I’m looking for resources on personal histories of the Great Depression. Books, audio or video are all good. Looking to understand people’s experiences within the depression, how they survived etc anything would be great?
2 Answers 2020-03-29
Sparked off by this thread of tweets on twitter.
Is the bombing of German cities a cultural touchstone and common reference point in the way that the equivalent is in the UK? Even as a child I was familiar with the common points of the 'blitz spirit' trope, of people sheltering in tube stations and air raid wardens and so on. It's a huge part of the collective psyche and national experience of the war. I'm curious as to how the other side viewed this, if a common interpretation emerged during the bombings and if this continues to the present day?
1 Answers 2020-03-29
Hi! I have been learning about medieval Europe lately, mostly France and Italy. My question is about the Normans. Were the Normans just the ruling class in Normandy or were they regular townspeople as well? Did they only marry royalty or did they, also, marry regular men and women?
1 Answers 2020-03-29
Hey folks.
I’ve been reading a lot of books about Ancient Rome lately. In all of these books, it’s common for authors to refer to “Italians” or the “Italian Peninsula” as a reference to all peoples living in what is now Italy. These phrases are even used to refer to peoples dating back as early as the foundation of Rome.
This surprises me, as my understanding is that, during the early years of Rome, the Italian Peninsula consisted of many distinct tribes, etc., which I assume did not think of themselves as sharing any sort of “Italian” identity.
Is this just a convenient phrase for authors to use? Or did the peoples of what is now Italy actually recognize that they had an identity based upon living on the Italian Peninsula? When did the word “Italian” first arise?
Thanks!
1 Answers 2020-03-29
Would***
1 Answers 2020-03-29
I am doing a paper on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and am trying to figure out, how the russian nobility lived up until that point. I managed to find many sources about the peasants and serfdom but very little, almost nothing, about normal nobility (not just the tsar and his family) and how they lived. Does anyone know?
2 Answers 2020-03-29
Ruling two countries at once would be difficult, especially if the two countries don't like each other much.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
Asking for research purposes so looking for more historical rather than opinion. What was Ireland's role, if any, in WWII? if anyone has any personal stories or know of anyone who lived in Ireland during the time of war or maybe even served for Ireland or the British Army during WWII like grandparents and such.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
1 Answers 2020-03-29
This book gets a fair bit of criticism but it’s also commonly recommended for learning about the start of WW1.
Is there any value to reading this book still, as someone who is interested in WW1 (have already read a few other books on the topic) but not necessarily interested in reading books just for the sake of learning how people understood topics in the past.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
The old testament/torah demonizes the religions of ancient phoenicia and carthage and portrays them as blood-thirsty demon-worshippers with lots of gory human sacrifices.
Were the OT's depiction of mass-child sacrifice realistic and how prevalent was human sacrifice in Carthage ca 800 b.c?
1 Answers 2020-03-29
In The Cross-Time Engineer series by Leo Frankowski the protagonist is a modern-day Polish man time warped back to a year before the Mongol assault, and the author explains the lack of a language barrier by saying the Polish language has been essentially unchanged in that time period.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
It seems like a difficult process for people without modern equipment.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
It is often discussed how the black death contributed to the ending of serfdom in western Europe. How the remaining peasants could fight for higher wages and saw increased standards of life.
However I've wondered if the plague had similar impacts in Asia. Was the death toll as horrendous as in Europe? And if so was it as impactful as it was for western history?
1 Answers 2020-03-29
Today:
Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Sunday Digest (formerly the Day of Reflection). Nobody can read all the questions and answers that are posted here, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.
4 Answers 2020-03-29
One of the greatest misconceptions about the subreddit is precisely what the rules about sources do and do not require. A common refrain, both in other subreddits, and also to otherwise decent comments which lack sources, is that they are automatically required. This isn't quite the case though! As written, our Sources rule is as follows:
We do not require sources to be preemptively listed in an answer on /r/AskHistorians, but do expect that respondents be familiar with relevant and reliable literature on the topic, and that answers reflect current academic understanding or debates on the subject at hand.
Even though sources are not mandatory, if someone asks you to provide sources in good faith, please provide them willingly and happily. If you are not prepared to substantiate your claims when asked, please think twice before answering. Requests for sources which are not fulfilled within a reasonable span of time will generally result in the removal of the answer.
The most obvious takeaway here should be that if you don't list sources in your answer, it won't be automatically removed, but we do expect that you be generally familiar with relevant works, and more importantly, be able to provide them if asked.
The main reason for this formulation is that we realize sometimes you don't have them handy! If I decide to write an answer on my lunch break, I can quite easily provide a long answer to many questions about dueling off the top of my head with all my books back at home, and just about any accomplished historian can probably say the same for their topic, but man... Did I read that in Freeman's book? Or was it Greenberg? And then when I get home I find it was neither and I'm remembering a passage from Wyatt-Brown. Familiarity with the topic and its literature doesn't mean encyclopedic recall of every citation, and we aim to accommodate that, with the expectation that with a little time, you can provide that information's source, even if it remains on the tip of your tongue at the moment.
In addition, we word the rule in this way to impress upon everyone the fact that including sources isn't a loophole to prevent removal. An answer that is a paragraph long with a source list twice the size is going to be just as suspicious looking as one which doesn't include any sources.... If there is so much literature on this topic, how is such a brief answer 'in-depth'!? Similarly, simply name-checking a few books doesn't mean the moderators aren't going to check them, look at a review or two, and maybe even spot-check a few claims attributed to them. Sources are not a substitution for substance, and we don't want users to treat them as such.
