This source mentions a diplomatic mission to China arriving in 1081, and it made me wonder how they would have communicated. I suppose I'm also interested in the same question about other pre-modern societies that had little contact with each other yet still communicated in some way.
1 Answers 2020-03-23
The Illuminati, as far as I understand, were shut down in the late eighteenth century. However, as long as I can recall, they have always been the target of accusations of modern-day conspiracies. How did the historical Illuminati evolve into the Illuminati of modern folklore?
Thanks for your time and help.
EDIT: thanks to everyone who responded for helping us readers become more... illuminated. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
2 Answers 2020-03-23
The Goths controlled Western Europe at the time, so it would be easier to assume that the religion of the populous would adapt and assimilate to the religion of their rulers and those who subjugated them.
1 Answers 2020-03-23
In every WWII documentary I have seen will often have first hands accounts from the allies. But I am curious to hear first hand accounts from a living person who was on the German side.
1 Answers 2020-03-22
I have been spending a lot of time lately reading the Iceland Sagas and have been fascinated with their history. As I am a cartographer by trade my first thought when reading the Vinland Sagas is trying to find on a map approximately where these places like Kjalarnes, Furdustrandir, Staumsfjord, and Straumsey would be. In my own research I have read about the site discovered in L'anse Aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland and figured that must be one of the sites, but I am not sure which it could be, or where all the other places would be. This has been quite hard to research though because it seems that any potential source about the Norse explorations of America quickly devolves into pseudo-history by bringing up fraudulent things like the Olaf III coin found in Maine or the notoriously fake Kensington runestone. I was hoping to be pointed towards a reliable source that breaks down the Norse explorations as described in the Sagas and looks realistically at where they potentially could have traveled. I appreciate any help.
1 Answers 2020-03-22
I'm interesting in reading how the USSR's government functioned. Like how decisions were made, how politicians were elected, how public feedback was gathered (if at all). Any time period before Gorbachev would be great!
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Often, I'm content to read reviews and look up the author to gauge whether something like this would be worth reading. But when it comes to Africa, I'm a little nervous I might end up with something either unconsciously racist or overtly racist. Especially when it's an English man doing the writing. Not exactly a wonderful history of white people writing about African people.
1 Answers 2020-03-22
After the Western Roman Empire fell and the Umayyad Caliphate spread into Algeria, who was in charge in the land comprising the former Roman province of Numidia?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Listening to The Beatles' "Tax Man" had me doing research on British tax history, and I saw that the rate peaked at 99.25% during WWII. However, nearly years later, the rate was 95%.
Why were the British rates so high? What was going on? Were there civic projects happening during post WWII that required those funds?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
To clarify I'm not talking about poor people living in "hotels" i.e. rooming houses, or people staying in hotels for longer than they do today because the pace of travel was slower without airlines etc. I can't think of a great example off the top of my head but I feel like this is a thing though, people genuinely *living* in a hotel, as in they have no other place of residence somewhere else they're going to be returning to.
Was this actually somewhat common, and is there a reason it was more of a thing in the past than it is today?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
2 Answers 2020-03-22
Otto von Bismarck is remembered as a realpolitik genius who made a practical / tactical decision to wage 3 separate wars over the course of a decade to unify Germany (Danish War, Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War). However, how much of this view of him is a result of our desire to fit things into neat narratives. Were these wars simply fought out of necessity and simply had the effect of unifying Germany absent, in spite of, or regardless of, any grand strategy of fighting them for that explicit purpose?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
With a huge economy, great crop growing and a massive population India should have made a pronounced impact towards swaying the war to the favour of the allies. However, India's involvement is rarely talked about. So how did Britain use India to it's advantage?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Let's say in the late republic era, or thereabouts. Specifically for a pleb, freedman, or maybe a poorer equite if that would be likely.
I know the poor lived in large apartment buildings, that there were roughly a million people in the city, and I have heard that there was a sort of vacuum effect of people constantly dieing and pulling in new bodies from the surrounding population to replace them. Grain supply was irregular at times... You would think there would be a disproportionate amount of women after the Marian reforms, but I've heard there was a perception that there were too few women at one point... There was no organized police force, no organized fire brigade (until Crassus extorts your property first).
So, how dangerous was day-to-day life? How comfortable was it? What did the landscape look like? What were the demographics of the city? What would you do for work or entertainment on a typical basis? How much wealth might you have, and when there was a land grant or colony would it be feasible to raise enough money to move out? Did the hallways reak of garum and celtic cooking?
Do we even know, or was everything recorded totally centered around the elite?
