Imagine a single edged blade that had a hand guard that was the blade itself going down the handle to protect your hand. Simular to a Chinese butterfly sword. I am pretty sure I saw one before but not sure if it was real or not. And if it is real could you please provide a link. I apologize in advance if I was wrong

I’m currently reading Battle Cry of Freedom, about 500 pages in, and McPherson seems to be highly critical of McClellan throughout. He seems to only credit him for doing a good job of organizing the Army of the Potomac and really inspiring his men at the beginning of the war.

He goes at length reveal his flaws and mistakes throughout. How he had contempt for Lincoln, his overly cautious tactics, his overestimation the enemy’s strength, and overall presents him to be pretty unlikeable (mostly by using his own words against him).

I know McPherson is well respected, but is their any legitimate criticism of his portrayal of McClellan?

I’m not sure if this is necessary, but I’m talking about cow liver

One would imagine that he would be moved by his death, but I can't seem to find any accounts of it.

When did it become relatively common knowledge in different regions/civilizations that if you go far enough east or west, time is different (i.e. It's night on one side of the world and daylight on the other)?

It'd also be interesting to hear about civilizations that did not spread wide from east to west (like the Incans). It would also be interesting to know when people became aware that different latitudes had different lengths of day depending on the time of year.

R

The prices for footage from websites like British Pathe are just insulting, and ripping footage from random accounts on YouTube always seems like a risky thing to do. Are there any places that have it at reasonable prices or - dare I say it - give it away for free?

Maybe the answer is really obvious but I want a simple explanation

These days, the opera is seen as something for the elites, not just because of the cost, but because the interest just isn't there for huge parts of the population (speaking as an American here). I'm curious about the accessibility of opera to the average person throughout history in various parts of the world.

Adjusting ticket prices and average incomes for inflation and putting it in US dollars would help me understand, but all answers are appreciated!

And by this, I mean any intersections with the Bible and the Torah, but I prefer if you would treat this subject from a Quranic view only. What evidence is there to support the accuracy or non-accuracy of historical events as the Quran described them, please be as neutral and objective as possible. You might think is trivial or a silly question, and you're probably right, but for this is very controversial as I'm trying to logically revaluate my beliefs. I'm open to any viewpoints as long as you justify them, please bear with me, and thanks in advance for your time and willingness to help me.

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask this so, mods, please feel free to delete this if it's against the rules.

I'm starting to gather sources for my honors thesis, which centers around the Italian-American community in St. Louis. For the background information portion, I want to paint a picture of life in post-Risorgimento Italy as well as get some information on how the Italian government reacted to immigration to the United States. I'm also interested in general immigration/conscription records. Google searches have been pretty fruitless thus far, so I'm hoping that someone will know of some primary sources online in Italian!

TIA.

The more I read academic-level works of history, the more I get the feeling that what I am reading is not even relatable to what I learned from pop-culture, high school, and 101 classes in my undergrad. The latter are highly concerned with presenting a narrative of events, which makes history into an easily-digestible "story" of "things that happened." Academic history seems to break down those narratives at every turn, revealing their faults and making them untenable as "true" accounts of the past. It seems like there's hardly anything at all about the triumphalist, linear meta-narrative of Western history which everyone knows and takes to be "history" that has really stood up to criticism, and attempting to educate myself has turned into a long series of realizations that what I knew before was wrong or else dramatically oversimplified. Even the simple matter of learning what history is, the product of continual dialogue between historians rather than a body of facts about the past, has been a major revelation slow in the making, not to mention all the subtle shifts in ways of thinking required to mitigate the biases that come with a modern-day worldview while thinking about the past.

So is academic history really even in the same ballpark as lower-level history? I spoke with a professor of mine about this and he said he agreed with my analogy: that in science, as you progress in education you build upon what you learned in earlier years, while in history, as you progress you deconstruct what you learned and see how it was flawed. If this is true, given that most students never reach the "deconstruction" phase, how do you avoid arriving at a nihilistic attitude toward high school & undergraduate history education of non-history majors? Having a small amount of knowledge about science is still useful because what you learn is true, but is having a small amount of knowledge of history still valuable even if a higher-level understanding would entail learning that what you knew before was wrong? And not even just wrong in terms of facts - wrong in terms of whole modes of thought and analysis. Does the expectation (either from students or administrators) that historians should teach history as a narrative hinder historical education as much as it seems to? Is there any way to fast-track lower-level students toward understanding the basic nature of academic-level history?

Lastly, do you think there is any significant difference in how these issues play out between teaching more recent (e.g. 20th-century) and more distant history?

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