9rsfq" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "So, to start, during the Berlin Airlift, the planes were sending over mostly dry food for the people of West Berlin, liquids such as milk were sent over in the very beginning, but eventually that was switched to condensed milk mostly for space efficiency (condensed milk takes up a lot less space and weighs less). There was also \"Operation Little Vittles\" which started as a little side project started by one of the pilots, Gail Halvorsen, to deliver candy to German children by dropping candy attached with small parachutes as he flew over West Berlin. This candy was usually chocolate or gum. As for the aforementioned non-candy food, they were usually dried when possible and there was a large variety, from my source, they are listed as \"sacked grains, vegetables, frozen meats, fish, dairy products, and fresh fruits.\" It's important to remember that the Berlin Airlift was not just limited to food though, the planes also brought coal, industrial supplies, liquid fuel, and medical supplies aside from food. The foods they chose were chosen in other \"to obtain the maximum calorie per food ton,\" so essentially to provide the greatest amount of sustenance possible while weighing the least and taking up the least amount of space in the aircraft as possible. \n\nAlso, I'm assuming when you say \"what kind of system\" that you mean the general flight plan for the planes to load cargo, fly, and unload the cargo, so let me know if I've misinterpreted that =) .\n\nSo for the trips the planes were making, it was a 24 hour process. Planes would have to depart at specific times and their flight times to fly from a landing strip from West Germany to West Berlin would be specifically calculated and would allow for a set gap time between each plane landing and taking off so workers could unload cargo (if landing in Berlin) or resupply a plane with cargo (if landing in an airfield in West Germany). These were approximate, but they provided a general schedule for everything and helped the efficiency of the system.\n\nAnd finally, to answer the question on how they made sure all the West Berliners were getting food. The source I've found is questionable, so some verification from somebody else would be great. Anyways, it seems that after the cargo was unloaded from the planes landing in West Berlin, the cargo would then be transported to distribution centers that would be throughout the West Berlin area to ensure that people had access to these centers and could receive said cargo.\n\nAnd I think that about covers it, here are some nice sources:\n\n[The Airlift!](_URL_2_)\nThis one provides a pretty solid overview of the entire airlift, if you want a nice, quick summary, this is a good place to start.\n\n[Berlin Airlift-A USAFE Summary](_URL_1_)\nProvides a lot of details (it's government stuff!) that you can't find on the standard website. If you're looking for something specific, this would be a terrific source. However, it is a bit of a pain to get to a specific page ._.\n\n[Berlin Airlift](_URL_0_)\nThis is the questionable source that I used to answer your last question about how people made sure everyone was getting food. Its explanation on food distribution seemed reasonable though. However, like I said, some verification on my answer to that particular question would be preferable." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.faqs.org/espionage/Ba-Bl/Berlin-Airlift.html", "http://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/berlinairlift00unit", "http://mason.gmu.edu/~jlemza/Final%20Assignment%20Airlift.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d636npc", "d63qnv2" ], "score": [ 8, 20 ], "text": [ "Not the original replier (obviously) but I think the answer to this question:\n\n_URL_0_\n\nWill perhaps answer yours as well.", "Keep in mind that *The Last Kingdom* doesn't actually depict *víkingar*, but rather an invasion by an actual army. *Víkingar* would not have been, on the whole, terrifically disciplined, but then again they didn't need to be, since their modus operandi was, basically, \"show up, steal everything that's not rooted to the earth, kill anyone who gives us any grief, then take off as quick as possible.\" The Danish Invasion, on the other hand, was an invasion undertaken by powerful individual actors banding together under a single command structure. It was an army, and to that end, they fought like an army - formations, orders, etc.\n\nYou can take a look at Paddy Griffith's (poorly named) *The Viking Art of War* for an idea as to how Scandinavian armies worked at that time, but it wasn't too far off from any other early medieval infantry-based army." ] }

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[ [ "https://m.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/37m8j2/was_the_viking_fighting_style_as_hard_to_combat/crnxrcw?context=3" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cirpu8u" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "In each nation, it was the duty of the General Staff to draw up mobilization plans in the event of war. These would include all of the mechanism for getting the troops into fighting order and moving to the front as fast as possible. Germany had a famously intricate mobilization plan leading up to world war one, which famously detailed down to the minute the plans for mobilizing the nation and preparing for the strategically vital invasion of France. Russia and France, too, had very elaborate plans.\n\nAll the powers relied on rail mobilization in the event of war. During mobilization proper reservists would be called and would then report to their respective regimental depots before embarking by train to their destination. The railroads had pre-established relationships with the European powers. The workers on these rails were familiar with what their wartime duties would entail. The governments had subsidized the rail companies and included double tracks and strategic lines to ensure a quick and orderly mobilization.\n\nBritain had a somewhat stranger mobilization process, as they were an island lacking any boarder with the other powers. Britain would man her reserve vessels, run the BEF’s troops to the shore and disembark to land her troops in France, where they could be moved by French rails to the front. \n\nSource: *History of World War I: War and Response, 1914-1916*" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d89a23e" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "Very small, hard to see picture but try this site:\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "http://www.epicmilitaria.com/german-ww2-insignia.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d2plaxt", "d2pqhla", "d2pu390" ], "score": [ 107, 283, 24 ], "text": [ "To clarify your question, you're asking about whether Vikings were defeated by the inhabitants of the village/town they were raiding alone? Without help from outside places or levies/military?", "The Anglo-Saxon defensive system of the late ninth and tenth centuries was such that villages were meant to not fight alone, but hold out and wait for relief forces drawn from the local levies of surrounding towns. This was a very effective tactic and results in substantial Viking armies being defeated in 893, 911 and 914 by provincial militias rather than the King's Army, at least according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.\n\nUnfortunately the Chronicle doesn't tell us much about small scale raiding. It's probably not deemed sufficiently important. Recently near Weymouth in Dorset, however, builders laying a new road found a pit containing 54 skeletons and only 51 heads. Dental and DNA evidence suggests that they're Vikings and a large longship crew was about 50-something men, so it's thought that this represents a raiding ship crew that were captured by the local milita and executed, with three heads carried off.", "Disclaimer: A substantial problem with using the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a source is the fact that it's an extremely biased text and its level of detail is spotty. However, the Chronicle is occasionally the only or best source we have on certain topics, so rolling with that.\n\nIf you buy the Chronicle's story (which unabashedly purports to glorify the Anglo-Saxons, especially King Alfred and the Kingdom of Wessex), then the Anglo-Saxons were occasionally able to repel the Vikings from settlements, both major and minor, including London:\n\n > A.D. 851. This year Alderman Ceorl, with the men of Devonshire, fought the heathen army at Wemburg, and after making great slaughter obtained the victory. The same year King Athelstan and Alderman Elchere fought in their ships, and slew a large army at Sandwich in Kent, taking nine ships and dispersing the rest. The heathens now for the first time remained over winter in the Isle of Thanet. The same year came three hundred and fifty ships into the mouth of the Thames; the crew of which went upon land, and stormed Canterbury and London; putting to flight Bertulf, king of the Mercians, with his army; and then marched southward over the Thames into Surrey. Here Ethelwulf and his son Ethelbald, at the head of the West-Saxon army, fought with them at Ockley, and made the greatest slaughter of the heathen army that we have ever heard reported to this present day. There also they obtained the victory.\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n(Check out that translation of the ASC for some more examples of \"the heathens\" and their assaults on Great Britain, both successful and not)." ] }

