I am a huge fan of Dan Carlin and his Hardcore History podcast. Its entertaining, informative, and makes learning about history accessible to people who might not otherwise. I think he does for history what Neil Degrasse Tyson does for science. With that being said, how to actual academics feel about his work? He has a lot of integrity in the sense that he always emphasizes he is not an academic, and his work should not be viewed as such. He wants to entertain, inspire, and get people interested in history. But considering the quality of his work and widespread appeal, I think a lot of people are actually learning their history from listening to him. Is he presenting history fairly? Do you see instances where his goal to make history entertaining comes into conflict with the truth of the subjects he talks about?

I’m reading Sea Power and it’s says “Civilization in Greece was at stake. The key, in the end, was freedom. Each of the Greeks was a free man, fighting for his family and his city-sate. Virtually all of the Persians were conscripts or slaves.”

QUESTION: Is it factually accurate that during the Second Persian invasion of Greece, Xerxes’ military was virtually all conscripts or slaves?

I’ve read that the attribution to Cryus the Great of outlawing slavery is not well-founded and relys heavily on a cylinder from under a temple that doesn’t well-represent actual policy, and that slavery being against Zoroastrian religion is also insufficient evidence that slavery was not practiced in the empire. But I’ve also read that for the most part, western understanding of Persian history relys too heavily on Ancient Greek sources, or old Great Powers translations. All of this I am unable to verify, it’s just stuff I found clicking around for a while in unfamiliar sources. So that’s where I’m at.

Hi all. I hope that historiographical questions are allowed here. If not, I am happy to move this post elsewhere.

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I am curious about the development of environmental history, a field that has become rather 'hip' in academic circles. Is anybody able to provide a quick rundown of the relevant literature, the key questions, etc.? It seems to be such a wide ranging field that any focal point is hard to pin down. Who might we consider the originator of the field, and what were they trying to do?

I have a masters in history. I spend some time working as a history teacher. Now I'm thinking about doing history research. I want to write a original scientific article with theme from my city's history. But the problem is- in the university we haven't talk a lot about scientific work and I'm complete lost. What would you advice to someone who is looking to write his/her first original scientific article in history field? Thank you in advance.

Hey everybody, I recently saw a movie about Bach and he was invited to play some of his pieces for some king (don't remember the name).

The king in turn also played flute for Bach.

So my question is:

How common was it for monarchs to play any instrument on a proficient level?

For context, the draw weight of historical war bows would require a stronger than average man to use them. But in modern literature and film, archers are always depicted as smaller and physically lesser than their melee counterparts. When did this change occur, and why did it happen?

Was it known that they caused harm by rearranging and squishing the organs? It seems very odd if it wasn't.

Were those problems treated in any way? Was it just something women had to live with?

It seems as though in popular culture stories of someone escaping the draft during the Vietnam war are more ubiquitous and in some cases even applauded due to the war being seen as unjust, and the greater light being shone on wealthier and more connected people being able to escape the draft while poor and middle class boys and men had little to no recourse. Were the same problems prevalent during WW2 where the war was generally accepted as being justified and there was little to no antiwar movement?

East Germany was much poorer than the west and that divide continues even today. Did merging with a poor country actually benefit the west Germans economically?

Is that the Russian calendar or some calendar Sigmund used himself?

The laws are mostly about the right fines (which are used to finance the judicial system) for the different crimes. Perjury results in death and investigative torture must be reversible (joint dislocations et al). There is an option for trial by combat, though Ivan limited that option to his subjects after a Muscowite knight was slain by a Lithuanian.

i.e. people knew to avoid bad water sources. People would get sick, and word would spread I assume. Or perhaps people have an instinct for water quality in some way.

In any case, we avoided bad water because it was bound to make us sick, at some point earlier than our understanding of bacteria, etc. we understood that.

So what did we think was in the water to cause illness? Just magic? The devil? Gods?

Are there any good books that defend the 1953 Iran Coup?

The Spanish state is an entity that was formed after hundreds of years as the result of the amalgamation and union of various kingdoms and territories. Eventually, the Castilian identity and language grew to be the dominant one among the Spanish regions and it's what most of us associate with being the "default" Spanish culture. What's weird is that historically, Castile itself used to be just a small county among the others such as Leon, Navarre, Aragon, etc.

My question is that, given the Iberian peninsula's history of diverse kingdoms and identities, how and why did the Castilian identity become the dominant one? And even more specifically, why are only Catalonia and the Basque Country (perhaps we can also include Galicia) the regions which insist on being different than the "default" Spanish culture? Why did the Leonese, Aragonese and Cantabrians more or less "accept" being Spanish and now speak Castilian instead of their own regional languages?

Thanks in advance.

Like did a castle or temple ever suddenly fall into the earth?

How did they explain it? God's wrath, magic, science?

In doing genealogy, I've found numerous instances of illiterate ancestors who placed a simple "X" when asked to sign for something like a Revolutionary War pension. Did this vary much? And what kept someone from forging an X and taking someone else's pension?

Noam Chomsky writes in a footnote to American Power and the New Mandarins (Ch. 2):

For the reaction of a victim, see Makoto Oda, "The Meaning of 'Meaningless Death.'" Tenbo, January 1965, translated in the Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan, Vol. 4 (August 1966), pp. 75-84.

In the afternoon of August 14, 1945, thousands of people died during a protracted and intensive aerial bombardment of an arsenal in Osaka.

I was a witness to the tragedy. I saw dozens of corpses—loyal subjects literally consumed by service to a government which had already decided to accept the Potsdam Declaration’s demand for unconditional surrender. The only reason these people died was because they happened to have been in the arsenal or environs at the time of the air raid. After what seemed an eternity of terror and anguish, we who were fortunate enough to survive emerged from our shelters. We found the corpses—and the leaflets which American bombers had dropped over the destruction. The leaflets proclaimed in Japanese, “Your Government has surrendered. The war is over!”

Was it even relevant outside of the United States?