Did we as a people know what was going on? and if we did, how much did we know?

I'm currently looking at prospective PhD places for research around the politics of the royal courts of Plantagenet England, and I've recently been feeling really down about just how saturated the academia already is. It seems just about everything has been picked apart and written about at such length that I could never come up with a single original thought or useful piece of analysis.

It might just be burnout and imposter syndrome talking after 8-odd years of continuous study and research, but I'm really feeling like there's nothing I can say about Medieval England that hasn't already been thoroughly gone over time and time again.

Is the field just too saturated for anything new? Should I look elsewhere? Or is this something that every historian feels at some point?

I've been doing a lot of reading and it sounds like gnosticism was a pretty major "competitor" to what became "mainstream" Christianity in the early days of Christianity. There are countless gnostic "gospels" and Gnostic belief systems seem to have survived well into the middle ages. The closest thing I can think of to a significant gnostic religion that exists today is Christian Science, but it lacks a historical bond to ancient gnosticism, and doesn't include many of the same core concepts.

Is it just a quirk of history that Constantine adopted what became "mainstream" Christianity and enforced its message across the Roman Empire? Would it have been plausible for him to have adopted a more gnostic form of Christianity, or had gnosticism already fallen out of favor by then among mainstream Church authorities?

I have recently started playing a WW2 flight simulator game (IL2). The game strives for a pretty high level of accuracy. Not DCS level, but pretty high. Many fans are clamoring for a pacific expansion for the game, for obvious reasons.

However, whenever asked the devs claim that the proper information about Japanese aircraft is not available. Things like information about the engines, glide slopes, clime rates etc. Now, this seams crazy to me. Surely this is all important information, that would have been recorded? So I am asking, is this true, is this information unavailable, and if so why?

So I've been going down a rabbit hole on Aincent Egypt and came up on some theories that suggests that the pyramids were built 10,000 years ago not 5000 years ago. This would mean that they pre date the Egyptian Civilization.

So what are the consensus on this? Could someone please tell what the are evidences that either support or oppose this claim.

The only solo biography I know of is the one by Ernest Edward Bryant which is rather old. I know that there might not exist a work only focusing on Antoninus Pius so I hope you can at least recommend any quality work that will expand my knowledge on the emperor.

I'll try to keep this brief as I'm not sure this is the most appropriate place to ask this question. I've been digging through my family's ancestry and came across my Great Great Aunt Josephine. Dr. Josephine Gabler performed thousands of illegal abortions in Chicago from 1905 to 1942 when her license was revoked. I've heard stories of my Grandmother visiting her Aunt and being told to hide in the closet if anyone knocks on the apartment door. I've also been told she had significant ties to the Chicago Mob. Obviously these points are near-impossible to find information on.

The most (legitimate) information I can find on her is a few excerpts from a book titled 'When Abortion Was a Crime.' This has led me to searching for court filings, arrest records, and really any other primary source that has her name anywhere near it. I haven't been successful other than finding mentions of information out there, such as home and business addresses, possibly getting arrested/detained, practice getting raided by police, a business card that tipped authorities off to the practice, and an insane story of a bribed cop shooting and killing my Aunt's Assistant's daughter. The cop (Daniel Moriarity), worried that the assistant (Ada Martin) would turn him in for accepting bribes, went to her apartment and shot her five times only to discover that he shot and killed the assistant's daughter (Jennie) rather than the assistant. Ironically, he saved the 6th bullet in the chamber for himself but the gun was either only loaded with 5 rounds or it misfired.

Again, sorry for wasting space if this is the wrong subreddit. Just to be clear, I'm not some guy trying to have his homework done for him or trying to capitalize on an increasingly volatile subject matter. I simply wish to know more about a fascinating branch of my family tree. I was a history minor forever ago in college and researching this has reminded of the incredible story-telling aspect of history that I enjoyed so much. My ultimate goal from this post is really to just get a bread crumb to follow. I've reached out to the author of 'When Abortion was a Crime' as well as Illinois Public Court Records, Sec of State, Department of Corrections, and Physicians' Database but keep hitting dead ends. I'd love to find a picture of Dr. Gabler but I think the holy grail here would be a copy of her business card. Thanks a lot, and I appreciate any help someone can provide.

Just wondering if it is all part of a single myth on the origin of the Greek gods, or were the Titans a representative for an earlier independent belief system that the more famous Greek gods replaced? I suppose the same goes for Uranus and Gaia, who had been overthrown by the Titans themselves.

Title.

as per question. Again, I would prefer an umbias stand point.

I apologize if it has been answered, I searched earlier questions and, while similar ones have been asked, none had a reply.