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[ [], [], [ "http://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/ang09.asp" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "d2d5nbh", "d2ddzjw" ], "score": [ 2, 9 ], "text": [ "[Actually hunter gathere lifestyles are easier](_URL_0_) according to /u/Tiako in this AH post I linked.", "First things first it's worth clarifying that there are two very different types of nomadic lifestyle. The vast majority of nomadic peoples today and in recent history are pastoral nomads, who live by herding animals. These nomads are every bit as \"agricultural\" as settled farmers, as their way of life is dependent on domesticated animals. The nomads you're referring too, who's way of life predates the invention of agriculture, are foragers, and there are very, very few of those left.\n\nWhich means the answer to your question is essentially that agriculture *has* wiped out the nomadic lifestyle, although it has taken a very long time and isn't quite complete. But there are only a handful of foraging peoples left in the world. These are people that have been pushed to the most marginal of environments by encroaching agriculturalists, and their way of life is under extreme pressure from further expansion of farmers and herders, and from modern state governments who don't like people who don't stay in one place so they can be taxed. Unfortunately the prospects for them maintaining a traditional foraging lifestyle aren't hopeful, so it's only a matter of time until farming finishes off the foragers." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4fcd0b/if_being_a_huntergatherer_is_so_great_compared_to/d27qlwq" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ea3btal", "ea3hs6a" ], "score": [ 150, 719 ], "text": [ " > which may or may not have included Bush himself\n\nFollow-up question: Has anyone ever given serious credence to the notion that this constitutes precedent for a President pardoning themselves?", "It is not looked at in the same light as Ford's pardon of Nixon because Bush never pardoned Reagan. President George H.W. Bush pardoned, at the end of his term in the White House, six former administration officials involved in Iran-Contra. The six officials were: Elliot Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George, Robert McFarlane and Caspar Weinberger (note: Weinberger had been indicted but had not yet gone to trial, all the others had been convicted mostly for perjury, withholding information, false statements or obstruction of justice). \n\nRichard Nixon was pardoned by President Ford to prevent an indictment and trial after he resigned from the Presidency. He was given a full and unconditional pardon before he could be indicted for the Watergate Scandal. Nixon initially did not want to accept the pardon and there was significant negotiation between Ford's representatives and Nixon over the wording of the pardon. It is important to note that accepting a pardon is admitting guilt. Donald Rumsfeld's recent book \"When the Center Held\" has a good first person retelling of the decision making involved with the pardon of Nixon and the negotiations to get Nixon to accept the pardon." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "deftthf", "defvoat" ], "score": [ 3, 12 ], "text": [ "De Bello Gallico and Bellum Civile are not works of history and therefore should not be judged as works of history. They are primary sources.\n\nThose books are first-hand accounts written by what was arguably the second most famous military commander in human history. Yes of course he was writing to impress his contemporaries and yes he downplayed or avoided mentioning his defeats and setbacks, and took more personal credit occasionally than he maybe deserved. And he described his opponents and allies and troops in ways that played to the preconceptions of his intended audience.\n\nThat doesn't mean we don't take him seriously. We compare his account to the work by an actual historian like [Cassius Dio](_URL_0_), and archaeologists try to connect dig sites to events and locations he described.\n\nJust because you don't take a primary source at face value with absolute credulity doesn't mean you don't take it seriously.\n\nAnd it also doesn't mean you can't enjoy reading it. Too many undergrad and grad students get a little snobbish about being too hyper critical of sources and histories, and forget why we all were drawn to this field in the first place. De Bello Gallico and Anabasis are what made me fall in love with history.\n\nDon't let your friends' attitudes affect your enjoyment of Caesar. Be aware of the context and know that you're reading a very clever piece of political propaganda, but allow yourself to enjoy it. ", "There's this odd perception that Caesar is somehow less credible historically than our other sources, and I don't really know why. I can only assume that it's from kids taking high school Latin (since the *de bello gallico* is always the text mentioned when in fact the *de bello civili* is *by far* more rhetorical and problematic), but I find it very odd. In point of fact Caesar is, along with Cicero, among the most important historical sources for the late Republic. Like Cicero, Caesar was a contemporary of the events which he discusses, which is exceedingly rare in antiquity (the next-closest major source we get for the period is Sallust, who doesn't count because the only \"contemporary\" event in his surviving texts is the Catilinarian conspiracy, which took place when he was only 23). Moreover, though Caesar employed rhetorical devices and wrote for political purposes^^1 he employed the Plain Style and wrote in such incredible detail that he is totally unmatched--compare Caesar to some of the speeches of Cicero on which we rely (quite heavily) and anyone with any understanding of rhetoric at all will see how really quite straightforward Caesar is. Caesar's thoroughness is worthy of particular note, since the alternatives of Caesar would be Plutarch, Suetonius, and Appian (I guess Cassius Dio too, but I have difficulty keeping a straight face when I read \"an actual historian like Cassius Dio\"). One look at them will show how much more detailed Caesar is. He gives detailed, frequently day-by-day, reports on his actions, which would be easily fact-checked (particularly if these *are* edited transcripts of his *litterae*). Any \"spin\" in Caesar is not to be found in his record of events, those are considered pretty impeccable, but in his rhetoric (such as it exists), particularly in his interpretation of the significance of events. Such reasoning is actually relatively unusual in the *de bello gallico*, you really only see it in a handful of places (the initial incursion into Gaul, his invasion into Germania, the reasons behind his expedition into Britain, and maybe Gergovia). It's vastly more prominent in the *de bello civili*, in which he is at pains to point out whenever possibly why he's in the right--but most high school students have never read the *de bello civili* in Latin, because it's much more involved as a piece of literature. \n\nAll historical sources have bias, and all ancient sources in particular are notoriously flawed for all kinds of reasons. This is a fact of historiography, and one that should not be used to point the finger at this or that ancient author in order to dismiss him--especially not an author as important as Caesar! Because here's the thing, problematic as Caesar is he is without doubt one of our best historical sources, and among our most trustworthy. He is *certainly without question* the single best military author we have in Latin, there is simply no way to debate that point. And really Caesar is actually pretty honest. He portrays the \"fog of war\" (and is one of only a handful of ancient authors who acknowledge the concept that warfare is confusing) and is very ready to admit when he makes a mistake--he rationalizes his mistake, saying why he was misled or what went wrong, but he admits it up front (with the possible exception of the German expedition). The weird singling-out of Caesar is a feature, as far as I can tell, of high school students and early undergrads who don't have very much experience with actual Latin texts--a little reading and it's pretty clear that Caesar's really quite good. \n\n1: The precise purpose of the *de bello gallico* and the *de bello civili* is unknown. Both other users have noted that they're not history proper, and that's about all we know. *Commentarii* were originally transcripts of the *acta* of, for instance, the *collegium pontificum*. By Caesar's time they had come to refer also to drafts of orally-delivered addresses, and from this it's been suggested that the *de bello gallico* was an edited publication of Caesar's dispatches to the senate, the *litterae* which provincial magistrates were supposed to send (though literally nothing happened if they didn't). These would have been read aloud (hence the third person persona) by an agent, and the suggestion seems plausible but we cannot know for sure. How they came to be collected and published, however, is even more unknown. At the very least we can say that they were not compiled directly, but clearly edited. Nor do we know the intended audience of the final publication, so babbling about Caesar's political bias is silly--we don't know what perspective Caesar was trying to portray and for whom" ] }

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[ [ "http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/38*.html" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c6suj86", "c6sulqr", "c6sum79", "c6suqkp", "c6suw5s", "c6svaku" ], "score": [ 7, 5, 10, 38, 4, 20 ], "text": [ "It might be helpful if you mention specific atrocities that you suspect might be, in fact, propaganda. \n\nAs far as it goes, nobody declared war on Germany over any atrocity - Britain and France were brought in via their defense treaty with Poland. Germany invaded the USSR, and Germany declared war on the US. Atrocity didn't really have a role to play. \n\nFor the most part, evidence of atrocities didn't emerge until well into the war, and prewar atrocities (Guernica, for instance), didn't factor into anybody's decision-making process. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n", "It was never about atrocities, it was pretty well known that jews were mistreated ~~if not outright massmurdered in the 30ties for instance~~. Even if the organized massmurder had not yet begun.\n\nIn any case the worst acts perpetrated by the nazis were still to come when the war began.\n\nAs already mentioned the western allies declared war due to their treaties with Poland & because their policy of \"appeasing\" Hitler up untill this point was proven a failure leaving only war as an option.\n\nEdit: Have a look at the UK declaration of war announcement: _URL_0_\n\nAll it talks about is the attack on Poland and how negotiations for a peacefull settlement have failed, no mention of anything else.\n\nWhy do you think the allies declared war over atrocities committed by the Germans? ", "well, I for one hope that one of you clever historians will give a thoughtful reply to the OP. his link is to a very effective piece of nazi propaganda - they were good at that - and it deserves an answer. \n\n\nplease keep in mind that new generations who have to learn about this arrive all the time; they cannot really be blamed for not knowing.\n\n\nto the OP, aTinySpaceship: I am not a historian, but I have read about the third reich like so many other people and it is deeply fascinating, no doubt about that. the best book I have read about life in nazi germany - a book not strictly about the war or warfare - is the diary of victor klemperer, a german writer of jewish origin who not only stayed in germany but somehow managed to survive, check it out.", "As a rule of thumb what Hitler spouts out in his speeches should be taken with a rather large grain of salt. Basically every expansionist move by the Nazi government had to be covered up by justifications, as the majority of the population did not want war. William Shirer, an American journalist who was stationed in Berlin for the second half of the 30's, noted just how unenthusiastic the masses were for war.\n\nThe atrocities Hitler mentions are non-existent, for example the propaganda ministry alleged the massacring of hundreds of ethnic Germans in Poland prior to hostilities, however the only few such cases were recorded after the outbreak of war.\n\nAlthough a case could be made against historians in the decades following the war having an allied western/eastern bias against the Germans the revisionist movement has mostly offered an accurate chronology of events, exposing propaganda and myth from all sides.\n\nEDIT: The popularity of this montage on /r/history and /r/truereddit is a bit disturbing...", "I think there is a shift in historiography now. People are willing to look at the allies role in the war more openly, and are criticising decisions made by both sides. \n\nFor example: _URL_0_\n\nOperation catapult. \nThe bombing or Dresden\nAnd motives behind dropping the bombs on Japan. ", "Oddly enough, a great place to start is the evidence presented in the libel trial of [Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt.](_URL_1_) David Irving sued them for claiming that he was a holocaust denier, and lost very badly. Several renowned experts wrote reports to be entered into evidence, and these serve as an excellent introduction to the question at hand: how do we know the holocaust happened, and that it was a deliberate plan?\n\n[Here is a link to the report](_URL_0_) by Professor Jan van Pelt on the history, design, and testimony regarding Auschwitz-Birkenau.\n\n[Here is the report](_URL_2_) by Professor Christopher Browning, concerning the evolution of the policy known as the Final Solution and the state of the documentary evidence thereof.\n\nThere were others as well, less relevant to this question (for example, Professor Richard Evans wrote a long report on Irving's misuse of historical sources, etc). I can dig those up as well for anyone interested. If they aren't available on the web, I should still have saved copies of everything somewhere." ] }

