I keep hearing people say this, but no one can tell me why people think so.

I've been wondering this for a while actually. Do they have American History classes? We have European History so I wouldn't see why they wouldn't but is the Revolutionary War a sore subject still? I talked to someone from England and they knew nothing of the subject. I'd think they'd know at least SOMETHING about it.

In a book I read as a kid (I can't remember the name) some of the characters, boys about 12 years old, argue over who has the best tanks. They compare the Tiger to the Sherman, as well as tanks from the Commonwealth and the USSR. I would have though civilians wouldn't have enough information available to even know the names of the enemy tanks, much less argue about specifications like speed, armor, guns etc. In fact, would they even have knowledge of their own countries weapons beyond their names?

So, i was watching this series about operation Grouse/Freshman in Norway.

At one point they tried to bomb the factory with a massive bomber formation. Is there any validity to this? I cant say I have ever heard about that part before.

I am also interested in learning about the historical accurateness of the series as a whole.

I apologize for any misspelling, as English is not my first language.

In the latest HOI4 DLC, you can oppose Hitler and start a civil war against the Nazis, led by von Mackensen and his silly bad guy hat in 1936. Once he wins, you get to invite Willy 2 or 3 back into power (with a super silly secret option to get Kaiserin Victoria and the HRE reformed).

How likely was this to happen in the period of 1919-1939? As in, how likely was a military coup, why didn't it happen, and if it did, what was the likelihood of the Kaiser returning to power?

I’ve struggled to find answers on this in Polish, German or English. I know some cities like Wrocław was German and Polish before that, but also smaller towns and villages? Did Germans and Poles live side by side in, say, the 16th century? I am very curious if modern west Poland was particularly historically Polish ethnically before World war 2 and before Prussia.

Sorry if my English isn’t great, I will try to make it clear if asked. Thank you

We all know about the Christmas Truce, but I always wondered if pacifism or the simple refusal to kill could be tolerated or even organized during this war.

Was it possible for an entire band of soldiers to willingly not engage in combat without it being considered desertion ?

Were there any exemple of units that actually never fired a single shot, or even being in "purposefully useless" operations to protect weaker soldiers from fights and courts-martial ?

Is there any record of average colonist opinion of the English Civil War, Cromwell's victory, Charles I's execution, Cromwell's government and the eventual restoration of the monarchy?

Also, what was Cromwell's attitude towards the colonies and how was it different than the monarchy had been?

Hello fellow Redditors, I'm currently writing an essay on the Paris Peace Agreement and focusing on each nation's goals in the Paris Peace Agreement. I am currently writing about Czechoslovakia, and here's what I have found so far:

1. One of Czechoslovakia's goals at the Paris Peace Agreement was to expand its borders and gain more territory, more specifically some pieces of Poland and Hungary. Also, Czechoslovakia wanted to have a corridor of land to connect to Yugoslavia. A lot of this was for defense reasons as well, because of nearby Germans and Hungarians.

2. Another goal was to show that ethnic conflicts within the nation were not a big deal and that Czechoslovakia was a stable/reliable ally. There were Hungarians and Slovaks in Czechoslovakia so that caused some ethnic conflicts.

So that's what I've found so far, and I would like some more help/guidance. More specifically, I would like to know as to how Czechoslovakia presented these demands in a persuasive manner to the big three. (I also know France liked Czechoslovakia because it helped balance Russia and Germany) If some articles regarding this topic could be linked, that would also be of great help. Thank you so much.

Welcome to Monday Methods, a bi-weekly feature where we discuss, explain, and explore historical methods, historiography, and theoretical frameworks concerning history.

Today, we will tackle a big question that dates back a very, very long time: What can we know? There is a whole field of philosophy attached to this question: Epistemology, as in the study and philosophical consideration of what knowledge is in the first place, how we gain it, what is extent is and can actually be. Many of our theories and methods are ultimately informed by this field of study and its thoughts.

But what I'd like to do today is to approach this question, not from a philosophical and theoretical perspective, but from, let's call it, a practical one. One that historians often have to grapple with in their research. The question of what can we know in light of what sources we have available to us and how we can access them.

Surveying questions from the last half year or so, there seems to be a rather widespread conception that historical records are easily available in times of the internet and possible even already translated into English. This is not the case. In our work, we are often forced to actually travel to archives, sift through finding aids – possibly even non-digital ones – and look through them there on both a limited time and budget. And sometimes, what you want to write about, what question you seek to answer with your work, is hampered by what exists in terms of sources.

Let me exemplify this problem with what I believe to be a very pertinent example from my own research endeavors: My research for my dissertation has lead me to Serbia in the past month, specifically to a larger Serbian city that I wanted to use as a microhistorical example within the framework of my question and overall thesis. Basically, I wanted to study everyday life under the German occupation in a city considered by international historiography to be peripheral. In preparation for my trip I did my due diligence when it comes to archival research: I read pertinent books and noted down footnotes and I even got hold of the published archival guide of said archive. All of these however were published before 1997 (this will become important in a minute).

