In the 1800s, Democrats were pro-slavery and Republicans were anti-slavery. Now, Democrats have liberal ideologies and Republicans are conservative. When, why, and how did that happen?

Rewatching 2000's Gladiator there's the famous scene where Maximus has his first big encounter at Rome's Colosseum, where him and his men are intended to be slaughtered for show with them playing the part of the Carthaginians at the battle of Zama as they get destroyed by the Romans in a 'Re-enactment', but manage to turn the tables and come out on top.

The scene is ridiculous for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that the re-enactors supposedly playing the part of the Romans of Scipio Africanus's armies seem to be highly orientalised Chariot Archers, but the description of the announcer that the Carthaginians were 'Barbarians' got me curious, did the Romans perceive the Carthaginians as Barbarians, both when they were fighting them in the Punic wars and in the centuries afterward?

To the modern mind the word Barbarian creates an image of crude, brutal warriors that are opposed to the very concept of civilization (yes I am aware that this is highly insulting to the real life cultures labelled as Barbarians but its how I understand the prejudices of settled, urbanized societies like Ancient Greece, Rome or China against a lot of their foes). It would seem to line up pretty well with the stereotype of the Romans fighting Celtic and later Germanic people to the north, but Carthage was a sophisticated, urban empire, would the Romans still have applied the label of Barbarian to them? If so, was Barbarian just a generic term for 'Foreign enemy' that would have also been applied against longstanding centers of civilization like the Hellenistic empires and the Persian empires, and that the whole notion of barbarians being uncivilized and intrinsically opposed to traditional concepts of what is civilized was a later evolution of the term?

I'm currently reading Guibert of Nogent's Monodies and I'm looking for more texts like it. I really like the on the ground view of life in the middle ages, I know that there's a lost of gossip and suspect stories, but I find it really enjoyable to read a primary account of how people saw their own world. Can anyone give me other recommendations for similar books? I would prefer the middle ages but if there is anything from another time period that is a really good read I would be interested in that as well.

Before Scandinavia was christianised ,what was the perception of homosexuality in those areas and how did it change with the arrival of christianity.

So I recently had this stuck in my brain for a bit. So during D-Day we had a bunch of people die just trying to take the beach but why did we not send in a group of bombers or atleast some planes to do a quick airstrike or just use the cannons on the ships to take out the bunkers?

Sorry for the clickbait but its the main example of what I am really asking about. On r/historymemes there is often a post with falling dominos progressively getting larger, implying the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand inevitably led to the creation of anime. Obviously, this is a gross exaggeration for the meme, but it makes me wonder: How do historians assign cause to events and is there a truth to the x caused y caused z therefore x caused z logic?

There were bitter partisan disputes before the Era of Good Feelings. There were (and still are) bitter partisan disputes after the Era of Good Feelings. Yet for 8 years everyone just kind of got along. Only one political party (Democratic-Republicans) was in existence. Not only did Monroe win every single state in the 1820 election, he ran unopposed. What led to this feeling of national unity? Why have we never seen anything like it since (not even after WWII or something)? The War of 1812 was a very destructive war. Washington DC was burned and the US didn't even "win" in the end. "The status quo is being maintained after years of war" seems like it would be a difficult thing to rally the nation behind. So what was it? It came to an end after Monroe's presidency. Was Monroe just that skilled of a politician?

As the title says - is there any difference between these terms? Do they mean the same? Are they used differently based on historical period - a.k.a. Byzantium will be "despotism", 20th-century ideologies rulers will be "dictatorship", and greek absolute rulers will be "tyranny", or is there some deeper difference.

I see a lot of historians in creating their discourse about certain topics use different terms, so would like to know more about deeper cultural-linguistic-historical differences.

TL;DR – Great Grandpa fought in ww2, wrote diary. Grandmas death revealed she had unknown brother. This make me think I have responsibility for a piece of history. Do I?

This needs some backstory. It might also be too philosophical and too little actual history for this sub but I don’t know where else to post it so please bear with me.

My great grandfather was born in the Swedish-speaking part of Finland and fought in the Winter- and Continuation War during WW2. He wrote a diary during his service which gives a great insight of what ordinary soldiers did during the war. From sitting around waiting for orders on where to march and complaining about the food, to desperately trying to fend off overwhelming Soviet forces pushing through their lines.