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[ "http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=131_1330431557" ]

[ [], [ "http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/06/second-world-war-declaration-chamberlain" ], [], [], [ "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-K%C3%A9bir" ], [ "http://vho.org/aaargh/engl/report.pdf", "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_and_Lipstadt", "http://ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/browning1.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cnuuc5s" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "This may be a good time for me to awkwardly describe Leopold von Ranke's theories, which I'm not really that familiar with -- so hopefully someone can correct me if I go astray. Ranke was confident that competent historians who engaged all the relevant sources empirically could produce an objective, reliable history. The role of the historian was to stand back as an omniscient narrator whose voice would essentially be absent and whose personal position (race, class, nation, and so on) would be irrelevant.\n\nIn many ways, the Rankean philosophy of history remains powerful today -- particularly within popular understandings of history -- although obviously historians have engaged with a whole series of modern and postmodern claims on narrative, ways of knowing, and positionality since Ranke's time. But the notion that historians are collectively engaged in producing a single consensus history that can stand for all time really doesn't capture the work that most historians actually do. Maybe the people that are most closely engaged in producing sweeping national or global histories that everyone (theoretically) agrees with are textbook authors or museum curators -- and even so I imagine they'd describe their roles in different terms.\n\nProfessional historians do produce big, global histories with sweeping narratives and do actively attempt to work beyond national borders and across cultures. I myself work very hard to produce historical work that can be responsive and useful to the non-Western communities with which I work, and always try to think through ways in which my position and the sources I rely on may be leading me to frame stories in biased or skewed ways. I write about empire, and I'm constantly bombarded with claims that originated as subtle justifications of colonial rule, so it's important to me not to inadvertently reinforce those claims. I also don't imagine that my work will supplant indigenous histories. My work is intended to be complementary to those histories, and to serve a different function.\n\nCentral to all of this, I think, is the need to recognize that who we are impacts the way that we research and the way that we write. That doesn't mean that only Japanese historians are able to write about Japan, or even that a Chinese or a Korean historian would necessarily produce scholarship that was substantially different from what this hypothetical Japanese scholar produced. It just means that historians need to ask themselves questions. Am I valorizing these American missionaries because they remind me of myself? Am I interested in this topic because it's important, relevant, and useful, or because by some quirk of my own personality or experience I happen to find it entertaining? If the latter, is that problematic, am I safe to press ahead, or should I tweak my research questions?\n\nI don't mean to be too relativistic here -- because historians work with sources, we can't go too far in the direction of Derrida. Or at least I don't think we can. There may not be many historians walking around trumpeting their work as the one true history for all people now and forever, but we still imagine that our work is the best and most reliable output of which we are capable at the time of production. This feels like a bit of a ramble, but I hope it helps." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "d77jaxr" ], "score": [ 8 ], "text": [ "The war was not caused by \"media hype\". That may have gotten people psychologically hyped for a war, but that was not the cause.\n\nThe immediate cause for the war (in the sense that it is the official reason for the US declaration of war on Spain) was the bombing of the USS Maine. In the 100+ years that followed it's destruction, most historians have set aside the idea that it was either a) a Spanish attack or b) a self-inflicted attack by the US as an excuse to invade. At the time, however, many believed that the attack was perpetrated by Spain. Those skeptical of this simply went along with it.\n\nAs to why there is no restitution for Spain, the colonies themselves were in open rebellion (or had just had their rebellions violently quashed) when the US intervened (on what was believed to be a legitimate cause for war). The Spanish government had also crossed the Rubicon, so to speak, in terms of its relationship with the population of Cuba through the *Reconcentración* which forced the island´s rural population to move to urban centers, failed to provide food or adequate shelter, and then sat back as civilians died of hunger and disease in camps (with deplorable conditions) made specially to house them. Eminent American historian Louis Pérez Jr puts the number of victims in the [tens of thousands](_URL_0_), though others estimate even more. While this was a kind of 'final straw' separating Cubans from Spain, other acts against the civilian population, such as the massacre of theatergoers at the Villanueva Theater during the Ten Years War (1868-1878) (ie. Cuba's first independence war), and other excesses had already alienated much of the island's population to Spanish rule.\n\nWhile the *Reconcentración* itself was especially awful, heavy handed Spanish policies to suppress rebellion in its overseas colonies were pretty common.\n\nSome compensation was actually exchanged as a part of the treaty, as you'll notice in Article III [here](_URL_1_).\n\nAs they agreed to the peace treaty they would have shaky grounds, at best, for further compensation.\n\nI would also highly doubt that Spain would press the issue in the 20th century since its abuses against its own population (during this and previous conflicts) would open it up to major claims for restitution by members of its own ex-colonial possessions, especially Cuba.\n\nAs the US frames itself as a 'liberating' force and its longstanding anti-colonial position within the Western Hemisphere, it is unlikely that they'd agree with the principles behind Spain's demands.\n\nI'd recommend reading Louis Perez Jr.'s *The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography* for a text specifically about that conflict and how it has been perceived by historians over time. You can also consult his book *Cuba Between Empires, 1878-1902*." ] }

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[ [ "http://digital.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=pittpress;cc=pittpress;idno=31735055592277;type=simple;q1=thousands;submit=Search;didno=31735055592277;rgn=full%20text;view=image;seq=0076", "http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/sp1898.asp" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "e3sg84m" ], "score": [ 33 ], "text": [ "The *Bismarck* has several things going for it as relates to name recognitions vs her sister.\n\nMostly in that she actually did battleship things instead of being hold up as a fleet in being and attempted commerce raider for most of her life. \n\nTo be clear *Bismarck* failed in her mission in her short career, and had about as much true impact on the war as *Tripitz*, that being that it forced the Royal Navy to hold additional assets in home waters or on escort duties to meet the potential threat of the 4 big German ships (the *Bismarcks* and the two *Scharnhorsts*). But all 4 came to rather definitive ends at the hands of British sea and air power without capturing or sinking more than a score of transports and an even smaller number of warships between them.\n\nBut back to *Bismarck*, frankly her sortie with *Prince Eugene*, gunnery duel with *Hood* and *Prince of Wales*, her damage by daring British Fleet Air Arm attacks, and finally her being run down like a fox and sunk in a final gunnery duel are the much more exciting story. It involves great drama from the fear of Britain's lifelines being disrupted at a crucial time in the war, the sinking of the pride of the Royal Navy, to the foes inevitable destruction by daring and dutiful British sailors. \n\n*Tirpitz* meanwhile frankly just didn't have as exciting a story to tell. While some of the attempts to sink her do have drama all their own, the threat to the Arctic Convoys to Russia simply don't represent as existential a battle for most of the Western, Anglosphere history consumer market. That isn't to say they weren't deeply important to the global war effort, don't have valuable stories to tell all their own. \n\nA Fleet in Being is simply not a very exciting an existence, and that is part of the role she played, along with the *Scharnhorst*. By forcing each convoy to Russia to be escorted should she come out, far more resources were tied down than if she and some escorts had set out to hunt down the first convoy they found. It was in this way that the limited remaining German surface forces tried to prove their worth to Hitler and impact the war following terrible losses and accumulated damage in 1940-41. And it could be very effective, under air and sub attack, when it was mistakenly thought that *Tirpitz* and a task force were underway, the Allied convoy PQ-17 was ordered to scatter and every ship for themselves. Of the 35 merchant ships that set out only 11 made it through, the rest being sunk or scuttled from damage.\n\nThe problem was though that when German surface forces did commit they also risked losing one of the irreplaceable big ships. This was *Scharnhorst's* fate in December of 1943 at the Battle of North Cape when after attempting to find a convoy sighted by aircraft she was ambushed by a British force specifically sent out to hunt her and in a running battle in atrocious weather with some bad luck she was sunk.\n\nAnd while *Tirpitz* did make a few sorties with her smaller cousin, and other cruises on her own she never got enemy ships under her guns and was instead worn down by persistent, and some very creative attacks in her increasingly protected fjord anchorages. While a dramatic read it isn't quite as marketable as a daring gun fight on the high seas we can safely say. \n\nA commerce raider that never actually did any raiding, and a fleet in being that did much more being than fleeting is essence sums up the *Tirpitz*. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dmlwh8i" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Thanks... I study German history and have always wanted to comment here. I am just starting out, however I believe that the historiographical questions don't have to be narrow.\n\nEven though they may be an extra complication for people just starting in the subject, knowing that your subject has been studied by many other people makes it partly appear like a conversation of theory sharing and disputing between the many historians. \n\nI do agree however trying to extrapolate immediately the 'nature of humanity'... is kind of hard, and possible impossible in some cases. \n\nThank you for reminding me why history is worthwhile. " ] }

