I'm trying to get a clearer understanding of how marriage customs and money worked in colonial America around the time of the Revolutionary war (late 1700s/early 1800s ). I've searched and searched and can't find a clear answer to this question.
For example, why did daughters from wealthy families have to marry rich? Did doing so also benefit a person's siblings, or did it only help to secure their own financial future? Was this social expectation of marrying up limited to the eldest daughter, or was it true for all children aside from the eldest son, who often benefited from the custom of primogeniture? In what ways would marrying someone of a lower status negatively affect a woman in this time period? And would her husband benefit from marrying into a wealthy family?
[For added context, I'm trying to understand the problem posed in a lyric from the musical "Hamilton" (which I know is not necessarily historically accurate), as sung by the eldest daughter of a high society family: "My father has no sons, so I'm the one who has to social climb for one."]
1 Answers 2020-09-01
I recently rewatched the film The King (2019) on Netflix and really enjoyed it. However one small thing that irks me is the Dauphine's (Robert Pattinson) accent. In the film it is portrayed as a stereotypical modern French accent. However I was wondering if a French accent in the 15th century would be similar to the modern French accent?
I know that old English did not sound at all like modern English, with different words and pronunciations, and so I assumed an old English accent would be different from a modern English accent. Is this true? And if it is, wouldn't old French accents be different from modern French accents?
So my question is: Would the Dauphine in the 15th century speak English with a modern French accent? Or are older French accents different?
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When did we realize our past was worth saving? Does a certain amount of time generally pass before discoveries begin?
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I'm conducting some research behind William Frazier's The Golden Bough, and have no idea where to start. What are the methods that historians use for research? Ideally I'd like to find out more about who Frazier was, the motivations behind TGB, how he went about writing it, how the book was received at the time, etc. One obvious place is the library, but even then I'm not sure where to start. Also, today being today, being able to do research in a Covid friendly way is also important.
So historians of reddit, please help me out. If you had to research a specific book, how would you do it?
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I am looking for sources to disprove the alt-right idea that Hitler was far left. I'm having a difficultly finding a source that goes into detail about the Nazis relation to industry/economy and how it changed overtime. If I am wrong and you can show me a source that shows he was a far left socialists, I would like to know as long as it isn't completely biased; only stating the NAZI acronym over and over. I believe it is very dangerous to call Hitler a socialist and giving affordable healthcare to people fascist, it seems like revisionism, and it seems common people are starting to believe it. I would like to know concise facts to the contrary I can bring up in an argument (unless I am completely wrong in my belief).
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I recently learned of the Fabian Society ( https://fabians.org.uk/ ), which is a group formed in London in the late 1800's with the aim of gradually pushing England in the direction of socialism. Their namesake is the Roman general Fabius, who waged a war of attrition to fend off defeat at the hands of Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Similarly, the society claims gradualism as one of their front and center beliefs, and was broadly Humanist in the tradition of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (at least as far as I can tell). Supposedly, the group is one of the first anywhere in the world to propose and support a minimum wage or universal healthcare.
While my question is about their historical role, it is worth mentioning that today the Fabian Society is an affiliate of the Labour Party and essentially Labour's own in-house think tank. I believe the Fabians claim credit for helping to form the Labour Party as well. Additionally, it seems that the society also founded one of the UK's premier universities - the London School for Economics and Political Science.
So I guess my question is, can anyone shed a little more light on their role in 19th and 20th century British politics? Were many MP's members of the society, or only a handful? Were they a fundamental part of the founding of the British Labour Party? Did its members and their discussions or publications have a significant impact on political discourse, or has it been more of a niche aristocratic club? It seems like a very interesting and unique group.
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A further example is coinage, that had both "Napoléon Empereur" and "République Française" on it simultaneously:
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I consider myself fairly well educated on WW2 but Ive never heard that the soviets had plans to attack germany so soon. I was under the impression, that the soviet union planned to attack germany but like 1-2 years later than germany attacked them...
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The South was certainly fighting for independence towards maintaining slavery. Was ending slavery as large a motivator as maintaining the Union for those in the North?
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The three biggest American civilizations that we are taught about in school are the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Mayans. While I know that the Mayans has mostly collapsed by the arrival of Europeans, what was the relationship like between these three empires? Were there diplomatic ties? Trade relations? Or did they really not know that the others existed?
