Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

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this thread is for you ALL!

Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!

We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: Atheism! As the joke goes, an agnostic is an atheist who is afraid of commitment. This week, we're celebrating those who went the full distance and concluded there is no god(s) and this spin around the big blue marble is all we get. This is the thread to share famous atheists throughout history, the evolution of atheism as an idea, and the ways in which atheists throughout history created community absent the church.

My apologies for this being a broader time period and geographic area than usual, but my whole life I’ve heard things like “Mary was only about 14 when she had Jesus” and “girls in the Middle Ages got married as young as 12,” but I’ve struggled to find hard data or primary sources to support this. I’ve found info on noble marriages in the Middle Ages, but since these were usually for political alliances, I’m not sure they reflect what the average commoner’s experience would be.

What sources or data do we have on the average age of first marriage for girls in those places and times?

Obviously first-century Palestine and medieval Europe were very different places, but since I’ve heard those statements repeatedly in my life, I figured it might be more efficient to ask about them in one question.

Preferably diaries of small officer or even involved non-combatant

I'm a high school teacher (English, not history) and, while studying American literature and conceptions of American identity, I'd like my students to be able to use changes in the naturalization exam over time as a lens through which to view changing ideas about who is, or gets to become, an American, what an American should know, and so forth.

I have found information online about the content of the 2008 and 2020 versions of the American Civics Test and about the English language proficiency test. I can't find anything prior to 2008 with any detail, but I'd ideally like to find some combination of the following: a) what questions were, or could potentially be, asked; b) what areas of knowledge were covered in the civics component, and what domains of language in the English proficiency component; c) how the assessment (how easy/difficult, how important is each component, etc) of these exams changed over time; d) what principles of assessment design were considered in creating these exams, including potential exam-takers' educational background, language ability and other languages known, etc.

However, I'm not finding detailed enough info, and it doesn't go back far enough. I'd love to find primary sources such as actual old exams, rubrics and markschemes, instructions for assessors, that sort of thing. However, I'm mostly finding secondary sources making general references to the naturalization process, when what I would like to find is very detailed information about what was on the exams for citizenship and about how they were designed, delivered, and assessed.

In other words, annexation of independent foreign nations was considered an actionable offense under international law when Napoleon tried to conquer all of Europe. So why wouldn't the same international law apply to the US government which annexed all of the "American Indian" nations of the New World?

In The Politics of Large Numbers, Alain Desrosières describes Occam's Razor as the product of Ockham's intervention into a dispute between the Franciscans and the Pope as to who should have to manage the Franciscans' properties (pp. 70-71). In Desrosières's telling, the Franciscans didn't want to hold the property (as they'd taken a vow of poverty!) so had gotten the Pope to hold it and manage it for their use, but the Pope got tired of the administrative burden and was trying to foist it off on the Franciscans. Here Occam intervened and said the Pope couldn't give it to the Franciscans because "The Franciscans" doesn't exist -- just individual Franciscans. And one shouldn't postulate the existence of new entities unnecessarily!

Medieval canon law is well beyond Desrosières's specialization -- Politics of Large Numbers is largely about 19th-century statistics -- and the only source he cites is a 1975 book in French by one M. Villey. And Wikipedia notes that there were some predecessors to Occam who made similar arguments to the Razor. So this raises several questions for me!

• How original to Ockham was the razor?
• Did he really intervene in the aforementioned dispute between the Franciscans and the Pope?
• If so, was this intervention what motivated his deployment of the razor?
• In general (and ambitiously!), how much did jurisprudence disputes drive philosophical innovation in the late Medieval era?

Thanks!!

In Old Assyria, women were legally equal to men. However, in Middle Assyria, distinctions disadvantaging women arose in the law. Are there any hypotheses on why this happened?

These disciplines were once aligned. It would be great to understand the factors/catalysts that triggered the divergence, and what caused astrology to fall to the depths of pseudoscience and horoscopes. Was it publicly debunked? Did it fall out of favour in academia due to any lack of evidence? What caused it to become so stigmatized?