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[ "https://www.amazon.com/Virginia-City-Historical-Archaeology-American/dp/0803238487/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8", "http://imgur.com/5YrYC80", "https://www.academia.edu/32339760/Little_Rathole_on_the_Big_Bonanza", "https://www.amazon.com/Roar-Silence-Virginia-Shepperson-Humanities/dp/0874173205/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8", "http://imgur.com/7J1IGW2", "http://imgur.com/8P5ohaZ", "http://imgur.com/rAslJ57", "http://imgur.com/NDeyINM", "http://imgur.com/lzmLmXQ" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "c7204iq", "c72d5e3" ], "score": [ 7, 2 ], "text": [ "My main theme is actually religions, but some history of policemen have made it's way across the desk (as part of studying the witchcraze), so since no one else have answered, I'll give it a crack. A limited crack, since my time is likewise at the moment.\n\nDuring the dark ages, town guards and policemen have been organised in many different ways. One common method in many of the cities across Europe was to make the Burghers responsible for guarding their own city. The Burghers simply took turns acting as the local constabulary and safeguard the peace. The lived in their own homes and spent most of their time running their regular businesses. In smaller towns and in the countryside, the job was generally passed around among the prominent farmers of the area. People took turns.\n\nIn addition to this, the courts often employed guards to conduct investigations as well as hunting down suspects and safeguarding judicial proceedings. These guards generally lived in the judicial court and often even raised families there.\n\nIn addition to this, clergy often had the authority to act as policemen and judges in regards to moral crimes (infidelity, slander, some minor thefts et al.) and often fulfilled this role as part of their ministering to the flock.\n\nThe watchmen and nights watchmen arose as a phenomenon with the rise of the more centralised monarchies and replaced the patrolling burghers. The organisation of these cadres was usually left for the local councils to decide, but the duties (keeping the peace, controlling rowdy youth and disgruntled workers/peasants/apprentice's) was usually dictated from the capital. In fact, the life of a renaissance watchman could be the one o a respected local authority figure with family and a comfortable home to the one of a hired mercenary living in a camp outside the city walls. Or in a barrack.\n\nMost of my sources are printed books in Swedish, but if someone is interested I'll put together a smallish list. [This](_URL_0_) excellent little book is available on the net. Still in Swedish though.", "see my post [from several months ago](_URL_0_), perhaps it will help\n\nedit: I should note, that this applies to renaissance/early modern Germany and France." ] }

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[ [ "http://lnu.se/polopoly_fs/1.23135!20092.pdf" ], [ "http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wogsm/where_city_guard_really_as_dumb_as_media_portrays/c5ggmo1" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ct1f3nm" ], "score": [ 7 ], "text": [ "Romania didn't exist at the time of the fall of Constantinople. The states which we could consider Romanian were mostly being occupied of vassalized by the Turks (who themselves claimed to be the heirs of Rome) so any claim to being Third Rome wouldn't have ended well for them\n\nRussia's claim wasn't a result of \"Roman-ness\" but because of marriage ties with the Byzantine Emperors. The marriage of a Byzantine Princess to a Russian King gave the Russians a claim to the throne (in their minds, anyway) The fact that Constantinople was incredibly strategically important also played a part in this decision \n\nQuite a lot of people claimed the Third Rome title over the years. Bulgaria, Serbia (I believe) Trabizon, and a few other Eastern European countries.\n\nThe reason the Western Latins didn't claim this, despite also being Roman in stock, was because for them the Byzantines/ERE weren't really the true successors of Rome. For them, the Roman Empire fell in 476. \n\nAnother reason was the HRE. The HRE styled and was at times more and at times less seen as a successor of the Roman Empire in the West. Given that the HRE and it's Emperor sometimes ending up being the most powerful ruler in Europe (Hey, Charles V!) claiming that the HRE's entire existence and raison d'etre was wrong and that therefore you were the real successor to Rome wouldn't have been the smartest move" ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dc1b32k", "dc1es4f", "dc1fdz3", "dc1lf2v" ], "score": [ 16, 10, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "I get what you mean, but the best solution I always see, if you just enjoy coming here and reading interesting stuff - is to ask the more interesting questions! People will be always up for reading about the more popular stuff and artificially trying to curb that would probably not result in much good. But there is wealth of knowledge in here that goes often untapped and many people would love to share it, so we can give them the opportunity by being curious bastards. It also (hopefully) provides an outlet for new potential flairs that don't have their topic come up often (and if you feel like that, shoot me a PM!)\n\nNow back to Hitler.", "Simply put, while the idea has of course been discussed, we have no interest in placing moratoriums on certain topics in this subreddit.\n\nYes, there are consistent topics that we see, but if they are getting asked, and more importantly, upvoted, it is because people continue to be interested in them. I can assure you that as mods, we see more repetitiveness than anyone else, and probably get more frustrated by it at times than anyone else too, but it just isn't the right direction.\n\nWhat I will say though, to anyone who gets annoyed seeing the 5th Hitler question atop the sub in a month... *you* can help make a difference? Not simply by asking your own unique and interesting questions, of course, but check out the New queue, and upvote the unique and interesting questions asked by others. Even a few upvotes early on can make a huge difference in the success of a post, afterall.", "While I agree there are many questions and some repetition on popular topics such as Ancient Rome and WW2, the sub seems to handle this well. I have seen instances where a helpful poster responds to a repeated question and links an earlier answer relevant to the same/similar question. \n\nAnother reason to not engage a moratorium on particular topics is that history is an evolving field. Every so often, a new batch of declassified documents hits, old archives formerly inaccessible to historians are opened up to research, or new evidence is unearthed that changes the way historians understand a particular topic. Occasionally, a dutiful scholar will even find a new and credible interpretation of an existing source that provides fresh insights into a relatively settled topic.\n\nSo today's answer could be reexamined in the light of information we don't yet have. It can be enhanced, altered, and occasionally turned on it's head if the right evidence exists. \n\nLastly, several people can read the same page, and interpret it differently. So a moratorium on popular topics may rob the sub of valuable perspective and diversity of opinion.\n\nI've not found repetition to be a bother, though I can see how some would.", "I come here daily and I don't really feel there is a terrible deluge of these topics. I might have blinders because I enjoy posts about Rome, but I think the questions that tend to percolate up are interesting. \n\nThe questions I do get annoyed by are the ones that show very little attempt at self research, ones that could be answered by a very cursory google search or reading the first paragraph of a wiki page. These questions often come from the more prominent topics (like Rome and WW2) but also others. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "e148i5j", "e149yap" ], "score": [ 4, 13 ], "text": [ "More can be written, but you might like to start with the FAQ section [\"Hours, minutes, and seconds\"](_URL_1_) with answers by /u/jeanlucpeckinpah , /u/kookingpot, and [deleted].\n\n > months, and years all seem pretty natural\n\nHeh, heh. Actually not quite so obvious. Might could scroll up that page to the \"The year and months\" section. Not much I can see on that, except for /u/dpoon 's answer at [\"Why is the year divided in 12, awkwardly arranged months instead of 13 months with 28 days each based on the lunar cycles?\"](_URL_0_) .\n\nThis is not to discourage discussion. Further questions, data, and debate are always welcome.\n", "I can only answer for old Japanese method of counting time during Edo times, I'll stick to that.\n\nSo the answer would be that there was a concept of hours, but the length of those hours was not constant and depending on the season. A day was divided into 12 \"hours\", associated with chinese Zodiac signs names and a number. The numbers would go twice from 9 to 4: 9 (middle of the night), 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 9 (middle of the day), 8, 7, 6, 5, 4. \n\nThe middle of the \"morning 6th hour\" was sunrise, the middle of the evening sixth hour was sunset. Middle of a 9th hour was either midnight or noon.\n\nQuick consequence, depending on the season, you'd have shorter \"night hours\" with longer \"day hours\" (the length was changed every two weeks or so). For instance workplaces would have a clear start/finish time (e.g. beginning on morning 7 til evening 7), so as the hours lengths were varying depending on the season, the duration of the workday was also changing.\n\nThere were a few bell towers around the city in Edo, that would ring the time.\n\nEach hour was divided into 4 quarters, but not beyond that (so that does not go down to a \"minute\" to determine a specific time of the day). As an \"hour\" in Edo was roughly 2 of modern hours, the granularity of time keeping was around 30 minutes, but not more than that.\n\nTowards the middle/end of Edo period (XVIII/XIXth century), there were a handful of mechanical clocks built based on this system (those clocks are called \"Wadokei\"), as one can guess things can get very tricky with varying hours length. There are a couple of those impressive mechanisms kept into museums in Tokyo.\n\nThe move from varying length to fixed length was enacted in 1873. \n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1iwqu2/why_is_the_year_divided_in_12_awkwardly_arranged/cb969y2/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/calendars#wiki_hours.2C_minutes.2C_and_seconds" ], [] ]

