When confronted with the notion that darker skin is less desirable to light skin in many countries, many people default to the notion that poorer people would develop darker skin from working in the sun all day, whereas lighter skinned people didn't have to. Is this notion rooted in history throughout the world or are there specific regions where it applies more (if at all)?

If it's possible to separate this folk history from the obvious fact that colonial Spaniards (for example) has lighter skin than the indigenous Central and South American people that they coerced into servitude, let's do it.

We know that the narrative of an oppressor would create this sort of sentiment - I'm wondering if it's possible that there are examples of the narrative growing organically within a population of people.

Also, any book recommendations about SOE agents or others like what the title asks, are greatly appreciated!

I know a little bit about Theodore Roosevelt and how he apparently introduced some important progressive reforms, but most of what you hear about him in culture is related to him being some sort of paragon of masculinity. It’s always about him bare knuckle boxing, or getting shot but still giving his speech because bullets don’t dissuade him, or riding horses and hunting in the wilderness out west. Where did this idea of him as the ultimate manly man come from? Why him instead of, say, Abraham Lincoln, who was not from a blue blood family and was actually from the frontier? Would he still be a famous president just based on his accomplishments (I don’t know a ton of them?) And is any of this actually accurate?

“The Irish slave trade began when 30,000 Irish prisoners were sold as slaves to the New World. The King James I Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white. From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well. During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers. Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle. As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts. African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude. In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company. England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat. There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on its own to end its participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery. But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong. Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.”

So it’s 1970’s South Africa. I am a White Briton who has moved to South Africa, it is obvious by my accent and dialectal phrases that I am not Afrikaner. Considering the National party at the time was focused on Afrikaner interests (bordering on supremacy) and the fact that a lot of Afrikaners were mistreated by my people during the Boer war 70 odd years ago, how would Afrikaners treat me as? Would I be an equal to them? Would I have the rights as them but treated with suspicion? Or would hatred for me be very open?

Edit. I forgot to mention I don’t speak Afrikaans, only English, I know some Afrikaner words but not enough to make a sentence.

The Spanish have a reputation for doing things late in the day, especially eating really late in the evening and starting nights out after midnight. Midday in Spanish, Mediodía, is around 3pm, which says a lot. I know that one reason Spaniards might do things late is because Spain is in the 'wrong' time zone with respect to the position of the sun. There's also the the fact that the actual middle of the day in the summer is often too hot to do anything (requiring the siesta) so naturally activity migrates to the cooler evening.

My question is whether Spaniards have been nightowls for a long time (100s of years), or whether some of this behaviour is more recent (because of the creation of international time zones, for instance, or other aspects of industrial modernity).

When we read the ancients, we have to realize that many of the writers are senators or ex senators. They give us a glimpse of how the senators were treated and viewed by the Emperor.

How did this happen in Ancient Rome? I asked myself. If I was a senator and there were literally dozens of other men like me, how could I win the favor of the emperor? Marcus over there has a beautiful villa in Naples and Rufius has thrown many lavish entertainments in his house, etc...

And what about all these other men? How can I possibly win Tiberius’s favor when I have to go through Sejanus? How can I win Claudius’s favor when Narcissus and Pallas are at his every corner?

I’m curious to know what exactly being an ambitious in imperial Rome meant.

We have examples like Nerva and Antoninus. These were men who where senators and won great admiration. The first by the senate and guards and the latter by the emperor Hadrian. How did they do that? These guys weren’t chosen at random. They build a solid relationship and had clout. How on earth can a senator distinguish himself and gain the favor of the emperor?

The mission was of course to find/verify Australia

And if the Germans were given enough time when would they develop it?

For context, a while ago I got into reading Lovecraft’s short stories. I was already aware of the man’s prejudice and rabid racism (despite all his brilliance) but still, as a Portuguese man myself, it came to me as a surprise that one of his targets in The Call of Cthulhu were none other than these folks he termed “Brava Portuguese”. The descriptions clearly suggested they were black and seemed to take part in some type of fetishist/animist cult.

The fact that Lovecraft apparently knew what a Portuguese was (instead of calling them, I don’t know, Spaniards) and would certainly have no quarrels with going down some anti-Catholic “Black Legend” stuff if need be, seemed to suggested that these “(Brava) Portuguese” in his stories were more linked to the concept of the Portuguese colonial empire than to mainland Portugal itself - hence the characters (if we can even call them that) being black. And then there was the “Brava”. I knew that was the name of one of the smallest islands of Cape Verde. Googling around revealed some scholarship on Lovecraft confirming that, indeed, the Brava Portuguese were Cape Verdeans.

But why were Cape Verdeans called after one of the smallest islands in the archipelago (Brava) - hence the titular question, “who were they”? Were the first Cape Verdean immigrants mostly from that islet? And how come these men immigrated to the US, as black freemen, way before slavery ended (the first migration wave apparently started in the early 19th century)?

I know from Wikipedia most of them stuck to Rhode Island, New England etc, (hence Lovecraft being acquainted with them) where their descendants still live for the most part, but what was keeping them, as non-English speaking Black immigrants that had just arrived to a slave-owning country, from getting intro trouble and somehow end up down South?

I think more generally the question is - how did freemen black immigration to America work? I assume some of these men and women were well aware of the fact slavery hadn’t been abolished yet in the US - weren’t they afraid of getting caught in the net? Do we know what they thought of the whole thing? What prevented them from being pressed into slavery if they took the wrong turn in life? Do we know what Southern slaves thought of these recent African immigrants?

Sorry for the rambling questions.

I know that Rabindranath Tagore studied at University College London and some wealthy Indians studied in other British universities. How were they treated by other students or the general public?

I've been doing design research on victorian fashion for a while now, and I was curious about how children dressed in the 1980s. There isn't much that I've been able to find online about this specific decade, let alone how children dressed, so I decided to reach out to this sub. I have a couple of sub-questions, so I'll leave them here

Did children wear corsets? I assume they're not as tight, but I haven't been able to find anything.

What differences were there between the way a child or someone of upper-class would dress vs lower-class?

At what age was the fashion at the time pushed onto children?

Thank you in advance if you're able to help me

Good day to you all, As a communist I've always been interested in Soviet history but my problem with it is that I don't usually know what sources to trust, this usually includes both right and left wing historians,

Like how Grover Furr completely ignored the soviet archive that stated that the katyn massacre happened, I'm also highly suspicious of some right historians as well who use things such as the black book of communism, the gulag archipelago or rumors as sources.

So in any case I was wondering if you guys (who I have a really high opinion of) could give me some examples of objective historians using the soviet archives as sources.

Thank you for your time.

I’ve watched a few medieval movies, and I realized that most people uses swords. I was wondering, was swords as commonly used as it is depicted in movies? Did they also commonly use lances, spears, maces, axes, etc?

For those of you who don’t know, an Atatl is a prehistoric tool that was used by the ancestors of Homo sapiens to throw spears at a much farther distance. People still use spears for hunting fish and even bears today, and there are a lot of times in ancient history when armies threw spears at each other, so unless the tool was just lost to time what stopped people from using it?