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Hello! I was reading the Wikipedia article about Okinawa Island and stumbled upon an unsourced mention of failed Mongol attacks in 1291 and 1296, after the much more well-known failed invasions of Japan. I have read about the period a fair bit and was familiar with the Japanese invasions as well as the Mongol invasion of Java but I had never heard anything about an attack against Okinawa.
I was able to find a good account of the attacks on Samurai-Archives.com but I'm not sure how good of a source that is. Does anyone else have any information about these two failed attacks?
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It has its origins in Rome (as far as I know), and Spanish as a language has some relation to the Latin language, but seeing as they're white Europeans we don't refer to the Spanish or the Italians as Latinos or Latinas, as we do with the mixed-race peoples of Latin America.
I'm guessing that the origins of this usage have something to do with the fact that it was mostly Spain and Portugal that colonized South- and Central America, but surely there must be more to the story here? Why don't we refer to all Hispanic peoples as Latinos or Latinas?
I'm unofficially asking on behalf of u/atthevanishing, who asked a similar question in this thread.
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From my understanding of the history of science and other major disciplines, the discoveries and developments of major breakthroughs are either done by continuous build-ups of multiple groups of people that continued the work of certain studies for multiple generations, or the work was done by a team of people who collaborated with one another for a common interest; or at times, the discoveries were stolen and the credit was given to someone else.
Even in scientific journals that we see today, these are mostly done by multiple people instead of one or two and are products of multiply repeated studies to test whether they produced the same results.
Stories like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla where it was believed that Edison was the sole creator of multiple inventions but after a deep understanding of the Current War, most of his so-called inventions were stolen from others or were given credit to him including the infamous case of Topsy the Elephant. However, at the same time, Tesla is somewhat credited with the "unheard genius" trope and given credit for multiple inventions and discoveries as suggested by this famous comic. However, according to some historians, this is not the case
This is similar to the claimed story of how Watson and Crick stole Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the DNA
A similar story is that of Einstein - either he is overly advertised and romanticised and became an icon of science but this is possible because he existed in a time where television was starting to become more common and popular which may explain why he became so famous, and there are some shocking history about the man as well and made errors in his findings which shows that he is just as human as everyone else.
And apparently, while Einstein's theories were ground-breaking, there were not quote "new" per se, but rather inspired by or developed from the works of others such as Hume and other physicists like Planck, Bohm, and Grossman
Or maybe something as recent as Steve Jobs whose contributions helped the democratisation of personal computers and his ideas made computers more popular. He is often credited as a visionary, an inventor and as a born leader but was actually quite the opposite and overly critical and there are claims that his ideas were stolen from others similar to how Jobs lied to Steve Wozniak about the bet that he had about creating an Atari game but lied about how much he was owed.
So there is a certain pattern of "Good artists copy, great artists steal" where scientific and technological achievements are given credit to a few select few but in reality, are done by many other people who are not given credit for.
So why is this the case?
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Istanbul (Constantinople), Edirne (Adrianople), Izmir (Smyrna), Erzurum (Theodosiopolis) are a few examples off the top of my head. Why did the Turks change the names of these cities to Turkish names, while some place names elsewhere (like Alexandria, Jerusalem and Damascus) retained their Latin/Greek/Traditional names?
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Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!
If you are:
this thread is for you ALL!
Come share the cool stuff you love about the past! Please don’t just write a phrase or a sentence—explain the thing, get us interested in it! Include sources especially if you think other people might be interested in them.
AskHistorians requires that answers be supported by published research. We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.
For this round, let’s look at: SCHOOL AND EDUCATION! Was education in your era a right for the many or a privilege for the few? What was the school experience like at different stages? Were there any particularly noteworthy and badass educators who you want to talk about? Discuss one of these or something totally different!
Next time: GOOD DEEDS!
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They're similar letters, and in some cases like "Corinth" vs "Korinth", there's no difference. But then in other cases the original pronunciation is completely lost.
"Alcibiades" vs "Alkibiades",
"Cephalonia" vs "Kefalonia",
"Macedon" vs "Makedon",
"Thucydides" vs "Thukydides", etc.
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