William Roughead, in his "Classic Crimes" (this specific excerpt is from "Katherine Nairn") relates how a man slipped through the noose and fell to the ground during a hanging. A local chimney sweep helped drag the man back up the ladder to the scaffolding. "For assisting the law on this occasion, a member of the Society of Tron-men (chimney-sweeps) was expelled from that association and banished to Leith for five years - a grievous punishment for an Edingburgh citizen." Were Tron-men anti-hanging? Anti-police? Why was it so bad to be exiled to Leith? Was it just because it was incredibly inconvenient, loss of connections, job, etc., or were there other reasons?

I have found information saying she was Macedonian, and others saying she was at least 1/4 Egyptian. Any truth behind any of these?

Why not a hundred miles? Why not two miles? This occurred to me while watching a documentary about Operation Sea Lion. The doc said that Hitler and Rumsted disagreed about the proposed landing covering nearly 200 miles.

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Now I can see why too narrow a landing could cause problems; it could be become a bottleneck, too narrow to bring in all the men and materiel. But surely too wide a landing has as many potential problems. So why fifty miles? How did they decide? Why did 200 miles for Sealion sound bad? (notwithstanding all the other flaws with Sealion.)

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In the past few decades, computers have made it much easier for ordinary people to access strong cryptography. Some countries have responded with legislation that restricts private access to cryptography.

What about in history? Prior to the 1970s, were there any examples of jurisdictions placing restrictions on secret codes, ciphers or whatnot?

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That is, were there egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies before more organized societies developed? how egalitarian were these societies if yes?

I know that the census in Rome and the italian peninsula was taken by the censors, but how were the non roman subjects

counted?
We know that the story of Mary and Joseph moving to Nazareth didnt take place this way, but how exactly would a census in Judaea or Gallia have looked like?

Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

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Come share the cool stuff you love about the past! Please don’t just write a phrase or a sentence—explain the thing, get us interested in it! Include sources especially if you think other people might be interested in them.

AskHistorians requires that answers be supported by published research. We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: What was it like to be back home during the war, in your era? Your country or city or tribe’s army is fighting far away, maybe you’re a civilian, maybe you’re a wounded soldier...what is your life like?

Next time: The art of death! What do we know about funerals and/or burials in your era?

The number : One and a half million algerians killed between 1954 - 1962

Say kingdom 1 takes over the territoriy of kingdom 2 in 200 BC, what did normal citizens think/do? What would they experience?

i can find sources that say that the famine was man made but some other sources says that it wasnt man made famine. Now i cant tell whats real and not. Can someone help me figure this out. I have no clue...

I didn't read the book, but "Harvest of Sorrow" main thesis was that ukraininan hunger was delibarate, intentional genocide. I read conflicting claims in internet about this thesis of Robert Conquest - in Wheatcroft and Davis book this thesis is attacked as beeing unfalsifiable (which means, I assume, that he didn't renounce it), while on various quoras or rational wiki about Holodomor I see that they state that he renounced it. I know those are not really reliable sources, I tried to dig in the internet to find a statement in an interview or something similar, but I can't find it anywhere. Do you have any sources that confirm that he renounced the thesis?

Generally in movies and tv shows (i'm mainly thinking GoT, Lotr, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin hood etc.) set in this sort of medieval era armor seems to do basically nothing. Often characters wear very light looking armor and cl;eave through any heavily armored enemies like they're wearing nothing. Lotr seems to be the worst offender due to just how many times it looks like the characters whack swords straight into heavy plate armor and still insta kill the orcs/uruks.

Historically do we know how effective light, medium and heavy were armor at resisting arrows and sword/spear/axe blows and generally keeping the wearer alive? And how useful would it be in battle to wear the fairly light but mobile armor you see characters in these sorts of movies/tv shows wear?

Most of the material I've found has focused on the lives of soldiers and rulers, less so on the normal folk. I understand that contemporary Spanish/Catholic records are the most available, yet unreliable due to their viewpoint. The records of the Inca and other peoples were largely not archaeologically stable or were intentionally destroyed.

As an aside, I'm uncomfortable with the term "pre-Contact", and I am curious to know if there is a more sensitive term among historians.

Has trickle down economics ever been effective in improving life for the middle class? Just curious, all I can think of is the massive failure of Kansas.

1. Are they the descendents of Jews who arrived in Germany in Roman times, or did they arrive later? If the latter, then when, and from where?

2. How far back do the latest common ancestors of Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazi Jews go? Where were they located before proto-Ashkenazim and proto-Sephardim went their separate ways?

3. When did they begin speaking the earliest version of their dialect of High German that would become Yiddish? What did proto-Yiddish replace?

Apologies if "is the movie accurate" post are too common. I'm watching the movie now and I'm only wiki-level familiar with the history. Greenery has pagan roots adopted by Christians, but would a single large decorated tree be accurate for the period?