Growing up, I have been fascinated with story about him and even did a school project about him in a history class. I’ve tried to dig deeper in this. I’ve found the official war diaries of both the regiment and battalion he served in, I’ve found maps and bought many books on the subject. The plan is loosely to write some kind of report or book detailing his service. Not necessarily to publish, but to give myself a clearer picture of what happened and what he went through. However, it’s an on and off project as I only do this when inspiration strikes me. It is slow work, cross referencing diaries, pouring over maps and to complicate things further a lot of the source material is in Finnish and Russian, which I don’t speak. To me this is obviously a very personal story as my relative did all these amazing things and survived. But in the bigger picture, the “Finland during WW2”, this quickly fades to some marginal anecdotes.

The philosophical side of this began when my grandmother passed away back in January. When we went through her belongings, we found an old photo with the inscription “Mother and me at my brothers grave”. The thing is, as far as everyone in my family knew, my grandmother was an only child. My dad called the church in the town where she was born, and it turns out she had had an older brother who died before she was born. She had never mentioned it to anyone.

What does this side story have to do with the war diary? It made me realize that I am the last person to care about my great grandfather’s war service. My sister and cousins aren’t interested. My dad, while interested and supportive of me digging deeper, will not himself do more than cherish the memories. Looking at that picture I was overwhelmed knowing that I have the power to decide if another person’s legacy will live on or not. Like my grandmother choose not to let the memory of her dead brother live on, I must choose what to do with my great grandfather’s memory, at least the war part. It made me feel responsible in some weird way, as “this story dies with me”.

It feels strange to know that if I do not do something with this material, the memory of his service will be forever lost, aside from the diary no one will read. At the same time, I feel I’ll come across as slightly megalomaniac thinking this highly of an insignificant piece of history. It is not the history itself that bothers me, it’s the fact that I am the last curator of a memory.

Do you think I have a responsibility for keeping this tiny piece of history alive?

I know that most of the world recognizes it as the territory of Azerbaijan. However I hear a lot of historical claims made for Armenia as well (Ana Kasparyan from TYT). So what is the history in that region? Historically what was the markup of that region? Who has the rightful claim to that region?

I recently read that the Khmer Rouge killed a fourth of Cambodia’s population. Of course, there were plenty of other communist countries with oppressive and violent governments, but from the very little I have read, the Khmer Rouge seems to have been uniquely bad even compared to them. So why did Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge turn out so much worse than Vietnam or other communist countries?

I'm not certain if this is more food history or anthropology, but I've noticed that seemingly every culture has their versions of dumplings. Where did they come from?! Did some crazed hermit clammer down from his mountain thousands of years ago to share the discovery of wrapping and cooking things inside dough? I simply must know!

I’ve been re-listening to Dan Carlin’s Supernova in the East and he mentioned that when an aircraft carrier was being attacked by enemy aircraft there wasn’t enough time to relax and have a cigarette between attacks. He also says that carriers were particularly susceptible to dive-bombers as they were filled with airplane fuel and bombs. So where would a safe place to smoke be? Nowadays you can’t smoke at gas stations because of the obvious safety hazards, so did shipwrights consider this and have a “smoke safe” part of the ship?

Was learning about imperialism in my modern Euro class and was wondering if part of the reason why so many countries decided to participate in the war was because they had the ability to declare war with the intention of taking more land for themselves.

Multiple stories seem to revolve around vikings adopting from outside their own culture. The most prevalent example are the Saxon Chronicles/Last Kingdom where a saxon boy is adopted by danes invading england. I've never seen any indication that this was an actual practice. Is this just a fictional trope or is it based in fact?

This is something that always baffled me about WW2. Nazi Germany and Japan are on opposite sides of the world, and have no common fronts and few if any common enemies. They don't seem to have had any kind of central organization or coordinated strategy together, and in even in some ways had somewhat contradictory goals. Why did they end up being on the same side of the war, instead of two separate conflicts?

When Japan then attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States then followed by declaring war on Germany, as if they had anything to do with it. Surely Hitler could have simply denounced Pearl Harbor, severed all relations with Japan, tear up the tripartite pact, and lose absolutely nothing.

Part of what always makes World War Two so impressive is the scale of fighting, having an equal amount of intense conflict on polar opposite ends of the globe. But at that same time, that very premise is rather counter-intuitive to wrap one's mind around. Since it seems that aside from this single, verbal alliance between Japan and Germany, there doesn't appear to be anything to really connect these two hemispheres together.

Edit: Before I go to bed, I want to shout out to the 500 people who pointed out that Germany declared war on America first, the day after Japan did. Although I did not know that, that doesn't really change my question whatsoever. Of course, I could have said this a while ago to clear up the confusion, but I liked the chaos.