I eat a lot of curry here in Taiwan.
Recently, I stumbled upon an Indian restaurant here with a map of the curry trade, spreading out from India through today's Malaysia and into Japan and other places through the Indian ocean.
It made me think, how did a food which I presume started in India, reach east Asia?
1 Answers 2019-06-08
In the early to mid 15th century, I know that fancy armour became popular among the wealthy. How rich could an armourer in a place such as Vienna or Venice expect to be? And would they be considered artisans?
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Not sure why it was done. Maybe they wanted to remove that German part because they wanted to make it clear that they are different from Germans? Why was that name created in the first place?
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Have there ever been any alternative tools (theoretical or put into practice) not purely economic?
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Whenever I see a Vietnam vet, I assume that they did not choose to enlist but rather were drafted. Was there a surge in voluntary enlistment for the Vietnam was like there was after 9/11?
1 Answers 2019-06-08
Today:
AskHistorians is filled with questions seeking an answer. Saturday Spotlight is for answers seeking a question! It’s a place to post your original and in-depth investigation of a focused historical topic.
Posts here will be held to the same high standard as regular answers, and should mention sources or recommended reading. If you’d like to share shorter findings or discuss work in progress, Thursday Reading & Research or Friday Free-for-All are great places to do that.
So if you’re tired of waiting for someone to ask about how imperialism led to “Surfin’ Safari;” if you’ve given up hope of getting to share your complete history of the Bichon Frise in art and drama; this is your chance to shine!
1 Answers 2019-06-08
I've often heard of the bronze age collapse as the largest societal regression in human history but how far were the effects felt? What was the relative level of development of other societies in the world outside the eastern mediterranean? Did they have the complex trading systems that we associate with that era? Did they have a similar regression? For example did peoples living in India, China, Germany or the UK notice anything happened?
1 Answers 2019-06-08
This was something I was curious about because a lot of people say it without doing any research as if it were common knowledge, so I decided to do some research. What I ended up finding was mostly blog posts, articles without any good sources, and a lot of info on arranged marriages.
What I read was a pretty mixed bag. Some say everyone did get married at a very young age, some said it was only royalty, nowhere did it say young marriage never happened. So, does anyone have a definitive answer to the question?
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I was watching gladiator with my brother during the coliseum scene of 2nd punic war (Hannibal vs Scipio). The man announcing just projected his voice across the whole coliseum. It didn't seem accurrate to me but what do I know?
edit: I didn't think there'd be this much interest. Its funny how the posts you forget about are the ones that blow up.
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I just finished watching the series yesterday and I quite liked it, at the end of the episode, after the credits, they show a few changes they had to make in order to better portray the story as a film (or series in this case).
Most articles seem to focus on things such as how the soldiers held rifles or referred to each other. While it is true that the show does clearly paint the Soviets as a little bit too evil at times, im more interested in other details such as: Did the radiation really reach 48 nuclear bombs per day? Were the tapes at the final scene really the reason that the Soviets listened at all? Were the soldiers really instructed to shoot all who did not wish to evacuate?
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Welcome to the East Asia flair panel AMA! A team of flaired users specializing in topics in or related to East Asia will be on hand to answer your questions about the region, its people and its history.
East Asia, commonly defined as encompassing China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, usually Manchuria and sometimes Mongolia and Tibet, has never been a single homogeneous entity. Across up to 12 million square kilometers it would be impossible not to find marked differences in landscape, language and lifestyle, which even today can often be overlooked from a Western point of view. Arguably the only serious attempt at Pan-Asianism ended in flames in the 1930s and 40s, and even in recent years there has been no dearth of causes for enmity between powers and between peoples.
Yet alongside such divisions, there have also been connections, both within the broader region and further afield across the globe. For quite a while, East Asia was largely united by a common standard of writing, and at many times people have been able to travel quite freely between its various landmasses, be they merchants, pirates, political exiles or simply travelers and tourists. Across the steppe and the seas, people, goods, ideas and knowledge from East Asia have flowed out to the wider world, and those from the wider world have flowed back into East Asia.
In the many millennia of East Asian History huge changes have occurred in many areas. Looking just at the last 1000 years, we see effects from the Mongol conquests in the 13th century, to the Columbian exchange in the 16th, to the appearance of Western imperialism in the 19th, and of course, a whole host of endogenous developments, be they religious, cultural, political or socioeconomic. There have been continuities too, of course, and sometimes quite resilient ones. For one, the physical geography has for the most part been pretty constant, outside of course the regular course changes of the lower Yellow River.
With this panel we hope to shed a little more light, to the best of our abilities, on one of the most prominent and yet often least popularly understood regions of the world. We're all ears for questions, and hopefully, you should be all ears for answers!
Our Panelists today are:
/u/bigbluepanda has the least worst knowledge of the evolution of the military within pre-modern Japan, of which the majority of questions fall into the Sengoku period.
/u/buy_a_pork_bun Specializes primarily in the Vietnam War and the Chinese Civil War. That said he is more than happy to discuss the nature of Tokugawa judicature, the transition of power towards and away from Meiji, the CCP, Japanese colonialism, and Chinese ethnography from Tang, Song, and Qing. Somewhere in the vaults is a fuzzy memory of the utilization of military equipment in the Pacific theater and in the Korean War and probably a few tidbits about the vehicle of Japanese legitimacy from Fujiwara onwards.
