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2 Answers 2017-09-14
Sorry if this has been asked before, but it seems relevant in light of everything that is happening with North Korea.
2 Answers 2017-09-14
With the vast communities of humans spread out across the globe, what caused red hair to be prominent only in Ireland?
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Why do people keep saying we lost the Vietnam War when we signed the Paris Peace Accords with the North Vietnamese in 1972? Saigon didn't fall until 1975, almost three years later. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say the South Vietnamese lost the Second Vietnam war?
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And would he have cared?
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Is there academic consensus on whether or not the Trojan war as described in the Iliad actually occurred?
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In the last year of High School in the Netherlands every student has to make an essay or a practical project, so me and a classmate have chosen to write an essay about New Imperialism in the Congo. This means we are going to do literary research about:
We naturally don't want you to do our essay, but I think this might be the best place to ask if someone has a literature list of important books that cover the subject.
A book that was already recommended to me is 'Congo. Een geschiedenis' (English 'Congo: The Epic History of a People').
If you want to share something that you know about this subject it is welcomed ofcourse, as long as it comes with sources so we can back it up in our essay, but the priority is literature if that is possible.
1 Answers 2017-09-14
I was reading something that mentioned that society became more patriarchal during the late Paleolithic/early Neolithic, that gender roles began to emerge (male hunters, female gatherers) and that marriage customs may have developed during this period.
How do we know this? What kind of evidence is there? Or is this a myth?
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I was looking at histories of other countries and a bit surprised to see they've re-written their constitution multiple times just in the last century.
On the other hand, the US Constitution is seen as completely immutable. The closest we have to re-writing it is adding amendments, and that's an incredibly slow process that has only happened once in the last 50 years.
1 Answers 2017-09-14
Where did garden gnomes first originate? How did they become decorative pieces for gardens? And why gnomes?
4 Answers 2017-09-14
For context, the envoy's official webpage is https://www.state.gov/p/eur/rt/hlcst/. I learned of this special envoy because Rex Tillerson recently ended a number of other special envoys, but decided not to end this one (see http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/28/politics/tillerson-state-dept-envoys/index.html). Note that I'm not asking about Tillerson's specific motivations for not closing this envoy, but more generally about how this office survived up until the start of the 20 year rule.
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Rape during the Holocaust has, apparently, been a fraught subject. Some historians, such as Lawrence Langer, appear to downplay the role of rape in the Holocaust significantly. For example, in this (relatively) recent interview on the subject, Langer noted:
"I have no doubt that some women were raped," says Lawrence L. Langer, a preeminent Holocaust scholar. But while rape is undoubtedly significant for those who are victimized, "the historical significance is very small in the context of the Holocaust experience," Langer says. "To make rape a significant part of the narrative, the numbers would have to be in the thousands or tens of thousands. We will never know how often it happened."
My understanding is that even this allowance for rape is a relatively recent turn for Langer and that his earlier work argued for even fewer instances of rape.
At the same time, historians like Dagmar Herzog have shown pretty conclusively that rape (in the form of forced prostitution) was widespread and could be found in many of the ghettos and camps. Although I can't cite them off the top of my head, I'm also pretty certain that other historians have shown that rape (whether through extortion, "forcible rape", or other forms of sexual violence that we would today consider rape) was relatively common, certainly much more common than the relatively low numbers suggested by Langer in the quoted passage above. (Note, he appears to be arguing that rape was extremely uncommon, by saying that those numbers would have to "be in the thousands", which suggests that he believes they didn't even reach that threshold. This, in a system of persecution that saw tens of millions of victims).
I'm interested in this older notion of Holocaust scholarship that sees rape as not being a fundamental experience for victims of Nazi persecution. Can anyone here speak to how those older arguments were made and the evidence that they used in doing so? I suspect that part of the problem is that survivors didn't necessarily speak much about rape, and I know for certain that there was a stigma in the immediate post-war period regarding women being seen as having survived by trading sex for food/better treatment. I'd imagine that this phenomenon of the post-war era plays a part, but that's speculation.
So how did historians of the Holocaust originally argue that rape was not a fundamental experience for victims?
Please also note: I don't want to limit this to male-on-female rape, as I know that there is a lot of evidence of male-on-male rape as well, especially in the camps (see, for example, Heger's The Men With the Pink Triangle).
Thanks!
2 Answers 2017-09-14
I have a History of Western Civilization project due, and I'm required to find 2 films (only one can be a documentary, the other can be a fictional film or nonfiction film). These films must somehow relate to the Scientific Revolution or the emergence of modern science between the 17th and 19th century. Any suggestions would be great. Thank you!!
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I've started doing Dagorhir, and one thing I've noticed is that spears have a big disadvantage against anyone armed with a shield. Shields are a lot easier to maneuver than the point of a spear several feet out from the wielder. Thus it's easy for a shieldbearer to block all thrusts and close in without the spearman being able to do anything about it. Since swords and shields and spears were all very popular on the high medieval battlefield, there probably would have been a lot of spear vs sword combat. How would spearmen fight swordsmen?
Additionally, I've noticed it's really damn hard to wield both a shield and a spear. How'd they do it?
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At what point in time were time zones discovered? Or at what point did they become relevant like they are today?
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This week, ending in September 14 2017:
Today's thread is for open discussion of:
History in the academy
Historiographical disputes, debates and rivalries
Implications of historical theory both abstractly and in application
Philosophy of history
And so on
Regular participants in the Thursday threads should just keep doing what they've been doing; newcomers should take notice that this thread is meant for open discussion only of matters like those above, not just anything you like -- we'll have a thread on Friday for that, as usual.
4 Answers 2017-09-14