{ "a_id": [ "f4ct34j" ], "score": [ 4 ], "text": [ "Specifically as far as the second part of your question- in [this](_URL_0_) post in which I discussed the decrease in antisemitism in the wake of WWII, I wrote\n\n > Why did it decrease so quickly? A large part of it was a greater awareness of bigotry in general, with antisemitism a large part of it but the Jewish community only one beneficiary of a larger campaign against hate. Once the strains of wartime were over and America faced newfound prosperity and peace, more mental energy was given to the possibility of improving the country for its residents. Part of this was due to the many soldiers who had served and, as mentioned above regarding Jewish soldiers, encountered bigotry that soon vanished by necessity under fire- that bigotry was then seen to be as senseless and horrifying as indeed it is. A poll of US soldiers in August 1945 in the army magazine *Yank* asking what changes soldiers wanted most from their country after the war ended had as its highest scoring result \"above everything else, the need for wiping out racial and religious discrimination.\"\n\nSoldiers were certainly affected by their experiences seeing survivors in the concentration camps, but it seems like the war in general had its own broader impact in terms of its effect on changing soldiers' prejudiced views." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c0yyyj/what_was_the_treatment_of_and_view_towards_jewish/etadhi7/" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "doebvij", "doeip8u" ], "score": [ 8, 6 ], "text": [ "They may have had the generals, but they didn't have the men. The free population of the Confederacy was less than a third that of the Union. Even if you include the enslaved population for economic purposes, they were still outnumbered by a considerable amount. Having a smaller population makes it much more difficult to replace losses - whether they're killed, wounded or simply gone AWOL to get the harvest in, those men are gone, and they must be replaced. This became a bigger and bigger problem as time went on.\n\nThe other big problem the Confederate states had was economic. Their wealth was bound up *incredibly* tightly with agriculture (one of the reasons they fought so hard to keep slavery was so that they'd have labour in the fields) and there was relatively little manufacturing or mining going on in comparison to the Union states. An army has to be outfitted - they need weapons and ammunition, they need uniforms, they need boots - and much of this outfitting involved industries that the Confederate states had never invested very much in. Union troops were showing up with rifled weapons like the 1861 Springfield, Confederate troops with much older smoothbore muskets off the mantelpiece at home...and even if they DID capture the more advanced guns, they didn't have the means to produce ammunition for them in any great quantity. \n\nTo make matters worse, the primary cash crop of the Confederacy wasn't even a food crop, something they could have lived on even if there was no market to sell it. Their primary crop was cotton, which had to be exported overseas before it could gain much value. They exported raw cotton, and imported all the other things they couldn't make.\n\nWhen the war began, one of the first things the Union did was enforce a blockade of Confederate ports. No way to export (and thus make money off) their primary crop. No way to import all of the many, many other things they needed - the blockade meant no finished cloth for uniforms, no iron and steel for weapons and railway stock that could move men or materiel around, no coal, no medicines. No *food*, since the Southern agricultural machine had concentrated on cotton more than food crops, and until war broke out had always been able to buy whatever they weren't producing. Food shortages get even worse when there's a war being fought directly on your territory and your crops are being trampled or torched.\n\nCan you see the problem now? ", "The -only- place where they won most of the battles or had the better generals was the Virginian front: the union was winning battles all the way through the war in the west from Shiloh to Vicksburg to Chattanooga to Atlanta.\n\nThe west was where the war was largely won: by 1864 Sherman was in Georgia, and yet the in the east the Army of the Potomac was still fighting same vicinity it was fighting since 1861 in what amounted to a 3 year strategic stalemate. But victories in the west had cut the Confederacy in half and allowed the invasion of the southern economic heartland by federal troops: thus achieving the strategic breakthroughs never achieved by either side in the east until very late in the war." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ca4ae6j", "ca4ahvo" ], "score": [ 6, 8 ], "text": [ "The Latin language changed quite a bit from Rome's foundation (classically dated to 750 BCE but the real date is uncertain) to the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476, but there's a problem in chronology. What do I mean by \"a problem in chronology?\"\n\nWell, we know about the ancestral language that Latin came from, Proto-Italic, which became Italo-Faliscan, which became Old Latin. Linguists know what changed in their phonology and vocabulary and even grammar, but *when* did the changes exactly occur? That's much more difficult to answer because most Latin examples come from way after Rome's foundation, thus we don't have very strong documentation of Latin's evolution. If we take the Praeneste fibula as genuine evidence of Latin (because some believe it to be a hoax), then the brooch is the earliest representation of the language we have, from the 700s BCE. So let's use the brooch's inscription as a way to peer into the language. It reads:\n\n > \"MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI\"\n\nLiterally rendered it reads 'Manius me he made for Numerius' (Manius made me for Numerius). By the Classical Era of Latin, that sentence would become:\n\n > \"MANIVS ME FECIT NVMERIO\"\n\nSo we see that nominative case ending *-os* has become *-us*. Words greatly simplified, especially in the verb *fhefhaked* / *fecit* \"he made.\" An intermediate form of the verb can be found in the Duenos inscription (c. 600 BCE?) *fēked*, so you can see that an internal -fha- was dropped before the ending *-ed* shifted to *-it*. \n\nBy the way, the label Classical Latin is actually a bit misleading. This was a version of Latin that was used by high society, and was not the Latin of the people, who used Vulgar Latin. Classical Latin is usually, but not always, more conservative than Vulgar Latin. But let's skip ahead to the Fall of Rome, shall we?\n\nBy the 400s AD, Classical Latin had evolved into Late Latin (which was only written) and Vulgar Latin was beginning to break into extremely different dialects that nearly new languages. Because Late Latin was neutered, we can forget about it. But what about Vulgar Latin? \n\nI'll write more about this later, I have to go. Long story short: they could communicate really really painfully if they were literate in a mutual alphabet and wrote everything down but they would be fucked if they could only talk.", "As a point of reference, Polybius writing in the late 2nd Century BC was unable to decipher quite a lot of the early-early Roman inscriptions and official annals. In one case he was attempting to add into his histories an account for Rome's first treaty with Carthage but that;\n\n > \"The treaty was in an 'ancient' form of Latin and difficult to understand\". (Polybius doc. 4.2)\n\nIn this case he's only attempting to decipher a record that had been written in 507 BCE, only 300 years before he was writing.\n\nA further example that could be given would be in Suetonius' life of Augustus. There's an anecdote where Augustus mocks both the future emperor Tiberius and Mark Antony for their usage of 'antique diction' in an attempt to emulate famous ancient orators. Keeping in mind that Augustus was making these comments in the early 1st Century AD, this comment indicates that a large amount of the ancient Latin language had already died out, and a new generation of Latin was being used. There are also examples I believe in Cicero's letters where comments are made about fellow orators and senators being seen as pompous for their usage of archaic Latin terminology in their speeches (again, this was during the 1st century BC). It's been a while since my last reading of Cicero, so I won't be able to source that one.\n\nWithout going too far into an essay response, I will say that yes, a Roman in 400 AD could *communicate* with a Roman from 400 BC. Why do I say this? Well it's because that today we are able to comprehend and translate sources from 400 BC Latin (historians that is) as well as 400 AD Latin. It is certainly difficult, and anyone here who has studied Latin will tell you that looking at a source from circa 200 BC is quite different to a 200 AD source (in style and language). So whilst a Roman *could* \"communicate\" with someone, I do believe it would be a very broken and stilted conversation that would barely be fluid.\n\nAt the end of the day, all languages are incredibly fluid and subject to context and change. Just look at our modern bastardised Twitter/SMS version of English. A person only 20 years ago would literally be unable to decipher a large portion of modern day Facebook posts or Tweets. Extrapolate that over a period of 400, or 800 years, and there is no way at all a person in Medieval England would be able to understand our social media version of English, but if you were to sit down with someone from ~1600 AD England and really TRY to have a conversation in English, then it could be done. It all has to do with context at the end of the day.\n\nHope that answer helps, maybe someone more qualified who has actually studied Latin proper will be able to come in and help provide a better response." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "c86owxf" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "It'd be rather hard to test. We'd have nothing but speculation on this question." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "czyw4xf" ], "score": [ 9 ], "text": [ "This probably only part of the answer, but classical literature (including theological writing in the case of Christian Europe) played a large role in creating this situation, and cultural exchange between people with different native languages helped maintain it. Something similar happened as well with Sanskrit and Classical Chinese.\n\nHere's the outline of how this process goes, although obviously details vary. I've provided some examples for Greek, Latin, and Chinese; I'm not familiar enough with Sanskrit to do the same for that language, but I believe the general pattern still holds.\n\n* A certain people's economic and military prowess (e.g. the Macedonian empire) causes its language and literature to be seen as high culture by those within its sphere of influence. Because culture spreads more easily than empire, this cultural sphere of influence ends up being a bit larger than the economic or military spheres that caused it, including places (like Japan or Scotland) that were never under direct control.\n\n* As a result of this perception of high culture, educated people throughout these spheres learn the language so that they can read its literature.\n\n* Since all educated people, regardless of native language, understand this dominant language, it's also a convenient way to communicate new ideas to a wide audience. So if you want to get your idea out--whether that idea is [Newtonian physics](_URL_2_), the [story of Jesus](_URL_1_), or the [basis of number theory](_URL_0_)--you write it in this dominant language.\n\n* All the works listed above were written by non-native speakers in a dialect whose primary purpose was communication between peoples, rather than day-to-day vernacular use. The dominant language has now become a *classical language*, one we learn because famous things are written in it, and write in because everyone else has learned it.\n\n* Since language-learning takes time and effort, and learning a classical language is only really useful to people who have time to read and write, it tends to be restricted to the upper classes and thus eventually becomes a mark of those classes." ] }

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[ [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Classic_of_Sunzi", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cdvmf63" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ " That is a very famous photo, you are correct in guessing the time and location, it was taken at Pearl Harbor after the attack. \n\n The ship still afloat in the foreground is the USS Maryland. She was built in 1921 and was the flagship of the US Fleet early in her career. She was repaired in time to serve as a support ship at Midway, and was the flagship of the Amphibious forces that assaulted Tarawa late in the war.\n\n The overturned sunken ship to the far right is the USS Oklahoma. The Oklahoma was a WW1 battleship and was not repairable after Pearl Harbor.\n\nThe burning ship in the background is the USS West Virginia. Like the Maryland she was a Colorado class battleship built in the 20's. West Virginia was very badly damaged at Pearl Harbor, and had to be completely rebuilt. The rebuild included modernization as well. The West Virginia was the lead ship in the American battle line at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. This was the last time 2 lines of battleships fought an engagement.\n " ] }