So, when arrived there on my first day, I ordered the files I wanted. I received the box, I open the box and inside on top of all the files is a note saying: "This record is incomplete due the files for the time span between 1941 and 1957 having been destroyed".

What happened? Well, (and this is where the before 1997 becomes important) remember how in 1999 NATO intervened in Serbia's Kosovo conflict by bombing the country? Guess what, one of those NATO bombs hit a building that served as a depot for these files and they all went up in flames. And now they are gone forever and I am in urgent need to find a different way to approach my subject. This new approach, once I figure it out, might lead me to the results I seek but one thing that is guaranteed is that what I'll be able to finally write up as the result will certainly very different than what I would have written, would I have had these files and the knowledge produced in the course of my endeavor will be a different one to the potential knowledge I could have produced had these files not been bombed into oblivion by NATO in 1999.

And my own story is certainly no exception in terms of this: If you have ever read more than one work about the German Gestapo, you will notice that the example that is always is used is that of the Gestapo in Würzburg. Würzburg is one of the very few cases where we still have a complete archive of the local Gestapo but everywhere else they were destroyed whole or in part. The German Military Archive was also hit by a bomb at the end of WWII and so many divisional files from WWI and WWII and the Weimar period are now lost to us.

And this is also not solely related to destruction of files in war or otherwise. Sometimes acquiring crucial knowledge or rather not acquiring it can be both an issue of how access to this knowledge is organized and considerations of time and work constraints.

To use another example from my own work: In another Serbian archive, large parts of the files of the German Gestapo in Serbia still exist. They contain a massive wealth of reports by their agents about certain aspects of everyday life such as the mood of the population, the black market and so forth. These files are organized exactly the way the Gestapo organized them, meaning that rather than being organized by general information about the case, they are organized by name. The only way to know what is in them is to either know who you are looking for or to pull names randomly (which I did and which, I can assure you, is a pain).

Basically, what I am trying to show here is that pertinent information might be available. But the way this information is organized makes approaching it from the angle I planned for my work very difficult. For others who seek specific people and what they did etc. this way of how the information is organized is perfect but from a different angle of approach it makes work so much harder.

Because history is a discipline is so reliant on our sources, because unlike sociology or political science, we are not in a position to generate our own data that forms the basis of our endeavors of knowledge, factors external to the researcher – very much beyond our control – can be hugely influential in the sense of what we can know, what we can write about, what questions that are posed to us or that we pose ourselves can be answered.

One central skill that we pick up in our training and that gets little emphasize in our final products that we put out for public consumption is how to deal with this limitation of knowledge; how, through surveying the historiography on a subject and through re-conceptualization of our research, we can find what is available, and how we can find a way with how we can answer our questions with what material is available. Central to this skill is the very knowledge that we can't answer everything, that we can't find out everything due to things far beyond our own control; where even if one had unlimited time and resources, there simply wouldn't be a way to get the information you want.

This basic limitation of knowledge has even served in the past as a major catalyst for innovation within our discipline. When only a limited amount of information is available on what you are researching and when the usual approaches to this information don't yield the answers you seek, one way to circumvent this is to develop new approaches to analyze and interpret said information.

Cultural history is one such example. As an approach it looks beyond the information supplied directly in a source in order to establish broader cultural patterns as can be gleaned from a convergence of sources. Its approach is not content with e.g. taking the French Revolutionaries word on why their flag is red, white, and blue but rather how the use of flags as political symbols changed during the French Revolution – something the historical actors and those writing the pertinent sources might not have been fully aware and conscious of.

Or History of Emotions as an approach. We know about the differences in doctrine between Lutherans and Catholics in history but approaching what sources we have about this topic from the angle of trying to glean, how the feeling spiritual elation between Lutherans and Catholics differ, can give us new insight into both their history. When considering that broadly speaking while Catholics equate the feeling of spiritual elation with the display of God's grace and power through splendor such as large churches, golden altars, elaborate frescoes, music, incense, while a Lutheran will reject these displays and equate spiritual elation with pretty much the opposite of that; spartan and solemn contemplation done by the individual in communion with God. Approaching the sources we have with questions such as "How they describe these feelings? In the same terms or differently?" can net us interesting new insight into their history.

In this sense, it is not only important to realize that we can't know everything about the past but also that this has been a major driving force into taking our discipline into interesting new directions that are well worth exploring, even if new approaches might be based on sources we already know.

Agincourt and Crecy were infamous for French Knights charging headlong without heed of proper tactics. Likewise, French Knights at Nicopolis ignored the veterans and charged head long into the Ottomans who defeated them. In Haitin, the Crusaders marched against Saladin despite being proven before that a cautious approach was the best counter against the Muslim forces.

The Ottomans even built a tactic around this, where skirmishers would provoke the enemy into an attack on the Ottoman's defensive positions.

Are the examples I listed the norm among knights or was it the exception? Is it really that easy to provoke armies into an attack?

To the best of my knowledge, a lot of pirates weren’t good. From theft to murders to rapes, they seem like bad people? So how and why did we start thinking of pirates as nice guys?