I can’t remember where I heard it, but I’ve heard that there were some cases of slavery continuing. Not in the form of share croppers or Jim Crow. But slave owners continuing to enslave people in the south. Keeping the news of the wars end from them or hiding their operation from the government. Or just strong arming these people into continued servitude. If so, did this manage to continue into the 20th century?

I’m reading lots of history books about pirates and such and they all mention how the water supplies turned rank in the barrels and it was safer to drink beer or rum instead. I’m sorry but as the biggest pussy on earth I can’t have a beer or alcohol without having a tall glass of ice water next to it. I just can’t believe people survived on just beer or rum. I know it’s not like they are drinking bud light or Bacardi but still I couldn’t imagine survival on just whiteclaws

I'm aware that the Black Hand was a secret military group started by Serbian officers. That brings into question:

1. Did the Serbian government support this group?
2. If not, why didn't Serbia allow Austro-Hungary to conduct an investigation on Serbian soil?
3. I suppose this may be speculation, but if Serbia had allowed the investigation, would WWI have been avoided, or at least would Austro-Hungary not have declared war or mobilized their troops?

Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

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Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!

We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: Casualties! We're raising the red cross for this week's trivia. This week is dedicated to those who were harmed or killed during an event - those known as casualties. This is the week to share details about shocking statistics or how those statistics are gathered. Perhaps you know interesting trivia on how aid is rendered to those harmed during an event or inventions that came out to better save lives. Let this week be the place to render aid to our understanding of the topic.

It is a common belief among armchair historians and generals that the Nazi failure in Russia was partially due to the late start of the Russian offensive, which did not start until June 22 1941. Growing up, I was always taught that the German mop up of the failed Italian invasion of Greece was the reason for the delay. However, Shirer in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (1960) perhaps the most famous book on WW2 written by a contemporary author squarely puts the delay on Hitler's reaction to the coup in Yugoslavia, stating that Hitler delayed Barbarosa 4 weeks to give his troops time to mop up Yugoslavia before redeploying troops.

If the common belief for the delay was Yugoslavia in the 1960s, how, when, and why did we shift the delay to Greek resistance today?

Are you just allowed to not have a Vice President - I mean, it's an important political position, right? Wouldn't his party make him appoint someone? What if Truman himself had died?

History master student from Fu-jen Catholic University (Taiwan) here, studying the ideas of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821, conservative Catholic thinker).

Cultivated fields, such as intellectual history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, are already dotted with classical researches. Even with Hermione's time machine one can hardly finish reading even the most important ones among them.

In my own experience, I spend quite some time on the metadata of books and articles I find, assessing their academic quality, factuality of first hand sources, translation quality, pertinence (whether it interests me and whether it relates to my knowledge pool), and readability (grammar not unnecessarily difficult, acceptable volume, good citation format...). The side effect, however, is that I spend too much time on these metadata and not enough time on reading (or: too much energy/time spent on context and no time for text).

I still believe that very few historical fields are "too crowded," as new perspectives and new questions come with future generations. But how do experienced historians prevent themselves from drowning in too many previous researches?

And, in the worst case, if I make an honest mistake (in my master thesis at very least) by claiming an independent discovery without knowing about a previous work which said the same thing, am I plagiarizing? Even if not, isn't it rather fruitless to "reinvent the wheel?"

I was recently doing some reading on the story of exodus as well as the Bronze Age collapse. It struck me that they are both attributed to the same century and I was wondering if it is at all possible they the Bronze Age collapse influenced the stories of exodus. The pharaoh of exodus is often considered to have been Ramses the great, who died in 1213 bc, whilst the Bronze Age collapse is commonly said to have been in 1170 bc. This seems pretty close to each other as well as the 10 plagues of Egypt being nods to pestilence, famine and war. 3 important factors that are said to have led to the Bronze Age collapse

Shiro ishi came up with the idea of using clay or ceramic bombs dropped from balloons down to civilians targets and releasing fleas on rats containing super virulent strains of pathogens like bubonic plague and the likes.

Where would the Japanese get the fleas that had those pathogens in the first place?

Absolutely adore the byzantine empire's history and would love to read a well researched book about it.
Anyone know of any?

Hello Historians!

My question is one I hope is simple but my googlefu does not seem up to the task. How were rations set per person in the United States during World War 2? What was the typical ration allotment per person and how did it work? How did restaurants operate - or did they have to shut down? Was it nutritionally complete or was stuff missing and that's why they encouraged victory gardens? Or did those gardens count against your allotment (i.e. those with gardens got less then those without)?

Thank you in advance!

Dawn seems like a more natural starting point, even today many people refer to the next morning as "tomorrow" even if it's past midnight.

So, why isn't dawn considered the start of the day ? And when did midnight take that place ? Is it a modern development originating with clocks or does it have ancient origins ?

I remember as a kid in the 90s and early 00s occasionally running into documentaries, TV shows, the like where women in various "tribal"/"traditional" (whatever that meant to the documentary-makers at the time) would be filmed topless and shown uncensored. Since American media was (and to a lesser degree still is) famously prudish, these same production companies and their distribution channels (PBS affiliate and other local TV stations) wouldn't ever think to show white women's breasts without censoring them, even in an educational context - and not all those TV shows were educational in the strict PBS documentary-type sense anyway. Think more "travel show". I also recall sitcoms and stuff either filmed in or featuring characters that grew up in the 80s or earlier jokingly referring to National Geographic as a "skin mag" akin to certain "lad mags".

I remember thinking at the time that it was sort of an "old-timey" or outdated thing as modern documentaries would either censor no one at all or everyone equally, but I still recall running into it on rare occasions into the late 00s (even, oddly enough, on a national morning news show once). I wouldn't have been able to articulate it as a kid or a teen but it seemed pretty exploitative and hypocritical.

So when did this phenomenon start? Why did white breasts need to be censored but no others? Was it a particular American or Anglophone-world thing, a wider "Western world" thing, or something else? And when it start going away, if it ever did?

Thanks!

1. Were temper tantrums ever documented by other employees or bosses?
2. Did they need (or get) "snack breaks"?
3. For the kids as young as 4 or 5, were they toilet trained? Did they get bathroom breaks?
4. Are there documented instances of crying for their moms, etc?

I just imagine that the temperament of children is timeless in a way. Children are just children even if they're denied the luxuries of a modern childhood. Did these kids' employers recognize their needs?

I’m looking into the concept of failed states and think Yugoslavia may be a good place to start. I’m just not sure what the best starting place here would be. TIA!!

I objectively realize that goods and boats went up rivers, but were there specialized types to head against the current or was it just a matter of muscle, be it human or otherwise?

Inspired by a recent answer in which it was pointed out that there were approximately 1,000 states in Greece at the time the "300" documentary was set. This seems an absurd number for such a small territory, and logically the threshold for being considered a (semi-) independent state must have been quite low. So where was the line? What did you have to do to be considered a distinct political entity back when men were men and abs were oiled?