I'm trying to work out who would be found on coins in England circa 270 AD. Don't have exact dates but I've been told they were Belgian and for a period were trying to stop piracy in the channel. Sorry for being vague, don't have a lot of info but am interested to know more about them if anyone this is true.
2 Answers 2018-10-01
Apologies if this question is too broad. I'm a history grad student reading about the Carolina colonies in the colonial period for an American history colloquium, and our book of choice extensively details the history of colonial Charleston and its importance to the Carolina colonies. That got me wondering why the city didn't develop into a major American metropolitan city later in its history like Boston and NYC did, especially considering how important it was early on. What kinds of historical events contributed to this? Westward expansion? Geographic limitations? The Civil War and the end of slavery? Seemingly after the colonial period, and especially the Civil War, as an American history student, you never hear about the city in an important location again.
If I'm wrong about that generalization, please correct me!
2 Answers 2018-10-01
Fashion history is a subfield that offers several very interesting lines of methodology! I'm here today to discuss the various ways we can learn about how people dressed and thought about their clothing in the past, particularly in the west.
The study of primary textual/visual sources applies to, really, every type of history - including this one. In the seventeenth century, European writers first began to deliberately create records of contemporary fashion or regional dress. One of the most beloved by fashion historians is the Recueil des modes de la cour de France, printed in late seventeenth century France, which depicts the formal and informal summer and winter dress of the men and women "of quality" at the French court. This was the precursor to more regular periodicals like the Galerie des Modes and its followers, Magasin des Modes and Cabinet des Modes, which were published every few weeks and sent out to subscribers in Paris and around the country in the late eighteenth century. Other magazines, such as the English "Lady's Magazine", might include a single fashion plate with a brief description mixed in with its literary content around the same time. In the nineteenth century, these proliferated, and so we have a fairly good idea of what was fashionable where throughout the century. Typically, fashion magazines promised that the clothing and accessories they showed were spotted by the artist and/or editor on the street, in the theater, at court, or in the dressmaker's salon. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we also have sketches by designers themselves, frequently dated, which serve as a similar type of document tying a specific style to a specific time and place. Portraiture and other types of artwork are also often used, when they can be dated in some way: many are quite detailed and give good indications of construction and material.
Other highly useful primary sources are letters and diaries. A pro of fashion plates is that they tell us what people saw as "up to date", but a con is that we don't know exactly how fast people were copying them, and what was considered normal variation in up-to-dateness. Personal documents give us important information about individual men's and women's experience with their clothing - what they bought and when, issues they had with prevailing fashions, what they were making fun of as dowdy, and so on. In periods before fashion plates and for people who weren't affluent enough to pay attention to them, we're also big fans of wills and probate inventories, which can tell us at least how many items someone owned, and often what color and fabric they were. Of course, the downside to these solely textual documents is that we don't know how they were cut and made.
In some cases we are very lucky to have a mixture of both! A mid-eighteenth century Englishwoman named Barbara Johnson was conscientious enough to create an album that documented her purchases of fabric and what her dressmaker made with it. For instance, the first page shows us a sample of a blue silk damask she bought for half a guinea a yard in 1746, and lets us know that it was made into a petticoat. The blue-printed white linen underneath it was bought in 1748 for a long gown. Some pages also include contemporary illustrations or fashion plates that help to give an idea of what the gowns looked like when made up.
The other big type of primary source we use is actual garments. These can range from actual Victorian gowns, still intact, made by Parisian couturiers to tiny fragments of wool and linen excavated by archaeologists. The physical garment evidence we have prior to the early modern period is mostly archaeological, bits that survived due to the qualities of the soil and/or their proximity to metal jewelry and fittings, though we do have some garments that survived in tombs. As with the previous categories, there are pros and cons.
Pros:
The clothing exists in the real world and so we know it was not a fancy of the artist or writer, but something that could physically have been made.
We can examine it minutely for information about how the fibers were spun and dyed, how the pieces were stitched, how it was made to fit to the body, etc.
Cons:
It's not always firmly attached to a date unless the archaeological find is close to datable material, or there is provenance tying it to a specific event.
... And provenance can be very wrong, off by generations.
We don't know what the wearer thought about it, whether they considered it to be well-made or fit properly or be aesthetically pleasing.
So we must be careful about coming to conclusions. A gown may be dated "1876-1877" by a curator who knows what she's doing and is aware that it most closely conforms to the current fashions of that period ... but it may actually have been made in 1878 by a person who didn't want to be on the bleeding edge of fashion and brought out for special occasions over the next decade.
A third type of source that is becoming more and more accepted is experimental archaeology - or, as we could also call it, costuming and reproduction. (I like "historical recreationism" because it implies the attempt to accurately recreate by using historical methods and materials, without the baggage of "reproduce"/"reproduction".) Using the previously-described methods of inquiry, people can attempt to make and wear garments to see how they work and what can be learned by following historical methods of creation. I think this is most useful when it comes to questions of "why did they do X?" - for instance, why did dressmakers in the 1860s and 1870s sometimes put thin pads in front of the armscye, at the sides of the chest? It turns out to help to smooth out wrinkles - or "how does it feel to have Y?" (a bustle, a neck stock, suspenders, etc.) One great example of this is Hilary Davidson's recreation of a pelisse worn by Jane Austen, written up here.
The big danger to this method, however, is that one can easily go beyond the historical methods to use modern ones (because it "just makes sense" to take a dart in an ill-fitting bodice, even though they simply didn't in some periods) or fit to a modern perception of comfort or aesthetics. This is why it's so important, when using experimental methods to prove a point in fashion history, to document everything and be able to explain why one fiber/fabric/stitch/etc. was used over another.