2 Answers 2020-03-22
Throughout America's history there has been endless debate over what the framers of the constitution intended and how they would apply it to issues that didn't exist when it was originally written. And of course we can never know those answers because the framers are long gone. But in the first years of the US this was not the case. Did the courts ever take advantage of this resource? And did the framers ever take advantage of their status to speak out and try to influence constitutional opinion? Like for example, could Madison have de facto "overruled" a Supreme Court decision if he wanted by essentially saying, "Your interpretation is wrong and I would know because I wrote the damn thing!"
1 Answers 2020-03-22
I'm reading Anna Burns' "Milkman", set during the Troubles in the 70s, and came across this line: "Either way sooner or later, courtesy of the renouncers, your corpse would be the latest to to be found up an entry with with the obligatory tenner in its hand and the bullets in its head." Just curious what this is referring to. (It's a great novel by the way.)
1 Answers 2020-03-22
2 Answers 2020-03-22
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 2020-03-22
On /r/AskHistorians, we get hundreds of questions every week, ranging from Polynesians navigation and the daily life of Egyptian women, to what Hitler liked for breakfast. Many of those questions are thought out and insightful inquiries, but we also know that we receive our fair share of questions which fall flat or induce a bit of head-scratching as to how the premise was reached. But while it can frustrate at times, it also is one of the greatest strengths behind /r/AskHistorians.
One of the core principles that we follow here for any question which is asked in good faith is best summed up by Carl Sagan when he said:
There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.
For this reason, we try to moderate questions with as light a touch as possible. Most removals are done solely on technical grounds and without regards to the premise, and most questions removed for their content are a reflection of our judgement that the question was not asked in good faith. Yes, that does mean that questions we approved can sometimes be naive; it means they can be ill-phrased; and certainly some didn't receive any self-criticism, but it is nevertheless someone trying to learn, and removing a question because of its premise does little to help them understand where they went wrong.
Some questions certainly are wrong in their assumptions, but short of them violating the rules about soapboxing, we will usually approve. If a question has a wrong premise, again, removal isn't going to help the user, so there are a few possible approaches we encourage:
Closely intertwined with this is the notion of 'scope' for a question. As already made clear with the discussion on the 'Example-Seeking Rule', we prefer questions to be narrow and focused, but we also do our best to accommodate the lack of pre-knowledge that many people have in asking questions. This means that especially the further away from 'standard curriculum' history, the more understanding we are of the broadness of a question. So while a 20th century military history question we'd prefer to see limited to, say, World War II, a question about indigenous people of what is now the United States we'd allow to be asked as "Native Americans before Columbus", since while asking about specific nations would be preferable, we understand that many people simply won't know enough to ask something that narrow.
This also, of course, is a reflection not just of pre-knowledge that users often have in forming their questions, but the false-expectations people have about what is available, source wise, the further back we go. Many people assume we have much more quantitative information about the pre-modern world than we really do, which means that some leeway is necessary simply to give such questions a chance at all. For example, some arcane piece of knowledge from Medieval Europe might be entirely based on an 11th c. document from a monastery in Lombardy. But if a user knew that, they likely wouldn't be asking the question, so asking about the phenomenon "in the Middle Ages" is allowable, while we might not allow the same question is asked about "the Modern era".
In the end, it is important to remember that as questions come from laypeople, the terminology that they use is going to reflect a lay-understanding, and we do our best to accommodate that.
People have strong opinions about questions asked his way, and certainly a vocal minority think they are "dumb", but the simplest answer is that about as many people love them, and most people don't care. We have no plans to ban them. If you aren't a fan, feel free to ignore them. Nine times out of ten, the question makes perfect sense without the affectation and you obviously don't need to answer it in the 2nd person, so they can be treated normally. Please don't report them simply because you think they are "dumb". It is just some curious soul trying to learn more about the world.
That said, we do have an exception to this which is informally known as the "I am a rapist" rule. Most questions in this format are lighthearted, but there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to be using this format to ask from the perspective of someone doing bad things. Questions which use this format to ask about sexual violence, genocide, enslavement, and other, similarly offensive topics will be immediately removed in the interests of good taste and respect for basic human decency.
In the end, all of this comes down to basic respect. People come to /r/AskHistorians because they want to learn, not because they want to be chided for never having learned. Even the most oddly-premised question will in most cases be one asked in good faith, from someone who simply doesn't know enough to ask the question you wish they did, and we prefer to see them treated like a member of the lucky 10,000 than ignored or ill-treated for it.
2 Answers 2020-03-22
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Before exploratory drilling and things of that nature, how did countries, Saudi Arabia, for example, realize that they had oil deposits? Would someone going out with a shovel have been able to dig deep enough to find oil? Or, to ask the question another way, would it have ever been possible to accidentally strike oil while, say, farming?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Was there a public fascination with space and space travel prior to the Space Race?
1 Answers 2020-03-22