/u/Cenodoxus was originally training as a medievalist, but started researching North Korea because she understood nothing about the country from what she read in the papers. After several years of intense study, now she understands even less. Her previous AMAs on North Korea and Korean history for /r/AskHistorians can be found here and here.
/u/churakaagii is about as niche as you can get for the English language, especially as an amateur in the history game: She got into history through her love of Okinawa, and trying to figure out how and why her heritage language and culture is in a zombie state. On /r/AskHistorians, this has largely turned into answering questions about Japan from very specific times that were relevant to Okinawa, e.g. the tide of Western colonialism in East Asia during the mid-to-late 19th century, or the pre-WW2 Imperial period.
/u/cthulhushrugged specializes in the Early & Mid-Imperial Eras of China, in particular, the political, military, economic, and ethnic histories of the Qin, Han, Tang, and Song Dynasties (and the periods of civil war bracketing each). He's also thrilled to wax poetic about the Mongols and Genghis Khan (and more broadly the border states and peoples surrounding China), why invading Korea and Vietnam overland are horrible ideas, and the Pacific Theater of the 2nd World War.
/u/_dk is an avid reader of East Asian history with an interest in the Three Kingdoms period of China and the maritime situation in East Asia during the 16th century, a time of pirates and the Portuguese.
/u/EnclavedMicrostate specialises in Qing Dynasty China, primarily from 1796 to 1912, with a particular emphasis on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851-64) and its broader context. He'll also be happy to discuss the Opium Wars, 19th century Sino-Western relations more broadly, and questions more generally about the later Qing Dynasty and its own domestic and imperial policy.
/u/JimeDorje is the local historian specializing in all things Tibet and Tibet-related, focusing on indigenous Tibetan historiography, the intersection between Sangha and State-formation, and the development of Tibet, Bhutan, and other Himalayan states from the Imperial period, to the development of Buddhist theocracies, and their absorption into 20th Century Statehood. He's happy to discuss all things historically Tibetan, Buddhist, and Himalayan.
/u/keyilan is an historical linguist specialising in East and Southeast Asia. In addition to the historical development of the languages of Asia, he is also interested in historical language planning and policies, particularly in Taiwan and Korea under Japanese occupation, and also minority language rights. Beyond linguistics, areas of interest include Hakka studies, China in the 19th century, and Chinese diaspora communities around the world, with an emphasis on the Chinese Exclusion Acts and anti-Chinese sentiment.
/u/KippyPowers specializes in the Philippines, with interests spanning precolonial, colonial, and modern, with a particular interest in social history and language and cultural politics. Secondary interests include modern China and Taiwan (particularly late Qing Dynasty to now, and yes, he and u/EnclavedMicrostate do love to have fun dialogues on this period together) and modern Viet Nam (in particular the 20th century). In both cases, again, he has a great interest in social and cultural history and is always very excited to discuss them.
/u/lordtiandao works on the institutional, military, and fiscal history of the Song-Yuan-Ming period, focusing on the Mongol conquest and its impact on state employment of personnel and state capacity. He's also interested in the study of nomadic state formation, military mutinies in the Ming dynasty, and Ming policy in Northwest and Southwest China. He's happy to discuss the politics, military, institutions, and finances of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties.
/u/LTercero focuses on Japan's Sengoku period, in particular, the socio-political climate which drove the military conflicts and general upheaval of 15th-16th century Japan.
/u/ParallelPain loves all history, but focuses on Japan, specifically the Sengoku era, due to the influence of NHK's historical drama. With only a bachelors in history, he'd like to call himself more of an "educated-amateur" than a professional historian, but loves diving through the primary sources in search for answers, which often cause him to take longer to write even short answers, even by /r/Askhistorian standards. That is, if he didn't give up altogether.
/u/ParkSungJun occasionally contributes points about organizational structures and institutions in Imperial Japan, Republican China, and other parts of Asia, Europe, and North America. In addition, he moonlights as an economic historian in commodity markets both past and present.
/u/Spiritof454 is an American Chinese history PhD student researching the late Qing and the Republican period from a perspective of economic and business history.
Reminder from the mod team: our Panel today is consisted of users scattered across the globe, in various timezones with different real-world obligations. Please, be patient, and give them time to get to your question! Thank you!
34 Answers 2019-06-08
I’ve been able to learn a lot about my ancestry from this very old book my grandfather put together over a 40 year period. He recently passed away and the book is potentially lost,
I have a antecedent named “Nathan/Nathaniel Cleaves” who, according to the book, bore some significance after the revolutionary war. According to this book, he was one of the first men to ever be compensated by the government for loss of his horse, saddle, and several fingers after having them shot out from under him in a battle.
What resources would I use to be able to verify this historical information? Google, ancestry, and anything else is leaving me high and dry. Are there any books or publications who cover such an obscure and limited scope such as “government payments” or benefits given to soldiers during that time period?
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Just looking for any info about details related to this subject.
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Fellow historians of Reddit, veryone has their opinions, everyone had their facts, so what did cause the American Civil War, and why was it faught?
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Today, my teacher said that socialism is still far from being well applied and even the USSR wasn't truly a socialist country. I regret that I didn't ask him so I decided to post it on Reddit to get enlightened about this subject.
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