So, I was reading a bit through history of Sengoku era, and what stuck out to me was Tokugawa Ieyasu's willingness to prove his loyalty to Nobunaga. What especially caught my interest was how Ieyasu agreed to execute his own wife for conspiring against Nobunaga and had his son commit suicide to stay on Nobunaga's good side.
However, the reports of Lady Tsukiyama's conspiracy against Nobunaga seem to mostly be based on Lady Tokuhime's (Nobunaga's daughter and Ieyasu's daughter-in-law) testimony. These two seem to have had a notoriously strained relationship.
So, I was curious if there's any proof that Lady Tsukiyama WAS actually conspiring against Nobunaga, or is there's a consensus that it was a lie made up by Lady Tokuhime to get rid of her mother-in-law? And if so, did Ieyasu most likely know this but decided to sacrifice his wife anyway (the two never seemed to have a loving relationship)?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Most research holes have taken me to US archives which I don’t mind but question their validity because the website is a little off (though maybe developers don’t get paid much for projects like this?). It would be cool to find some online German/British archives or some diaries to read through but I’m open to be honest.
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Davies, Norman (1996). Europe: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 232. Says that semi-legendary Merovech fought along the Romans left wing
Kim, Hyun Jin (2013). The Huns, Rome, and the Birth of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 81. Says that the supposed son of Merovech, Childeric I, fought on the Hunnic right wing.
I don't want to intensify the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry any further but this just seems, highly unlikely. Does anyone know if this actually happened?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Me and my friend were watching the trailer of a movie which takes place in Britain during the Middle Ages and there were ethnic minorities in it (mainly black but my question extends to Arabs too). Think of Centurion or Prince Arthur. I argued that there was almost no way for there to be minorities back then, especially among the peasantry and especially if they're just there without context. If, perhaps, they were nobility or merchants then the likelihood would increase but they never are as far as I've seen. My friend thinks the opposite.
I understand that the Roman Empire at it's peak was from Britain to Egypt, but would African/Middle Easterners travel all the way to Britain (or any where else in Europe) for military orders? Surely the Romans would not send people THAT far away considering how long that journey would take? I'm no military connoisseur, but that seems foolish to do considering how stretched thin they already were. If I'm wrong, how common was it to find ethnic minorities all the way in Europe?
Thank you in advance.
2 Answers 2020-03-22
It is known that they built several mounds across the Midwest in states like Illinois and Indiana but they mysteriously disappeared by 1500. What happened to these people?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
I'm referring to books, documentaries, research papers, etc.
1 Answers 2020-03-22
I've always heard the phrase "Typhoid Mary" but I just learned more about her story today. I did some googling but nothing explains WHY she kept working as a cook. The doctors were all telling her she had typhoid (asymptomatic) and was literally killing people. Was she just in denial? Did she just care about the money (cooks made more than launderers, for example)? Was she homicidal? Do we have enough sources to actually know this answer?
Thank you!
1 Answers 2020-03-22
how did ww2 conquerors hold enemy territory?
what werr the occupying soldiers doing to maintain control, run the proxy government, and prevent guerilla warfare?
1 Answers 2020-03-22
In terms of:
1 Answers 2020-03-22
We know from the constitution of the Empire of Japan that the Emperor had nearly unlimited (theoretical) power; he was able to remove the Prime Minister as well as any members of the cabinet as he saw fit. I don't seem to be able to find the actual legal abilities of any of the princes, however, and from what I can tell even the Emperor's closest relatives drew their importance from positions they held that could easily have been held by commoners, not because of their 'blood'.
1 Answers 2020-03-22
1 Answers 2020-03-22
Dependent on my grades (which are now out of my control as exams have been cancelled!) I'll be going to study (read) history at the University of Cambridge at some point towards the end of this year.
I'm absolutely determined not to lose my edge, and to continue stimulating and challenging my historical thinking, so that I'm not totally out of depth when I do go to study.
As such I'm asking for ANY recommendations you have whatsoever, be they books, articles (I have JSTOR!), podcasts, source exercises and so on.
I'm particularly interested by the history of political thought, and most recently really enjoyed Foucault's Discipline & Punish (if he counts as an historian!) and would definitely like to learn a bit more about power dynamics throughout history. I also read an extract from Montaillou, which I'm about to buy, and any recommendations for similar historical works would be greatly appreciated! One final, very specific request is for decent histories of social housing.
In general though I'm VERY open. The one criteria is that it challenges the way I think & exposes me to different methods of doing history; I'm not so interested in learning the timeline and a tonne of facts about a particular event!
Thanks very much and I look forward to reading your recommendations. Hopefully, this can be useful for other redditors wanting to engage historically and with a lot of time on their hands!
1 Answers 2020-03-21
From the Plague of Justinian to the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic, infectious disease has massively shaped the course of history. Historians use primary sources, like diaries, to understand the effects disease had on the individual and society. In light of the current pandemic, I have started a pandemic diary, what should I include to make my diary as useful as possible to future historians?
•How much should I talk about my personal life vs. work (nuclear weapons policy/history— unclassified)? •Should I avoid idioms, vernacular, and slang or should I use them? •How should I address privacy (eg. full names vs pseudonyms vs initials)? •How much and what type of meta-information/analysis should I include? •What aspects of daily life should I include?
1 Answers 2020-03-21
In 12th Century France, where would a cathedral's bishop live? I'm struggling to differentiate between the uses for, and types of residents of, religious buildings, like:
As far as I understand it, people don't live in churches/cathedrals, those words specifically refer to a place of worship. So far I've been able to surmise that a bishop would likely have a cathedral, but what word describes the building(s) in which he lived? What about the other clergy members for the cathedral: where did everyone live? Did they all just live in apartments attached to the cathedral, or was the residential part of the complex called something (like a parish or abbey?).
