The year that the Gregorian calendar was adopted (1582), the discrepancy between the two calendars was at 10 days lag. So Christmas on Dec 25th of the old Julian calendar would have corresponded to Jan 4th on the new Gregorian calendar. So does that mean eastern orthodoxy celebrated Christmas on Jan 4th (gregorian) in the 1500s?

And as over time this discrepancy grew, did the eastern orthodox christmas correspond to different gregorian dates? At first, it would have been Jan 4th, then Jan 5th sometime in the 1700s, then Jan 6th sometime in the 1800s, and finally, Jan 7th now because the discrepancy is now at 13 days. And in the year 2100, the discrepancy will be at 14 days, so will eastern orthodox christmas then be celebrated on gregorian Jan 8th?

TLDR - why, historically, has the Julian date Christmas always fallen on Gregorian Jan 7 if the divergence in time between the two calendars was less than 13 days in the past?

I came across this copy paste on LinkedIn posted by someone calling themselves a futurist. Enjoy!

The US 🇺🇸 standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used? Well, because that's the way they built them in England and English engineers designed the first US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

So, why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And what about the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder

'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)

Now, the twist to the story: When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything.

I'm reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and several chapters are devoted to military spouses traveling to Belgium alongside the English regiment during the end of the Napoleonic Wars. How common was this in practice in the English military? For what ranks of soldier was it considered acceptable? When did the practice begin and when did it end? It seems like it would have introduced a lot of logistical complications.

In the musical “fiddler on the roof” the main character, while dreaming of being rich, says he’d have a house with “one long staircase just going up, and one even longer coming down, and one just leading nowhere just for show!”

Were staircases specifically a sign of being wealthy? He talks separately about having a “big, tall house with rooms by the dozen, right in the middle of the town” so this is a seperate thing from just having a big house. Or is this just a funny line?

For context for those of you who haven’t seen the show, the main character, Tevye, is is a poor Jewish dairy farmer who lives in a small village in the pale of settlement in the Russian empire. Likely in the southern part of the pale as they mention Kyiv as being the big city. Also, it takes place in, about, 1905 or so.

Bersekers obviously were something in Norse culture but what? Were they really completely naked save for an animal skin or is that just pop culture? And did they really work themselves into a frenzy were they would attack friend or foe? Seems like a liability rather than an asset.

Were Protestants more open about how they handled things at this time?

“ The Security Council, “ Considering that a grave situation has been created by the use of Soviet military forces to suppress the efforts of the Hungarian people to reassert their rights, “ Taking into account that because of a lack of unanimity among its permanent members the Security Council has been unable to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, “Decides to call an emergency special session of the General Assembly, as provided in General Assembly resolution 377 A(V) of 3 November 1950, in order to make appropriate recommendations concerning the situation in Hungary.”

━ United Nations Security Council Resolution 120

Why couldn't the UNSC intervene or assist the Hungarian revolutionaries against the USSR forces? Only the Soviet Union voted against the Resolution, so what was stopping the UNSC from invoking Article 34 and following through with it?

Sorry if this is outside of the scope of r/AskHistorians but 13 years ago my family had some of my Oma's memories of her life in Germany.

According to my Oma, her parents hated Hitler and their village's Bauernführer. My great-grandfather was a World War I veteran and had rheumatism, so according to my Oma, he should have been exempt from the war, but apparently due to their dislike of Bauernführer and the Nazis he was conscripted in 1943 at age 51. When he came back a month or two after the end of the war, they found out he was guard in a concentration camp and apparently he had secretly let some prisoners escape when he knew the war was lost. According to my Oma, her mother never found out what her husband did during the war.

Given my Oma's age and how long it was before these details were recorded, I don't know how accurate these details are or how plausible the events were. Were people conscripted as retribution? Were conscripts sent to be guards in concentration camps? Did guards ever secretly let prisoners escape?

So in a local library I found a copy of the 2007 Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World and in the environmental background of that book it describes the Roman Empire as about 2°C warmer than in contemporary times. Does more recent environmental history research corroborate this and what would it's impact have been?

Hello, I am 17 and need to decide what to study really soon.

This question goes to everyone who studied history is now working in said field.

My interest always has been in history, if I had a dream job it would involve said subject. I am however, uncertain if there are any good (with good I mean well paying and respected since that sadly is important) jobs that you can get with a masters in history.

I feel like if I study history I will never get bored and these will be the best years of my life but I need some sort of "goal" I work towards therefore, I need some sort of job I can think of to motivate myself.

Almost everything I've seen that discusses pre-Christianisation Germanic religion focuses on Scandinavian and Norse religion and culture. I know that the Norse sagas and other stories probably influence this and lead to more information being available. Were Odin and Thor and other gods that are commonly thought of as Norse worshipped by the wider Germanic peoples? I know that "Germanic peoples" can also be a problematic term and can refer to a wide range of people. I'd be interested to hear what we know and what sources exist

Maybe with different names (like Heracles/Hercules) and different accomplishment?

Hey, I'm relatively ignorant on history but I never understood. US population exploded, and Canadian population I suppose grew comparably to what it started with, but I never understood why it didn't grow more - all of the reasons people give for US population explosion apply to Canada as well, right?

For instance I am reading Ab Urba Condita by Livy and I am interested how such a lengthy book was preserved after the fall of Rome. Was it copied down the ages by patrons?

What exactly does "peer reviewed" mean?

Is there a list of "peers" who have reviewed the content, and their reviews, readily available somewhere?

How many people would one soldier kill in one ancient battle (swords, no guns)? At what ratio of army sizes would soldier experience or ability be insufficient to overcome the the numbers?