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

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{ "a_id": [ "du2g2h6" ], "score": [ 2 ], "text": [ "The decision of how and where to try Eichmann was a source of significant tension, inside Israel and out.\n\nHis capture, which was largely seen in Israel as an act of justice and triumph, galvanized the nation. Nachum Goldmann, for example, was a prominent Zionist who argued that [an international tribunal](_URL_0_) should be used to try Eichmann. Joseph Proskauer, who was formerly President of the American Jewish Committee, worried that the trial would cause anti-Semitism and hostility to Israel in the U.S., and suggested letting West Germany try Eichmann instead (which Israel considered outrageous, given West Germany had a reputation for letting Nazis walk free) or give him over to an international tribunal. But the decision to keep Eichmann for a trial in Israel was as much motivated by politics as by justice; Israel did not trust other states to try him fairly, and also saw this as a twofold political win: on the one hand, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion could gain points for his handling of relations with Germany, which had seen him get criticized for being too \"conciliatory\" in light of the history of the Holocaust, and he could also use the Eichmann trial to really open the nation's eyes to the Holocaust, which was not fully grasped by many Israeli Jews. Ben-Gurion was unabashed about this; he said no punishment or trial could match the enormity of Eichmann's crimes, but said that this trial would \"unfold the canvas of atrocities and evil plots of the Nazi regime against our people\". This was something not many could stomach disagreeing with, for obvious reasons.\n\nSo what about Robert Servatius? Servatius was already famous, given he had a career of defending Nazis, including at the Nuremberg Trials. Servatius was one of the lawyers who volunteered to defend Eichmann, and he was chosen by Eichmann, as you've noted. Israel chose to follow the Nuremberg precedent, though, which meant giving the accused the right to select their own lawyers, rather than an Israeli one in the Eichmann case. It was for this reason that Israel's government was the one paying Eichmann's legal bills as well, rather than Eichmann himself. This was supplemented by the sale of Eichmann's papers and documents, which were sold by François Genoud. The other reason for allowing Eichmann's choice of lawyer was legitimacy; Israel sought to impress upon the world that it had the right to try Eichmann, and Eichmann signed a statement submitting to an Israeli trial so long as he was provided an adequate defense, as reported [here](_URL_1_) in 1960; this preparation to pay for and allow Servatius to act as Eichmann's lawyer was based on this theory of an adequate defense. It was not true that Servatius had no other source of funds, but Israel was not aware at the time of the decision that Eichmann planned to sell documents to fund his defense. An Israeli lawyer was tasked to the team to ensure that they understood matters of procedure in court, also with the goal of ensuring an \"adequate defense\" and a fair trial, also following the Nuremberg Precedent. Israeli [law](_URL_2_), by the way, establishes some of the procedures of such a trial as well as the punishment, and while it does lay out the ability to deviate from some rules of evidence for expediency's sake, it does not take away the general presumption that a fair trial must be given, particularly since it was assumed that a Jewish lawyer would be so antagonistic to Eichmann as to make the trial impossible. Even so, Servatius might not have been allowed to represent Eichmann had Israel's inquiries not exonerated him of involvement with Nazis. While it was well-established that Servatius had defended the Nazis at Nuremberg, and while he claimed he defended Eichmann for the money, he was still investigated by Israel for any ties to the Nazi government and for sympathies for the Nazi cause, and only when cleared was he voted on to give him the special legal changes necessary for Eichmann to use him as his lawyer." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.jta.org/1960/06/02/archive/dr-goldmann-defends-his-plan-for-international-tribunal-for-eichmann", "https://www.jta.org/1960/12/27/archive/israel-prepared-to-pay-20000-fee-to-eichmanns-defense-lawyer", "https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl-nat.nsf/0/aacf823ae32ab469c12575ae0034c1fe/$FILE/Law%20no.%2064.pdf" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ce9mikd" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "While I cannot go into detail about the American Revolution, I can talk about how history presents it. Currently, I'm working on a post-bachelor teaching certification program on Secondary Social Studies so I may teach High School history. One of the classes that I was required to take was about the standards that my state, the state of Texas, puts out on what students are required to learn. One of my biggest objections to it was the inclusion of American Exceptionalism as a positive thing, which claims that America is unique and amazing because we're America and America is #1.\n\nAmerica isn't really revolutionary compared to the French Revolution which became an attempt at a Rousseau style Republic (meaning everyone was involved) while the US government was still very elitist. Or the Haitian Revolution, which took the flame of the French Revolution to a true egalitarian point when everyone, including women, were allowed to vote.\n\nAnother point to consider is that only Britain aimed to crush the American Revolution and for the logical reason of it being a revolution against them. The French Revolution had several attempts to put it down through military conquest from the powers of Europe. Further, the Revolutions of 1848 continued the spirit of the French Revolution throughout Europe and brought major changes such as constitutional movements in Germany and Austria as well as ending the French Monarchy once and for all.\n\nSo, to conclude, we see the American Revolution and Republic as unique and special but that has more to do with how we teach history at the primary and secondary level rather than historical reality. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dfb4bty", "dfbtb2b", "dfbw67v" ], "score": [ 21, 3, 2 ], "text": [ "Old English texts (c.700-1100 AD) frequently describe sword blades as poisonous, and Megan Cavell has published [a great discussion of these sources](_URL_0_). She ponders whether these texts are describing a real practice -- we know, for example, that sword blades were etched with corrosive acid to bring out the patterns in their metal, so might this acid be the poison described? Or perhaps the texts refer to an archaeologically invisible practice of actually poisoning blades before battle.\n\nPersonally, I don't think these texts refer to actual poisoned blades. Instead, I think they describe the (morally) poisoning effects that violence had on weapons. As swords shed human blood, they became tainted -- poisoned -- in the eyes of the Christian monks who described them. Monastic authors were very cautious about weapons -- they affirmed their importance, but also warned (in Solomon and Saturn II, for example) that weapons could sumon the devil. In this text, the author explains that drawing a sword would release the devil unless the sword's bearer recited the Lord's Prayer as he pulled the weapon from its sheath. The language in this poem -- describing the rules etched into swords blades -- echoes that used to describe poisoned swords in other texts like Beowulf. To these authors, the liquids that iron came into contact with could corrupt the metal -- blood get into a sword, and changed its physical properties. If that blood were human, improperly shed, the sword could become tainted. Hence blades were poisonous because they had come into contact with and absorbed something from the human blood that they shed, not by literal poisons applied to their edges.\n\nBut perhaps there was a more literal reality behind this metaphor. We can't know for sure -- swords from archaeological contexts are too corroded for any trace of a poison to survive. Perhaps Cavell's musings are correct and swords were sometimes actually, literally, poisoned to increase the harm they could cause.", "It was not uncommon during the early days of muzzle loaded muskets/aquebuses/rifles for soldiers to keep their lead bullets inside rotte meat/corpses for a period of time so that even a scratch could generate a kill on the long run because of infection. This was particularly the case during the 30 years war.\nThis started to be seen as dishonourable already by the Napoleonic wars and there were previous conferences opposing this practise. However this did not stop individuals from occasionally doing so and sometimes bullets would be infected involuntarily by being exposed to infected water (waterloo saw a few of these cases).\n\nSource: Tim Clayton's \"Waterloo\"", "Magellan was allegedly shot with poisoned arrows and stabbed with poisoned spears when he died on Mactan Island in 1521. However we only have Antonio Pigafetta's account of the battle. In any case, even if the arrows and spears were not poisoned, we at least know that the practice was either known, or thought to be known at the time.\n\n_URL_0_" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.academia.edu/9822266/Constructing_the_Monstrous_Body_in_Beowulf" ], [], [ "http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/magellan-killed-in-the-philippines" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cleb6r6" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "The biggest one in my field of study is Société le Nickel in New Caledonia.\n\nThe House Rothschild was one of the early investors in the race to open up gold, nickel, copper, and cobalt mines in New Caledonia; and helped provide the capital necessary for some French geologists (Jules Garnier being the main) to kick start the mining industry (1880) and build up enough infrastructure and secure enough mining concessions that ultimately they were able to buy out many of the other smaller producers that were founded around the same time. The fact that they built a processing plant in the colony very early on (1910).\n\nThe company's main product has been nickel; a key industrial component, and very important to France as a strategic resource- part of the reason why the colony is still part of France and why there is such a large settler population there. The company has experienced a couple of huge booms; especially during the arms race leading up to the first world war; and then again in the 1960s.\n\nThe companies size and presence in the colonial economy have lead it to have a somewhat outsized voice in political affairs since the 1910's. The French branch of the House Rothschild still controls the mining company among other subsidiaries and has only increased control since further consolidation in the industry in the 1930s.\n\nSo maybe not the big famous company you are looking for- but a company that has considerable holdings and has rights to a large amount of the known unextracted nickel ore. They are somewhat behind the scenes as they don't produce any consumer goods, but are instead an important supplier of raw materials and have been for over a century now." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "ch4fwdv" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Bob Wakabayashi translated Aizawa Seishisai's Shinron (New Theses, 1825) in Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early Modern Japan.\n\nAizawa is clearly worried about Western imperialism and hated the West, but he saw it more as Christendom overtaking the world. It's not exactly seen as an economic conquest just yet. (So in his mind it was a cultural contest between Christendom vs Confucian Japan.)\n\nFrom Japan's perspective in the early 1800s it wasn't just Britain and France that was threatening, it was really Russia that was threatening. What united all three was Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox), so it was natural for Aizawa to think in terms of religion. He seriously thought that Christianity first converted local people and then the converted Christians acted as a fifth column for the Europeans to take over. This New Theses became very popular in Japan and led to the growth of xenophobia among the samurai.\n\nInterestingly after the Opium War (1839-1842), shogunal officials recognized that the Europeans were not driven by religion but by profit above all else. Unfortunately as far as I know this is not available in English books, but it's recorded in the Bakumatsu Gaikoku Kankei Monjo.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nAfter the 1850s, as more Japanese began to leave Japan and witness Western colonial rule in Shanghai, Singapore, India, part of Middle East, leaders like Takasugi Shinsaku became very worried that Japan might be next. The Iwakura mission toured not just America and Europe, they visited the rest of the world as well. They have to be blind to be oblivious to all this. Kume Kunitake has left a great record in the Bei-O kairan jikki (parts of which has been translated as Japan Rising: The Iwakura Embassy to the USA and Europe). \n\nThis fear was one of the great drivers of change in Meiji Japan." ] }