Thank you - and sorry if these questions make no sense; I can't make sense of it enough to ask a coherent question.
1 Answers 2020-03-21
This is making the assumption Cuban medicine really is as good as it’s touted to be. If it’s not true, how did the Castro regime make Cuban doctors appear to be so competent?
1 Answers 2020-03-21
1 Answers 2020-03-21
I have had the impression that the vikings and the finns didn't have much relations. I have heard that there is Norvegian or Icelandic saga telling of some viking raid to Finland which didn't go well. Is this true?
1 Answers 2020-03-21
Being cooped up has its advantages - I’ve listened to every single episode of ‘Byzantium and Friends’ by Anthony Kaidelis this week. One comment from an interviewee stuck out to me though. She said she ‘wasn’t a vulgar marxist.’ This seemed like an inside historian baseball joke. Where can I find resources about Marxist historiography, pro and anti, during the last century? And can someone with a professional historical background explain why ‘vulgar marxism’ might be a joke?
1 Answers 2020-03-21
Our 2020 social media feeds are filled with folks discussing the economic and political impact of the COVID-19 closures, and I've noticed many more people talking about taxing the rich, demanding public-run healthcare and and end to for-profit health insurance companies, and pointing to the erosion of public health investment as reasons they are moving Leftward in their political allegiance.
Has anyone researched the effects of the 1918 flu pandemic on the rise of leftist political parties in the 1920s? Is there any way to identify the epidemic-related influence on people's personal beliefs about economics and politics?
1 Answers 2020-03-21
3 Answers 2020-03-21
We could just get to introducing ourselves, but the spirit and intent of Ask Historians is to provide context … So, context incoming.
"Placing Women in History: Definitions And Challenges” by Gerda Lerner arrived on the scene in 1975. Recognized as one of the foundational texts of a then nascent branch of history known as “Women’s History”, she laid out how a consequence of traditional approaches to the historical record meant women often went unremarked on. Not that our words, labor, ideas, and work were unremarkable but that the men writing about history saw our presence as background noise to the “real” history their fellow men were making.
Lerner wasn’t the first to recognize it but articulated that when we envision the past as a place dominated by men, it’s that much harder to envision an equitable future. Since then, in ways big and small, historians of all genders have worked to push, prod, and encourage the field to approach the historical record in a more thoughtful, and more complete, way. With varying levels of success, they have helped their fellow historians move from framing women as someone’s wife, sister, mother, or daughter to attending to their full humanity, agency, and experiences.
The field of women's history reminds us that in order to tell the full story of the past, we need to consider the actions of all people. And the work truly means all - Women. Men. Nonbinary people. Girls. Trans women and men. Black, Indigenous, multiracial women. Women of color. White women. Women with developmental disabilities, women with physical disabilities. Women sex workers and women rulers. Everyone in between. All.
Telling more complex, more accurate histories, though, is only part of the work. Another essential part is setting the record straight about who does the telling. Many women historians write about topics generally thought of as “about women” such as fashion, pregnancy, or feminism. Many women historians write about history topics generally thought of as “about men”, including wars and armies. Women historians write about whoever we want and whatever we want -- in short, we write history.
Today, groups like Women Also Know History (#womenalsoknowhistory) encourage the public and media to use women experts when talking, writing, or learning about history (and avoiding the dreaded manel.) From their website, “Women Also Know History is inspired by and indebted to Women Also Know Stuff, an initiative to bring attention to the work of women Political Scientists.”
And in the spirit of the WAKH project, we wanted to formally introduce ourselves as women moderators, historians, and members of the AH community.
Making the decision to identify oneself on Reddit as a woman can, on its face, seem like an easy decision. However, it’s worth stating explicitly that it is a complex decision to identify as a not dude on here. Each of us, including some women members of the mod team who made the perfectly reasonable decision to not be part of this post, have been misgendered. We routinely see or experience gender-based insults. We, and the non-women mods, have had to deal respectfully with users who suspect there’s a woman at the other end and use that as an argument for why they were right, and we’re wrong. Users have even used our fields of study as insults, as if the history of things mostly associated with women is less worthy than the history of things mostly associated with men. Basically, it sometimes sucks when people on the internet know you’re a woman.
However, it’s sometimes not that bad. Like when we get to metaphorically stand up to say, “Hi, I’m a woman,” and know there’s some woman or girl out there reading our words, who needs to know that history is for her, too. She’s seen male-gendered names on the cover of nearly every book in the “History” section of her bookstore or on her textbooks and she knows how many of them are biographies of men. When we write as women historians, we model she can read history, she can write history, and she will be memorialized in history.
Not only are we modeling women as historians through writing on the sub, in many ways we also model women as historiographers through our volunteer work as AH mods. In the most basic sense, this manifests itself in our fulfilling the basic moderation requirements of the sub along with the other non-women mods; however, as female moderators we are also able to - and often take the opportunity to - not just keep an eye on the content that already exists, but try to cultivate the content that we want to exist. We can highlight questions that celebrate under-explored and under-represented topics by flairing them with Great Question flairs; we can recruit brilliant women podcast and AMA guests to share their expertise; we can share in Meta threads and Methods posts the vision that we have for what this sub can be: open and welcoming to all, whether in or out of Reddit’s target demographic, and giving voices to a wide variety of historical experiences and perspectives.
We are women who love history.
In the comments below, five women members of the all-volunteer moderation team have shared our thinking about posts we’re proudest of, the ones we best liked writing, posts we wished we could edit but can’t cause that door has closed, or general observations on the sub. Feel free to say hello or share your favorite post!
Women of the AH Moderation Team:
10 Answers 2020-03-21