If you're looking for books on fashion history, I have many linked in my flair profile! Let me know if you're trying to find something more specific and I may be able to help you.
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This question is really about European mortuary and funerary practices among the elite during the early modern period, as well as deeper sociocultural meanings that might have went with the experience of death and burial in a public space. How did people in early modern Europe understand burials in a public place? Of course, practices around death and burial are super important for understanding OTHER peoples' cultures, but I haven't given the meaning behind Western Judeo-Christian funerary and burial practices in the early modern period much thought. I thought of this question while standing in the cathedral in Sevilla and realizing that I was walking on top of the graves of many famous people. Today, it is easy enough for tourists to breeze right by these graves without giving them much of a thought, but this would not have been the case shortly after a person was entombed there. I find it interesting that funerary practices in early modern cathedrals essentially created ritual, performative, and spacial dimensions to death that intersect with natural biological processes in ways that I know absolutely nothing about.
How were bodies prepared for burial in such public places (both physically and ritually)? Did bodies undergo a process of embalming? Would any practices have guarded against the smell of decomposition or even possible public health dangers? Would flowers, incense, and perfume really have covered up the smell? Was decomposition just a normal, unremarkable part of the funerary experience or perhaps the smell of death had unique religious or spiritual meaning in the early modern period, which we no longer maintain in the modern world? In essence, how did people understand and perform death and decomposition in a public space?
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Today was my first day as a PhD student, and although I've met some great course mates, it still seems really quite daunting. Any advice this sub has would be much appreciated.
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Okay, so I recently learned that Catholicism was the state religion of Italy until the 1980s. Why was this the case? My understanding is that the early Kingdom of Italy was fairly anti-clerical, given how they like, literally invaded the Catholic Church and made the Pope a prisoner in the Vatican. So why did the govt continue to sponsor the catholic church in abstract by keeping it the state religion?
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Okay, so during the Italio-Turkish war the Ottoman Empire put a ton of effort into guerrilla resistance against the Italians in Lybia, to the point where one resistance group, the Senussi (which was technically a religious order, but like, they also functioned as a resistance group) was still fighting against the Italians during WW2, long after the Ottoman Empire had ceased to exist.
However, when the Dey of Algeria upset the French enough that the French invaded, the Ottoman Empire just declared Algeria independent and let the French do as they pleased. Likewise, when the French marched into Tunis, the Ottoman Empire just pretended they were an "autonomous province" and ignored the de facto reality that France had literally invaded the Empire.
Anyway, what made Lybia so special? Why did the Ottoman Empire care so much more about that one patch of north african desert than they did about the other two?
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Not religious texts in general, please, unless those religious works are explicitly concerned with making philosophical arguments.
And links to English translations would be amazing.
1 Answers 2018-10-01
I'm a junior in a social science that requires a lot of reading, and I've just entered the stage in my education where there's officially too much for me to be able to keep it all in my head, but at the same time too much for me to take notes on in the way I used to.
Thinking about this recently, I realized that this must be totally dwarfed by the amount of reading required of any professional (or even amateur) historian on a daily basis.
So my question - how do you do it? How do you keep yourself focused, make sure you actually learn from things you read, and organize it so that you can reference it weeks or months later?
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Was it Lincoln himself who made the offer? Or someone else? What was their reaction to Lee turning it down?
Was this offer generally known about by Northerners while the war was ongoing? Is there any record of how Northerners felt about this--either to Lee's turning it down, or to Lincoln/whoever making the offer in the first place? Was it controversial?
Also, the claim usually has it that Lee would have taken up the offer, but he could not turn his back on Virginia. Had Lee made this claim publicly known during the war, or only after? Did it happen at all?
Any information on how we came to know about this, and the veracity of the event is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
2 Answers 2018-10-01
In light of the recent developments with the Macedonian name change referendum, could someone provide some unbiased history about this whole issue? If the historic kingdom of Macedon was (mostly) in modern Greece, and ancient Macedonians were Greeks, why are ethnic Slavs called Macedonians who are not living in historic Macedon? Any insight would be appreciated.
BONUS QUESTION: pronounced Macedonian or Makedonia?
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To be clear, I'm not talking about the idea of Palestine or Israel as being rightfully Arab land. I'm talking about the idea of a distinct Palestinian nation.
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The majority of books I have read, and what I have been taught in school, invariably focussed on the French leadership; the various assemblies and committees that helped guide the revolution. I was curious about how Marxism can be used to interpret the events of the French Revolution from 1789-93 from the perspective of the people, and are there any books in particular you would recommend to help understand the French Revolution from this viewpoint?
1 Answers 2018-10-01
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, mods please delete if this isn't appropriate for this sub.
I'm not a scholar, I just love stories. I particularly like listening to stories on public transport on my way to work or while doing housework. However, I've always preferred things that actually happened to fiction, since the human imagination is limited and fictional stories follow age old conventions of storytelling. So without further ado, what books about your preferred period of or event in history should I listen to? I have a few limitations:
Has to be on Audible
Violence and sexual deviance = good
Political intrigue = even better
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Bonus points if there were any movements in the "middle to late" period of the republic, like during the year of the 5 emperors, the crisis of the 3rd century, year of the 6 emperors. Maybe even during Caligula or Nero, although that is pushing it a bit early for my qualifier
Basically any movements sometime after anyone who was alive during the republican days had died or was too young at the time to remember.
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Before developing his theories on things like hysteria and psychoanalysis , was Freud ever a familiy doctor who was effective at treating his patients? Did he have patients who broke their legs, with fevers, or other common physical illnesses?
He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902.
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