Welcome to a special AskHistorians TIL--Ecumenical International Winter/Summer Solstice-Holiday Edition!
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.
5 Answers 2019-12-24
2 Answers 2019-12-24
Since it's Hanukkah and Christmas I've been thinking about the word 'holiday,' and how it's taken on a drastically different meaning in modern times. My instincts tell me that perhaps a religious pilgrimage became more of a getaway. Or perhaps this is a recent development where holidays were just days people didn't have to work and could travel for leisure. How did days of religious significance transform into days of leisure?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
Specifically, did they maintain their claim even after Nicaea took Constantinople and became widely recognized as the Byzantine Empire?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
Is there any reason to believe Lucius Cornelius Balbus of Gades was a "Jewish banker" as claimed by wikivisually.com?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
1 Answers 2019-12-24
Was it the geography of Scotland which prevented urban settlement, hence the triumph of clans?
Why was Scotland different to England in this regard?
Was tribalism still prevalent in other European countries during the middle ages?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
http://people.umass.edu/ogilvie/291H/1o_assignment.pdf
I'm going to be taking some history courses in the Winter term (Im not a history major) and in my research of past courses, I notice there will be essays that analyze primary sources or review the work of other historians (historiography).
So I found some sample primary source analysis assignments, but how the hell do you write a primary source analysis essay?
If you click the link, it wants me to answer all of those questions. But like how do you actually form a thesis that ties all of those elements together. And how would you organize the paragraphs. I'm having trouble understanding what it is that I am going to argue in this type of essay, since they don't want it to be a narrative type of essay, which is all we ever did in high school.
Can people who took history classes please help me with how to make a thesis out of this type of assignment?
*Please note I am not asking for an answer for the assignment. It's not my assignment even. But rather, I want to know how to go about doing an essay of this nature. Thanks everyone! (And sorry mods: I accidentally deleted my previous post!)
3 Answers 2019-12-24
Christmas = December 25th (Western calendar)
Hanukkah = Kislev 25th (Hebrew calendar)
Pagan Winter Solstice festivals = Around the 25th
Is this just a coincidence? Is there much historical evidence regarding the reason Kislev 25th was chosen for Hanukkah's date? Could this possibly have been an intentional choice much like the intentional choice many historians believe was made in placing Christmas on Dec. 25th, in relation to concurrent pagan celebrations?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
I'm referring to any time period in which "magic" was used effectively in an army or military conquest.
2 Answers 2019-12-24
This lead cross has been dated to be roughly 500 years old and analysis of the lead seems to show that it originally came from France.
Does a discovery like this on a Canadian island have any true historic meaning?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
Singapore was important to the British:
The Singapore strategy was the cornerstone of British Imperial defence policy in the Far East during the 1920s and 1930s.
But when the Imperial Japanese Army attacked it in February 1942 (with a force less than half as numerous as the defenders), the British seemed to mess up in almost every conceivable way.
They erroneously thought the Japanese wouldn't be able to get through the jungle. (What is this, the Ardennes in 1940)?
They only put serious defenses on the northeast side of the island, while the Japanese actually attacked from the northwest. British command persisted in this false expectation of an NE attack throughout the Japanese bombardment of the northwest and even after the landings began.
They quickly yielded air superiority, being equipped with obsolete Buffalo fighters.
Their huge coastal guns had mostly armor-piercing rounds--good against ships, bad against personnel.
There were other failures of tactics, command, and communication as well. Having taken the city, the IJA took 80,000 troops as prisoners, massacred ethnic Chinese, and "were highly successful in recruiting captured Indian soldiers" to foment revolution in colonial India.
Some choices are understandable given resource constraints, but that just raises the question of why resources were so scarce in such a strategically important position. In fact, the sorry state of Singapore's defenses was already known to the British at least a year prior to the attack:
The Japanese had broken the British Army's codes and in January 1941, the Second Department (the intelligence-gathering arm) of the Imperial Army had interpreted and read a message from Singapore to London complaining in much detail about the weak state of "Fortress Singapore", a message that was so frank in its admission of weakness that the Japanese at first suspected it was a British plant, believing that no officer would be so open in admitting weaknesses to his superiors, and only believed it was genuine after cross-checking the message with the Automedon papers.
In short, the British defense of Singapore was poorly equipped, poorly motivated, poorly prepared, and all-around unready to defend the "cornerstone" of the British Far East. No wonder Churchill was so ashamed of the loss!
So what happened? How did the British leadership let Singapore's defenses lapse so badly?
P.S. I searched this sub and found adjacent questions (here and here with answers by /u/danwincen and /u/slumberjackbear), but they seem to be describing British failures after the battle began--I'm hoping to learn how things got so bad that Singapore was even a realistic target in the first place.
2 Answers 2019-12-24
1 Answers 2019-12-24
The stars can give you latitude. But it wasn't until Harrison that a reliable method to determine longitude was found. How did such ancient navigators cross open water so well without these?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
I read a bit of the articles and listened to a few of the podcast and thought it was very well done. It wasn’t until recently, however, that I read that 1619 isn’t completely historically accurate. The article saying this was from a right leaning news source and the main historian it quoted seemed to be right leaning as well (I couldn’t find the article when I went beach and looked for it for this post). So my question is, is there any truth to the claim that 1619 is historically ill informed or wrong?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
When did horses getting horseshoes become a thing? Why?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
Perusing the wikipedia articles and various websites, I found that opinions on the resurrection of Jesus and its historicity are rather lopsided in favor of it being a historical event. The wikipedia articles cite only Bart Ehrman for skeptical sources, and draw upon further sources that appear to counter his points. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_and_origin_of_the_resurrection_of_Jesus / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_tomb) Most articles I found outside of that seem to concur (https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/historical-jesus/the-historicity-of-the-empty-tomb-of-jesus/) I also noticed that both drew upon some controversial sources, like Gary Habermas' minimal facts argument. I know that there might be a bias in opinion, since Christians are more likely to study the new testament, but I feel like I should keep an open mind to this. From this I feel I have to ask, is the conversation really so simple? Are there scholars other than Ehrman who are regarded on the same level as those such as N.T. Wright?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
1 Answers 2019-12-24
Was the first year adjusted maybe by Hebrew calendar or by oral transmission? Has there been any event of great historical importance in 1AD?
1 Answers 2019-12-24
4 Answers 2019-12-24
Hi, I'm from Argentina and saw the topic of "Peron being a pedophile" being brought up in anti-peronist circles, I wanted to know if it holds any water. Thanks in advance!
1 Answers 2019-12-24
All I know is Hitler one day decided that Jews were to blame for all their problems. So he started putting them in concentration camps and torturing them. He also started murdering them and invading other countries.
I dont know, for example, the origins of the poem "First they came for ...". Can someone give me more information and background on this ?
1 Answers 2019-12-23
How did naval exercises work before computers and missiles? I know today they can just do all the steps to fire a missile without firing it and register "hits" with radar and computers, but how did they do it in the 1890s or 1930s?
I've done some reading on the Fleet Problems the US Navy did in the 1920s and 30s, but they never really specify how they worked, only which side won and what was learned from them. I want to know how they actually worked.
1 Answers 2019-12-23
More over, what was the general mood between the Byzantine scholars and the italian/western european scholars? Were they shocked by how little the Italians knew? Did they learn anything from the west?
1 Answers 2019-12-23