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[ [ "https://www.hi.u-tokyo.ac.jp/english/publication/komonjo-e.html" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ccesy34", "ccet4vh" ], "score": [ 5, 5 ], "text": [ "In *Santa Claus, Last of the Wild Men: The Origins and Evolution of Saint Nicholas, Spanning 50,000 Years*, Phyllis Siefker argues that Santa Claus does not resemble the stern Saint Nicholas of Dutch tradition, but rather the wild Belsnickel or Pelznichols (roughly meaning \"drubbing Nicholas,\" or the Nicholas who beats bad children, as opposed to the saint). This character came from the German immigrants of Pennsylvania, and he gradually grew more friendly and less fierce. But he wore furs and was covered in ash and was not completely human -- and he evolved into the jolly old elf who was said to come down chimneys and leave either gifts or coal. The Dutch had a similar character, Black Pete, who accompanied Saint Nick and threatened to take bad children away in a bag. But Belsnickel was one character, not two, and awarded both gifts and punishments. ", "Our modern day Santa Claus is the amalgamation of several different traditions, along with a hefty revamp from the Coca-Cola Company during the early 20th Century. Santa Claus evolved from the figure known to the Dutch and Germans as Sinterklaas and Sankt Nikolaus, respectively. Patron of children, the saint’s festival was celebrated on December 6th, and children gleefully looked forward to receiving presents in their shoes on the festival’s eve, a tradition that evolved from putting coins into the shoes of the poor back in Europe. The Dutch tradition held that Sinterklaas leaves a rod for naughty children. However, in the colonies, this tradition was influenced by a separate character known in Germany as Belsnickel, who personified both good and evil, carrying a switch and delivering coal as he saw fit; good children would wake up to candy, nuts and fruit in their shoes as an early Christmas blessing. As these traditions made their way to the New World they were maintained in Dutch and German communities, and over time the two traditions melded, inspiring Washington Irving and Clement Clark Moore to craft their familiar portraits of Santa Claus. " ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "cf83i7h", "cf9zsl5" ], "score": [ 4, 2 ], "text": [ " The Goth subculture is influenced by Gothic literature(dark,horror fiction). \nThe word \"gothic\" is used to describe something barbaric or maybe just different/new. \nI believe the architecture was called gothic because it replaced the older styles(like roman). ", "Well it all started with a band called **Bauhaus** and their 1979 song Bela Lugosi is dead. Goth as a phrase did not exist, but with hindsight we can say there were \"proto-goth\" bands [like **Siouxsie and the Banshees**, **Joy Division** etc.], mostly a mixture of experimental punk, glam, etc., but there was no subculture or even a unique genre yet. With time the media started throwing around the \"Goth(ic)\" word as a descriptive term to apply towards certain flavors of \"Post Punk\" music, but this came years later and even then was inconsistently applied.\n\nIan Astbury [of \"**The Southern Death Cult**\" & \"**Death Cult**\" & \"**The Cult**\" fame] claimed that \"*One of the groups coming up at the same time as us was* **Sex Gang Children**, *and Andi. He used to dress like a Banshees fan, and I used to call him the Gothic Goblin because he was a little guy, and he's dark. He used to like Edith Piaf and this macabre music, and he lived in a building in Brixton called Visigoth Towers. So he was the little Gothic Goblin, and his followers were Goths. That's where goth came from*.\" [[source](_URL_0_)] That's probably as accurate of an answer as you can get without building a time machine to ask Robert Smith himself in 1984 when he was samiltaniously playing as part of **The Cure** and **Siouxsie and the Banshees**. This actually gave him the unique distinction of being at the #1 position of the charts w/ 1 band, and the #2 spot with the other at the same time. A feat that to my knowledge has never been done by anyone else.\n\nThe Sex Gang Children hung out at this club, called \"The Bat Cave\" where most of the *early* goth bands got their start. The people who hung out there [audience & performers] were called batcavers, not goths and were known for their crazy appearance & stage personalities. But the media didn't like that term, and instead opted to use the word Goth(ic), a reference to Andy's nickname. The word was more or less forced on the scene, and not everyone was happy about it. One person who really disliked it was a guy named Andrew Eldritch [of **The Sisters of Mercy**] who went on the record circa 1987 to say that he would have prefered the new genre to be known as \"Deathrock\" like a similar [but not quite the same] music movement that had started in southern California around the same time [with bands like Rozz William's **Christian Death**, **Ex-Voto**, **Voodoo Church**, **Death Ride 69** etc].\n\nSomewhere in all this, the fans started taking on the stage appearance of the bands they listened to and that's really when goth as a subculture took hold. I forget exactly which band member, but someone from **Theatre of Hate** [another one of those batcave bands] told one story to the media where they had gone to a gig and noticed that some of the fans who were showing up were dressed more strangely than they were. To play a prank on the rest of the audience, they grabbed the first most-crazily dressed fans they could find, and put them on the stage to have them pretend to be the band. Once the show started they had someone in a suit go on stage to pull the fake-band members off stage & replace them with the real band, and the audience went crazy refusing to believe that the real band was the real band and figured some label executives had decided to pull the show & put some new sub-standard act on stage in its place." ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.scathe.demon.co.uk/name.htm" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "feg3go8" ], "score": [ 6 ], "text": [ " > were there any people thinking about Germany allying with the western allies against the Soviet Union?\n\nabsolutely; the United States. Immediately after the war, the USSR went from ally to rival within like two years. The red scare that had been around since the bolshevik revolution in 1917 had dissipated during WW2, but after that was done, it came back with a vengence. The US now needed their half of germany to be a bulwark against communism, and it needed to be economically and politically strong. Other european countries were obviously not thrilled, but couldnt really object. \n\nI wrote a paper a few months back about the rhetoric of the holocaust after the war. Seems kind of relevant. Main source is *Holocaust in American Life* by Peter Novick.\n\n > Immediately after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the United States had a new foe. The Soviet Union had gone from invaluable ally to threatening totalitarian superpower, and Nazi Germany from threatening superpower to ally. Suddenly it became very disadvantageous to remind the public of the Holocaust. As Novick puts it, “symbols that reinforced the old view were no longer functional. Indeed, they were now seriously dysfunctional, reminding Americans of how recently our new allies has been regarded as monsters.” In order to accomplish this rapid publicity shift, the United States had to perform some rhetorical gymnastics. Rather than the Shoah being caused by Nazism, now it was authoritarianism. “Even active support of the Nazi program could not be considered criminal, because ‘totalitarian regimes insist [on] enthusiastic unanimity.’” Rehabilitating the German image as a friend in the fight against communism meant disregarding the entirety of the Holocaust, and in turn, this put tremendous pressure on the American Jews to disregard it as well. \n\n > Due to this rhetorical shift, the Jewish population in America was forced to disregard the Shoah as well. Conspiracy has long linked communism to Judaism, and in the age of McCarthyism, Jews were forced to confront the realities of their optics. “The popular association of Jews with Communism dated from the Bolshevik Revolution...In the interwar years the Communist Jew was a staple of anti-semetic propaganda both in the United States and Europe.” Additionally, along with the separation of Germany and Nazism, the victims of the holocaust were obfuscated as well. Rather than a purge of Jews, the goal of Nazi Germany was to remove political rivals. After the liberation, then general Dwight D. Eisenhower stated that he wanted journalists and lawmakers to visit “German camps in which they placed political prisoners.”This narrative was not only accepted by the general populous, but also a vast amount of American Jews. “It should always be pointed out that Nazi tyranny does not discriminate between Jew and Pole,” said one writer in the Zionist publication, Jewish Frontier. Jews advocating for themselves in the wake of the Shoah could be difficult during a Red Scare, and discussing the Holocaust was not adventagous for their public image. And so, outside of that brief moment of using it for political gain, the Shoah was largely disregarded for almost a decade.\n\nTheres also Operation Paperclip, where the US was competing with the USSR in hoovering up all the nazi scientists and generals and psycho torturers (google klaus barbie for a not fun read). Cold War was a strange time" ] }

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[ "https://www.americanheritage.com/last-days-third-reich", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable" ]

