Yesterday, I went to see the Michael Wadleigh documentary 'Woodstock'. It was a wonderful experience and I would recommend it to anyone, but there was one thing that made me curious. The famous guitarist Jorma Kaukonen wore a swastika necklace, which made me really confused. After digging up some info on the internet, I found out that it was only meant to be interpreted as the original peace symbol and that Jorma actually got some strong backlash. Seems right and fair to me, but there's one more thing. He wasn't the only person wearing it. There was a shot of a couple walking away and the guy had this leather jacket with a swastika on his back. Maybe it was also meant to be the peace symbol, but that explanation doesn't seem right. I feel like there's a difference between the symbol being shown on a necklace and a BLACK LEATHER JACKET.

Am I wrong (I hope so)?

Were they really only worn as peace symbols?

I felt like there might be a Charles Mason connection, but connecting these two things feels a bit too silly.

Sidenote: If this question seems too ignorant, I am from central Europe and 19YO so I am completely unaware of those times.

From my knowledge of renaissance armor, it seems there is an abrubt jump from the full harnesses of 1550 to savoyard armor of 1600; personally I have seen very few examples of three-quarter armor before savoyard and post full-harness. So what exactly did the armors of 1560-1599 look like?

I am reading the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece by Nigel Rodgers.

On page 259, it says that Jesus and Pontius may have spoken Greek, plus ‘Without the impact of Hellenism, Christianity might have just been an obscure heretical Jewish sect...’

1.) Is there any evidence of the Palestine colony speaking Greek as the primary language in Ancient Israel, under the reign of Rome?

2.) Does the claim that ‘without Hellenism roots, Christianity may have not existed as it does today,’ have any merit?

:Edit:

Fixing some grammar

I realize this is a very broad topic. There is no denying America rapidly rose through the ranks in its meteoric climb to superpower status. Roughly speaking, how much of this is due to the millions of slaves were indentured until 1865?

I assume this has much to do with the civil war, but if that was the case why wasn't the land returned following the conflict?

Reposting a question I had during the Middle Eastern feature.

We hear about the Templars and other knightly orders fighting in the middle east all the time, but there was a ton of down time in between the wars. What kind of things were they doing when there wasn't fighting going on? Was it all just guarding roads from bandits, or did they get involved in the politics or trade networks?

I've heard a little bit about how the Templar's got into banking, but what about the Hospitallers or Tuetonic knights? Did they just chill out in their castles?

With President Trump's reported fascination with purchasing Greenland from Denmark, I wanted to inquire the history of buying and selling sovereign territory.

Obviously the U.S. owes much of its expansion to buying land: the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, and the Gadsden Purchase all come to mind. Possibly less relevant is the purchase of Manhattan from (likely non-resident) indigenous people.

Have other countries expanded their territorial boundaries through purchases from other countries?

I get that state borders are a relatively recent concept historically in the last few centuries, but even then most borders have changed through warfare, conquest, consolidation, and dissolution. I'm sure some settlement payments have been exchanged after a conflict where land changed hands. But why are there not more outright purchases?

It feels like one sovereign country buying 100 million acres of other's sovereign land is somehow different from a private citizen buying a 1 acre plot of land, but how different is it really?

Were there legends to debunk? Did the Romans know anything about Britain before Caesar informed them about it?

We always hear about the clash between the Royal Navy and the U Boats, but what about the French Navy? They had some of the most feared capital ships in the world, and the Germans built ships like the Bismarck specifically to counter French battleships such as the Richelieu.

Did they dread waking up early for work? Did they look to the stars at night and ask the same existential questions we do today? Could a person from today approach a random citizen of that time and seamlessly strike up a conversation with no worries?

Sometimes I just wonder how alike we really are.

(I did search around for an answer for this but nothing really came up, please let me know if anyone find an response that already answered my question!)

So, I'm a bit of a nerd, and I'm currently trying to think about religion in my DnD game and where people's morality would come from in a pantheon-based religion? As people in say, Ancient Greece, worshiped many different divine authorities, were there particular moral rules that transcended whichever God you were worshiping at any given time? Would people who particularly honored one deity have a different moral compass to someone worshiping a different deity?

I'm sure that part of this question is based on a probable deep misunderstanding of ancient religion, but hopefully I can gain some more insight from this!