It is important to keep in mind that the lack of sources is one factor out of many which moderators use in their holistic evaluation of an answer, so we very much encourage adding them from the start. We don't remove an answer for the sole reason that it lacks sources if it is otherwise a good one, but it absolutely can impact our impression of answer that is lacking in some places and seems just on the cusp.
But just because you don't list the sources doesn't mean you simply not have them. Many times users will ask about sources, or citation for specific info, and we expect those to be replied to "within a reasonable span of time". Just what that is varies. We'll usually give a maximum of 24 hours, as we know real life is more important, but if you have been active on reddit since then and seem to just be avoiding it, that clock may be shorter.
A few caveats for readers are also worth mentioning here. The first is that how you ask can make a big difference, both in the response from the OP, and also from other users. A curt "Sources?" often gets downvoted if in reply to an otherwise decent looking post, and while we don't like it, it happens. Likewise coming off as challenging or aggressive can put the OP on the defensive. Asking for sources in a way that engages with the original answer almost always is better, and also can create a dialogue, and what we recommend.
Additionally though, note that we expect these requests to be made in good faith, and removal for failure to comply is only generally the case, not always. It is rare, but we know that some users use the 'requesting sources' routine as a bludgeon to try and get an answer that is otherwise good removed simply because they disagree with it. That doesn't mean we always ignore such cases, nor that we'll always approve, but we do approach those cases contextually.
Our decided preference on /r/AskHistorians is for sources used to be academic in nature, and works that reflect current, academic understanding of an issue. For the most part, good answers should be drawing on good secondary literature. We love to see the use of primary sources interwoven into an answer, but they should be used critically and contextualized. Tertiary sources are not the basis for a good answer. If your sole source is one such as Wikipedia, it will almost certainly be removed, but they can make for good sources as reference works for basic facts and figures.
Although we'd rather see your sources be books from academic presses, relying on popular histories is generally allowable if done carefully. However, there are definitely potential pitfalls here. Academic historians and other writers often will publish popular history books for more general audiences, of course, and sometimes they’re fantastic, but sometimes they’re oversimplified and potentially misleading. In this case, what we like to see is a clear understanding of the topic matter that shows an ability to contextualize the source you’re using within the overall literature on the topic, and a careful treatment of its claims.
If you plan to use such works, you should nevertheless be considering factors such as the publisher (a large publishing house versus a vanity press, for instance), the author (a respected journalist versus some guy running a conspiracy laden YouTube), its reception (good reviews versus bad ones), and its age (a book from 30 years ago might not reflect current historiography) among others.
If your only source is something you just Googled five minutes ago, stop and delete your comment. I guarantee you shouldn't post that answer. More generally, online sources follow the same expectations, but require a bit more verification. As a general rule, random blog posts and websites are not going to be allowed, and we'll almost certainly remove answers which rely on them. Similar to popular works, you should be evaluating factors such as the author and where the piece is hosted if you are considering using it, as that is the same evaluation the mods will be giving it.
Audio/Visual sources follow the same process too. A documentary you found on YouTube isn't a source. Nor is Dan Carlin's Podcast. Academic lectures put on YouTube by the academic or by the university, or published audio series such as 'The Great Courses', are generally allowable, but again, the general rule of thumb is always to consider the 'who' and the 'where'.
We don't know who you are. 'Sources' such as "I learned this is class" simply won't fly. If you had a class on this, you had assigned reading and a syllabus. Please cite that instead. Likewise, if you lived through it, or if your Grandpa told you about his experiences living through it that one Thanksgiving where he got really drunk, we'll cover that more in-depth with the 'Personal Anecdotes' Roundtable, but in short, we can't allow that either.
3 Answers 2020-03-29
Just looking for maybe a few references to spark a debate as there isn’t much information available. Thanks in advance.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
1 Answers 2020-03-29
We always hear about the Jewish persecution in the holocaust, but I also know that Hitler would kill propably anyone who didn't fit into the german steryotype(tall, broad, preferably blond with coloured eyes) but does that mean that even some germans could have been killed, were they? And were there any other groups of people or ethnicities that were also targeted by the holocaust
2 Answers 2020-03-29
Let’s say I’m a blacksmith and I make and sell a sword, how would a tax collector know of the sale or the amount of money I made? How would the tax collector determine how much money I have to pay in taxes?
2 Answers 2020-03-29
I've been doing some family research and found a government document dated July 1928 referring to my great-great grandmother as an "insane person" and stating that she was discharged from a "mental hospital" on 29 May 1928. What would were common treatments back then? She was in Australia but I am interested more generally too.
Sorry for some of the language used above - these are direct quotes from the official document.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
Not sure if this is the right place as I'm more looking for books on the topic. I had a look at the rules and it didn't exclude questions or requests for books.
I'm looking for a constitutional history of the UK / Britain including key constitutional changes (e.g. Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, Reform Acts, Parliamentary Acts, etc.) and the political or social circumstances leading up to the change.
2 Answers 2020-03-29
I've heard the 'fact' that he did 'experiments' where he'd sleep(simple sleeping, not sexual) with women, everyone nude, in the same room, towards the later stages in his life. Now people online and on reddit keep saying that he slept(in both senses) with minors too. However, I've yet to find a reliable source on this 'fact'.
So, dear historians, is this true or false?
Edit: Turns out he didn't even sleep with naked adults(except his wife), let alone little girls.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
I'm thinking of an interactive timeline, combined with a world map, which tracks the borders and names of countries over time. It'd be highly educational for demonstrating what the world looked like during a certain time period, and how it's changed through the passage of time.
I had a search but haven't been able to find such a tool. It'd be a great bonus if it can add context of major events such as wars, conquest, significant exploration or migration.
1 Answers 2020-03-29