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{ "a_id": [ "csg8v15" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "Recent studies have shown that a lack of outdoor time dramatically increases myopia (nearsightedness) _URL_0_\n\nThe study was prompted by doctors noticing that our eyes are way worse today than in the past, and the rate at which they're going bad is speeding up." ] }

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[ [ "http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "cj99q6x", "cj9b0d9" ], "score": [ 3, 6 ], "text": [ "The Ancient Egyptian language was a direct ancestor of the Coptic Language, which is still used as a liturgical language by Egyptian Christians, so the best way to determine what Ancient Egyptian sounded like would be to search for Youtube videos in Coptic. It was an Afroasiatic (though apparently not Semitic) language, and hence would have been a distant relative of Arabic.", "[Turn up the Volume on both players](_URL_0_)" ] }

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[ [], [ "http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DWkk_xEhCsTw&start1=&video2=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_6dcDh4HSkw&start2=2&authorName=thenightmancumeth" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "ctvwgsu", "ctvx6yp" ], "score": [ 9, 30 ], "text": [ "The United States Army was inexperienced, and very few of it's forces managed to see battle. The German Army's doctrine (Stosstruppen) was deeply flawed, and they never managed to achieve a degree of combined arms operations equal to that of the Allied Armies. The French Army was qualitatively close to the BEF, but it's role was reduced due to casualties, and the BEF began to shoulder more of the burden from 1917 onwards. The BEF captured half of the prisoners and guns captured by the Allies in 1918, which the French captured a quarter, the rest being split between the Belgians and Americans.\n\nInsofar as the German and American Armies are concerned, Hart is more or less spot on, and I'd say he is right to an extent with regards to the French, though I would give the French more credit than he gives them. ", "This is an awesome question and I'm excited to see what other people say. I'll start by saying that more than most wars, the First World War does seem to arouse the most nationalist sentiment among historians, even the normally dispassionate ones. In the English-speaking world, much of our World War One historiography has been produced by Brits. Many of these books are perfectly subjective. Hew Strachan's survey of the war, *The First World War* (2003), is very even-handed. One of his specific goals for the writing of the book was to remove the Western Front- (and British-) centricity of First World War history. As such, and because the book is so sweeping in scope (strategic, operational, tactical) Strachan doesn't really allow himself to get bogged down in the question of \"who really won the war,\" or \"which army was best.\" On the other hand, you have authors like Paddy Griffith (an author I quite like) who wrote his book *Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack, 1916-18* basically in an attempt to claim that the BEF was the best army in France during the last three years of the war in tactics, strategy, and operational design. One of his central arguments is that the vaunted infiltration tactics generally attributed to Captain Willie Rohr and the German Army sometime during 1915 were actually a British invention and that the *German Army* copied them, not the other way around. As a counterpoint to this argument stands Bruce I. Gudmundsson's book *Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918* which tells the more conventional story of the German Army as the home of cutting edge tactical development. He argues that the mission-oriented and decentralized German command structure and the self-supporting squad fireteam were innovations that were not to become standard practice in other armies until the Second World War.\n\nI'll go ahead and offer my opinion as an historian at this point and then try and answer your central question. First though, why is the Great War such a theater for nationalist history of the \"my army was better than your army\" sort. Well, simply put, it's the World War where one side does not have the *clear* and *accepted* moral high ground. Getting anywhere near admiration of the Wehrmacht's fighting capabilities in the Second World War puts a lot of people on edge. On the other hand, the Germans in the First World War have a less clear-cut moral position. Much of the newer historiography I've read has tried to spread the culpability for going to war in 1914 among the Great Powers, if not outright absolving the Germans of any sort of immoral practices. As such, the sides are, I guess, more evenly matched in terms of historical support, if that makes any sense. Second, the tactical innovation of the First World War is truly astounding and it's understandable for historians to want to accredit that to their country and the army their fathers or grandfathers fought in.\n\nBut on to your question of whether the British Army was better than the other Armies in the field in 1918. Paddy Griffith, who I mentioned above with his very pro-BEF narrative of tactical developments, lays out a few reasons why the BEF has been denigrated in post-war tactical analyses. First, since the Vientam War, the US debate has generally spun more towards the German view of tactical innovation. \"...In the US debate since Vietnam, was the idea that all German soldiers were almost always incomparable tacticians, from the lowest 'deeply professional and long service' NCO or stormtrooper, right up to the gifted Colonel Max Bauer, the fiendish Colonel von Lossberg, or the omniscient General Sixt von Armin... But can we really trust such a critique, in view of the fact that the Germans lost the Great War?\" and further down, \"A facile contrast can also be made between the slow British progress against strong defenses on the Somme and at Passchendaele, and the much faster German advance against weak defenses in the spring of 1918. However, one should add to the equation the devastating casualties ufferd by the Germans on the latter occasion, due to their almost total neglect of tactics, as well as the far faster and deeper allied advances which subsequently won the war. As at Appomatox in 1865, the tactical brilliance of the final campaign has often been overshadowed by the varied emotions arising from the war's end.\" He then goes on to accord to the BEF all the tactical innovations of the German Army. Griffith also claims that the early supporters of the tank are a main reason for history's less than favorable view of British tactics in the Great War. Pro-tank lobbyists had a vested interests in showing that the British Army's infantry tactics had crystallized and stagnated during the war and that only the tank had won victory in 1918.\n\nI'll use Strachan to answer the question, though, since he's significantly more even-handed and broader in general. By 1918, the British had developed and were the best practitioners of \"combined arms\" warfare, which sought to combine infantry attacks with artillery, mobile fire support by tanks, and aerial observation and disruption bombing by airplanes. With the advent of better communications technologies, this combined arms approach would become the hallmark of modern warfare. The most decisive of these areas of development was in the field of artillery gunnery. At Cambrai, British gunners used curtain fire which sought to lay curtains of fire between German positions, essentially isolating them from communication or reinforcement. The bombardments were also less concerned with \"preparation\" and the days-long bombardments of 1916, but more with counter-battery fire and the knocking out of enemy guns. In terms of volume, although Germany had more guns than both the British and French combined in January of 1918, the British had pulled level by November through its high industrial output capability.\n\nIn terms of operational planning, the British had come up with (in conjunction with the French, I must say) the limited offensive, which was neither the bite-and-hold attritional battle a la 1916, nor the willy-nilly \"advance as far as possible for as long as possible\" of the Michael Offensive. The attacks were designed not to outstrip the reach of friendly artillery. Furthermore, British infantry outfits had modernized in terms of organization and technology. British battalions had gotten smaller since 1914 - 1000 to 500 - but also had more light machine guns and mobile mortars, and usually tank support.\n\nBy 1918, the British were on par with the Germans in terms of stormtroop tactics, and which army actually developed them first is a matter of national pride for some historians. They certainly better adopted the principles of combined arms warfare which would become famous during the Blitzkrieg years of 1939 and 1940. They had better operational design and were supported by allies with whom it had close contact and coordination. This cannot be said of the Germans, whose allies were a dying Austria-Hungary and a pan-Turkic crusading Turkey. At the tactical level, whose army had the best individual fighting men? That's a question I'm not going to tackle, mostly because 1) it's a can of worms, 2) I don't have as much experience with the BEF as I do with the German and Austrian armies and don't want to bias my answer and 3) I'm not sure it's a question which can be answered in an historical manner. I think it's more interesting and important to note that the armies throughout the war were evolving and learning from each other with a rapidity that's dissappeared from the popular perception of the war. Much more than a stagnant, stale war fought from trenches, the Western Front was a highly dynamic conflict in which armies and soldiers were forced to learn from each other and either adapt or die.\n\nSources:\n\nStrachan, Hew. *The First World War.* Viking, 2003.\n\nGriffith, Paddy. *Battle Tactics of the Western Front; The British Art of Attack 1916-1918.* Yale University Press, 1994.\n\nGudmundsson, Bruce I. *Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918.* Praeger Books, 1989." ] }

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{ "a_id": [ "dx29hjj" ], "score": [ 3 ], "text": [ "You may be interested in some of the earlier answers and journal papers linked in this recent thread (there's one anthropological paper that's particularly interesting re. chronotypes): \n(_URL_0_) by u/whattthefat and myself. \n\nu/sunagainstgold on how [muezzins and medieval monks woke up](_URL_1_) \n\nThere are also a few older answers in the FAQ: _URL_2_ \n\n" ] }

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[ [ "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/86muij/before_electricity_did_people_sleep_longer/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4t6u9y/how_did_imams_wake_up_in_time_to_make_the_call/", "https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/calendars#wiki_waking_up_without_alarm_clocks" ] ]

{ "a_id": [ "c7grmaw" ], "score": [ 5 ], "text": [ "Many ancient (non-Asian, someone else will have to comment on that) societies were fairly syncretistic - that is, they tended to blend their religious beliefs with those of their neighbors.\n\nThis could take multiple forms. For example, the Romans sometimes merged the gods/goddesses of other civilizations with their own deities, as in the case of Sulis Minerva, or considered other deities as the same as their own, as in the case of Odin and Mercury.\n\nSome civilizations simply felt that their pantheon was tied to their land - their gods were 'more powerful' in their lands but that it might be worthwhile to worship other gods in other lands.\n\nWhile some places outlawed the worship of 'other' gods (notably the city of Athens), the idea that only your god exists, and that everyone else is wrong, wasn't the norm." ] }

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