In my part of the world it's getting wintery and dry, and that means I'm "enjoying" daily encounters with static electricity. Whenever this time of year rolls around, I always think of people in the days before we knew what electricity was, and I wonder what they made of such phenomena as: static cling - that thing when your hair stands up - palpable static shocks - visible static sparks.

Are there any well known texts from pre-scientific times that discuss or attempt to explain these experiences?

We admire infamous outlaws, such as Jesse James or the pirate Blackbeard, as anti-heroes. There weren't many.

Most of us have rebelled a little in our teenage years, against small laws such as "it's for your own good", and against "Say hello to your Auntie". "Whatsuuuup Auntie". "Now look at her and say hello properly". "OK. Hi Auntie".

There aren't many radically rebellious youths, rebelling against their own society's norms, but until recently it seems there were none at all and no society admired or encouraged it.

I wonder if this development is good for a society (would WW1 have been possible with modern day Western youth) and are there any historic precedents to judge our current trajectory by?

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From what I’ve learned, the Romans were very particular about language, and that the only officially approved languages for use in the Roman army were Latin and Greek. They also tended to station troops many hundreds of miles away from their homelands.

So for Romans stationed in Judaea in the First Century, would they have conversed with the local populace in Latin or Greek? I assume Aramaic would have been off-the-table for Centurions and Governors.

I’m mainly thinking of conversations such as those recorded in the New Testament. Many Jews were Hellenized, and therefore knew some Greek. So would that have made it more likely that Jews such as Jesus, Herod or the Sanhedrin would have conversed with the Romans in Greek?

I’ve read several articles about how the fighting in Bakhmut, Ukraine has devolved into trench style warfare. A lot of the journalists/pundits seem shocked by this and have mentioned that trench warfare like this hasn’t been seen since WW1. Why? Why was trench warfare so common in WW1 and why is so uncommon now?

I’d like to learn more about his life, his path to the presidency, and his conservationism.

I’d also be interested in reading about the history of the Department of the Interior.

Thank you!

I was fascinated by the story of Lemnos joining Greece in 1912 told by Peter Charanis. As the story goes, Greek soldiers arrived in Lemnos and local children came to look at them. When asked what they were looking at, the children replied "Greeks (Hellenes)". The soldiers asked "Are you not Greeks too?", the children replied "No, we are Romans".

The fact that Roman/Byzantine identity endured since antiquity in Greece/Turkey and survived under Ottoman rule for 500 years until the modern era is pretty astounding.

This got me wondering if there were any pockets in Western Europe where Roman identity survived? Excluding the city of Rome itself of course. For example, in the 1800s or later could I find a rural Spaniard who identified as Roman? A Welshman in 1000? A Frenchman? Perhaps even in Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia?

I hadnt thought of slavery & cotton being the chief drivers of US wealth but have been running into statements like this recently. It looks like even at the height of cotton production <15% of the population were slaves. I found sites saying that cotton accounted for half of US exports and was vitally important worldwide for trade. The US still ran a trade deficit during this time and much of ecomic growth would be local rather than international? It seems like there is a debate about the importance of exports for US growth during the 1800s. When cotton exports were cut off in the Civil War, the effect on the North did not seem very significant relative to the South with its much weaker nonindustrial economy? And the end of slavery after the Civil War did not destroy American economic growth? My take is that slavery contributed to the US development but was but one factor among many but I am trying to find out if I am totally off here?

I've been reading Otto Kiefer's 'Sexual Life in Ancient Rome' which is considered by some to be driven more by the author's personal feeling than fact. I'm looking for more reading that could expand my view on Ancient Roman sexual life, particularly 'perverse' sexuality and links between sexuality, cruelty and hedonism.

If so, why was this treatment offered to Jews then as well as before Christianity existed?