Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

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Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!

We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: Women leaders! For this round of Tuesday Trivia, the call is open for all things related to Women Leaders in history. Women who held formal or informal leadership roles, those who were given or took power, and those who challenge the idea of what it means to be a leader. You take the lead and we'll fall in line in this week's thread!

Last year me and my fiancee went to visit President Andrew Jackson's slave plantation. When we went right to the back of the plantation where the slave houses used to be, we saw a sign saying a number of blue beads and jewellery had been found, and that up to the mid-18th century blue jewellery seemed to have a lot of significance to enslaved African-Americans. And this is theorised to be connected to the spiritual beliefs of their homelands.
My impression from this sign is this isn't well understood by historians, but it's just a sign at a plantation, perhaps someone has done a study?

I wonder if perhaps there's a tradition of significance to blue jewellery in somewhere like Benin or Senegal where many slaves came from, or perhaps around the whole of West Africa, but that's a big place with a lot of different cultures without much in common. I assume by the time Andrew Jackson owned these slaves, they were not thinking of themselves as coming from Ghana or Dahomey, but perhaps they'd syncretised cultures and that was something from one particular place that had become significant to the whole of a pan-African-American culture? (Obviously this could just be a Tennessee thing, but I am sure I also saw it somewhere else, and I think somewhere I read that this was found in archeological digs in other places.)

I understand that what we is describe as Feudalism was the description of a society (Neapolitan I think) in a particular short time period. How does the society in Medieval Europe differ from this particular system to warrant such a dislike from the academics?

I'm just not finding reference to it on the web very easily and I've only seen parts of the movie. Is his mask historically accurate? Was it due to leprosy related deformities? Or something symbolic separate from that?

I know he existed irl but also that much of the film is fictionalized

With recent reports that Russians are deporting Ukrainians, I have seen many users on worldnews claiming that deportation and ethnic replacement had happened during the USSR. How true is this?

Valerie Hansen, in The Open Empire, writes: "Gold was always viewed as an inferior metal to silver. The Chinese price for silver was almost always higher than the world price and the Chinese price for gold was almost always lower. Accordingly, silver tended to flow into China while gold flowed out."

Given the relative global scarcity of gold and abundance of silver, this seems highly counterintuitive. What accounts for this?

I’m doing a research project on the modernization of individualism and social mobility during the Hundred Years’ War. Is there any primary source contract or indenture calling for troops for either the English or the French detailing pay/compensation and service length?

Thanks!

My librarian was showing students a newspaper clipping for a class, and one of the students noticed this word. A search of Google turned up only scant references to the word, which appears to be clothing, without much context and without any specific descriptions. It appears to be a word from the 1800s that was common enough that writers referred to it without feeling the need for further elaboration. I also wondered if it was a common misspelling of a word we would recognize. The excerpt we found it in was listing items for sale. That listing and the few writings we found on a Google search support the idea that it is a piece of clothing.

We are now playing a game with students since the word only appears on Google a few times, so the likelihood that they can cheat is low. They have to come up with a description of a bumbazett and justify it with the writings we have found that mention it. We would like to be able to reward the student(s) who come closest to the actual description.

If not, when did the perception shift from "pagan soothsayers have some access to mystical power, but it's irrelevant compared to faith/the true God/etc.", to "these are just normal people with the wrong belief"? Did the colonial encounter with indigenous belief systems have something to do with it?

"Pagan" in scare quotes since most of those alleged (European) pagans had probably fully grown up in the Christian tradition themselves, at least according to my limited reading.

Thanks!

After getting to know and reading about paganism and Abrahamic religions, I couldn't help but wonder if Zoroastrianism could be included in paganism as well? I am from Iran and was raised a Muslim but I don't consider myself as one, but as I've always been living through Persian traditions, I have found many pagan effects in our customs. I, myself think that if you ask a zealous Zoroastrian, they might deny it, but technically speaking I believe it could be perceived as pagan.

I saw a copy of the USA Declaration of Independence hanging up recently and was struck by how straight and neat the lines were. I wonder the same thing about the US Constitution. If I tried to hand write straight across a paper with no lines to guide me, I'm sure by the time I got to the bottom of the sheet the lines would be a bit curved and jumbled.

How did scribes back in the day keep their lines so consistently straight that they could write entire pages by hand and keep everything in order?

Thanks very much everyone.

I’ve been reading the book When Montezuma Met Cortes by Matthew Restall and he makes a number of interesting arguments, some of which I find a bit confusing. I was wondering if any experts on this time period could clear it up for me.

In his book, Restall goes to great lengths to argue that the Spaniards played a much smaller role in the ‘conquest’ of the Aztec empire than did Tlaxcala and other allied Indigenous nations. He points out that the Spanish comprised a small percentage of the troops present at the siege of Tenochtitlan and even argues that the Spanish were being manipulated by Tlaxcala, not the other way around.

On the other hand, he argues that Spanish war tactics and ideology was responsible for making the war far more brutal, even genocidal. He writes:

“Furthermore, the Spanish tendency to engage in a kind of total war (ideologically justified, aimed at unconditional surrender, with civilians as legitimate targets) destroyed the second factor of pre-Colombian restraint.”

And:

“In other words, the lesson of conquistador practices was that the rules no longer applied; the Spaniards let the genie of total warfare out of the bottle.”

He also describes how the Spanish justified atrocities against Indigenous people with a racist ideology. He concludes:

“The sum of all this so resoundingly makes the case that the “Conquest of Mexico” should be seen as a war—not a conquest war, not a short war, and certainly not a surprisingly short war, but fully and categorically a war—that it in fact does more than that. It suggests that we might do better to understand it as a genocidal war.”

I find these arguments a bit difficult to reconcile. If the Spanish were as marginal to the fight as Restall suggests and were being manipulated by the Tlaxcalans then why was their total war ideology so readily adopted? Who orchestrated the siege of Tenochtitlan? And who ultimately was in ‘control’ of the battle and bears the most responsibility for the carnage that occurred?

I tried to look for images of the Silk Road, but all that popped up were maps of the Silk Road. I know that the Silk Road wasn't actually a road that we know of today, but I don't know what the Silk Road actually looked like.