In the americas at least, there is a very prevalent stereotype that europeans in general - but french in particular - are dirty, stink, have B.O., etc. In the case of Brazil, where I'm from, there is a more prevalent bathing culture than anywhere else I know of, popularly understood to be inherited from the native people's culture, but, having been around french people my entire life, as well as other europeans, north americans, africans, I am loathe to see a marked difference between the french hygiene habits and the other european countries, or even a difference to that of americans (united statesians) or africans. While I can certainly remember examples of french people who feed the stereotype, if I think about it further, the fact I can remember them as french probably stems from the stereotype itself and the bias it creates, as I can think of equally egregious nostril assaulters from other cultures without associating them with their nationalities.

So I guess the short form of the question is as the title: why have the french become associated with this particular stereotype moreso than other european cultures, and is there a factual difference in habits that supports this view?

I have been reading some writings on death by Seneca the Younger. It seems to me that he was thinking a lot about the topic of death. He seems to be a man who was trying to cope with the ever-impending threat of death in a violent society.

He was sentenced to death for his alleged adultery and eventually exiled. And then finally forced to take his own life at the end. Yet despite such constant threat of death and despite his ponderings surrounding death he did not attempt to flee the Roman Empire.

Given that he was such an intelligent man and that he already faced a death sentence why didn't he attempt to flee with his family from the Roman Empire to some other country?

He knew Nero was a violent man and that Nero was already executing people on a whim. Why stay beside nero and risk his life when he could have fled elsewhere? Or was it because in other countries he would be enslaved?

As an aside can anyone recommend academic works on American and Canadian organized crime in the 20th century? Most of what's out there seems to be written by journalists and not historians, which is not to say that journalists can't do quality work, but there's also a lot of romanticization out there. And I haven't found any options in the r/askhistorians booklist, though I may have just looked in the wrong places.

Thanks!

Chinese immigrants to Southeast Asia, the US, Europe, and even Taiwan in the 19th and early 20th centuries seem to have favoured identifying as people of Tang (唐人) while Chinese people today identify as people of Han (漢人). This is evident especially in Hokkien / Hakka / Cantonese, where the Chinese language is the Tang language (唐語), Chinatown is the Street of Tang People (唐人街), and China itself is the Mountains of Tang (唐山 as in 唐山過南洋).

I can understand that they didn't want to identify as Qing given the Manchu angle, but the selection of Tang seems odd. Han was already a semi-official designation, and the last non-Manchu dynasty was the Ming, so why didn't they go with Ming? Secret societies across the Overseas Chinese community like the Tiandihui were at least formally devoted to Overthrow Qing and Restore Ming (反清復明), so it seemed there was already broad popularity for the Ming. Tang just seems both too far away for anyone to relate to, and yet not old enough that a claim for Tang to be the "beginning" of Chineseness could be made (especially considering how religiously and culturally diverse Tang was).

What are the best history channels on YouTube?

So, after WWI, Britain had a colony in Palestine (a remnant of Ottoman empire). Palestine has a large historical and relegious value to Jews (and Arabs), so there were waves of Aliyah (Jewish immigration to the Zion) to escape antisemitism.

For some reason, British colonists helped Jews to create their government and tried to resolve Arab-Jewish conflict.

How did British colonists benefit from helping creating Israel?

The park attraction "Splash Mountain" is a classic ride at the Disney Land/World theme parks, but I heard a few days ago that it is to be renamed and changed soon, which piqued my interest in the history of the attraction. The attraction is based off of an old and relatively obscure Disney movie named "Song of the South. The movie is widely considered one of the most racist films Disney has ever released, which is exactly why they are changing Splash Mountain's name to "Tiana's Bayou Adventure" in 2024 within the theme parks. However, one is to ask why Splash Mountain was even made in the first place. Ever since the Civil Rights Era, Disney has tried to erase the movie from its history entirely, which is why the movie has no VHS version and hasn't been released in theaters since 1986, which predated Splash Mountain by 3 years. With this in mind, it is puzzling to me as to why Disney has decided to make an attraction in their theme parks based off of this movie in the first place.

With this in mind. why did Disney make a theme park attraction based off of a highly controversial movie that they've been trying to remove all traces of for the past 60 years?

Was it largely a jurisdictional divide? Or were there actual border checkpoints that regulated the movement of people? Was it something else, perhaps something looser than that, like with communities close to ‘the border’ having different loyalties that didn’t necessarily align with which side they were on?

For example, 70 is soixante-dix, literally “sixty ten”

80 is quatre-vingts, literally “four twenties”

90 is quatre-vingts-dix, literally “four twenties ten”

I don’t understand how French could have lost names for these numbers since Latin.