In a comment on this post, /u/preservedfish writes:

"British emancipation of rebel-owned slaves was later used as partial evidence that the emancipation of of an enemy's slave was a customary practice in war thus giving Lincoln the power to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure."

This points to judicial precedence, which in turn implies that the Emancipation Proclamation was formulated with some legal justification in mind. It makes sense that this would be the case, but I've never heard of any legal framework or precedent used to bolster the EP before.

Were such arguments indeed put forth? If so, what were they? If not, why not--did wartime somehow preclude such justification, or was the moral argument deemed sufficient?

There's this church in Bergen, Norway called Nykirken photo map.

It has "AÑO 1761" written on its tower. Our tour guide didn't know why it has a writing in spanish, can anyone please satisfy my curiosity?

Pictures: http://imgur.com/gallery/uVpbr

Hello /r/askhistorians,

I was wondering if someone of you might be able to tell me what this heritage actually is or what it might have been used for.

The things I know from my grandmother:

It was an item of her first Husband. As far as she knows, he was member of the freemasons - and this item might be related to them. Also she said it might be key, she wasn't able to remember correctly but she said she heard something like that.

As far as I know skulls are not a usual sign for freemasons, there might be some lodges using them (maybe scottish rite).

Also I'm pretty sure this is not a key, but who knows`? - maybe someone of you.

I appreciate your help since I really have no clue what this item is. Would love to know what it symbolic meaning is (if there is one) or if it's just some sort of paperweight.

Thanks in advance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_J._Kelly

Why was he awarded two? Was it just the brass wanting to claim that "there man" was the brave one? Or was there specific reasons for it?

https://imgur.com/gallery/iDrHF

Thanks in advance if anyone can find something, and pm me if you want/need more info

Today's topic concerns an absolutely central skill of the historian that is not only essential for the historical endeavor but also fits very well with our past topic of How to ask better questions?: Empathy.

Empathy as a central skill of the historian

At the very center of the historical endeavor lies an undeniable and universal truth: When we talk about the past, we talk about actual people. Actual, real-life, flesh and blood Human beings who during the time they were alive lead actual lives, who felt happiness and sadness, joy and pain, love and hate, hunger and cold and who experienced triumph, tragedy, victory, defeat, and sacrifice.

Whatever history we write, from those inspired by Marxist historical materialism to even those employing post-modern theory, from the extremely large pictures of the longue durée to even the smallest micro study, in the end it all comes back to how things affected these individual, real-life human beings. Ours is a field that studies humanity and humans – we are not paleontologists, geologists or physicists who can – if they so chose – be content in the study of objects or concepts.

Because for us as historians, as those who study the history of humans, it always, at the most basic level comes down to the story of actual, real-life human beings and how they affected each other and were affected by forces and things around them.

To quote an expert from my own field: George L. Mosse, one of the most respected scholars of Fascism, once wrote in his 1996 essay The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism that for historians to craft a theory of fascism it was necessary to see "fascism as it saw itself and as its followers saw it, to attempt to understand the movement on its own terms". History, he continued, considered the perception of men and women and how these were shaped and enlisted in politics at a particular place and time.

Mosse's words are not limited to Fascism or any other single phenomenon. Rather, they apply to the study of history in general and provide the reason why empathy is such a central skill for the historian. The ability to perceive the world through another person's eyes, to see their perspective, to be on an intellectual and emotional level able to understand and share their perspective of the world in their emotions and views is essential to consider their perception, to catch a glimpse into why they acted the way they acted and why they thought what they thought. And as historians, it is, after all, not just our interest to find out what happened but also why and how it happened.

As Sam Weinberg writes in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: "This is no easy task.", because it means the attempt to temporarily to rid our minds of assumptions our culture and our own thinking process have made seem natural to us. And yet, it is so central: Craig Wallner describes in his essay on historical imagination, that even Leopold von Ranke emphasized "that a key attribute of the historical imagination is empathy, the ability to project oneself into the time and place of the actors under study, to see their world through their eyes. This does not mean sympathizing or siding with those whose actions we would ordinarily condemn, but understanding why they believed and behaved as they did. This is perhaps the most difficult and, at the same time, most important of the attributes those who deal with the historical record must develop."

This skill, this ability also fulfills another central function. As former frequent contributor on the subject of slavery, /u/sowser, once wrote in a superb answer:

I don't believe historians should be utterly and unfailingly objective - like most historians I don't believe such a thing is perfectly possible anyway, but even if it were any history (at least of slavery) completely devoid of moral philosophy is fundamentally bad history. The transatlantic slave trade, antebellum slavery, slavery in the Caribbean - these were indefensible crimes committed by one group of people against another for equally indefensible reasons, and that understanding must shape how we engage with the historical record and who we prioritise in our work. We have a moral obligation to do whatever we can to give a voice to those who were made to seem voiceless; to make that extraordinary effort to bring the experience of oppressed people back from the margins and into central focus. It is not a moral obligation we have to our readers or to historians, though we certainly have those obligations as well - it is one we have to the very real people who lived through those experiences.

But we must also be careful not to write history that is basically accusatory or excusatory (if such a word exists!), either; good history tries to achieve authentic understanding, or as close to authentic understanding as we can manage. Historical narratives must not cast their subjects neatly as heroes or villains bereft of complexity and nuance. That way lies disaster for all involved. They can accept that people did bad and terrible things and condemn those things, whilst also appreciating that the explanation for why they did those things is much, much more complicated than 'because they were bad people who should know better'. If we do that, then we not only fail to do justice by them as people who also deserve to have their story told as authentically as possible, we fail to do justice by everyone - by the people who suffered at their hands, our readers and ourselves.

It's this authentic understanding that prevents us from becoming either fanboys or judges and jury that can be achieved through the ability to empathize with historical subjects.

Sometimes we are confronted with favorite battlecry of those playing the role of warriors of "objectivity", "Realz not feelz." Reddit loves "science", reddit loves "objectivity." This is not a bad thing: the point is to approach a question considering all sides. The greatest challenge of the historian is to do just that--to consider all sides at the deepest level. People act based on emotion, prejudice, life experience, factual information, observation; historians must reconstruct those holistic perspectives--for everyone. Most importantly, we strive to strip away our distance from the people we meet in our sources. "Objectivity", distance, as a historical tool introduces a modern bias. The goal of objectivity, the ability to fairly and justly investigate the past and its people, requires seeing the world with their eyes.

Empathy and asking better historical questions

Furthermore, the acknowledgement and intellectual awareness that it is real people we talk about when we talk about history is something that can enable one to ask better historical questions. When considering history in this manner, it becomes more than a collection of facts or interesting tidbits. It becomes a complex web of deeply human stories that can further our understanding and knowledge about ourselves, the society and culture we live in, and about humanity itself.

When we start engaging with history with this awareness that at its very center it is about human experiences, knowledge that otherwise would be merely neat to have can transform into realization of something bigger. When we stop treating 46.000 battle casualties at Gettysburg as a statistic and instead as 46.000 individual stories of actual people we can start engaging with their motives for fighting, their way of thinking, what consequences their deaths had, not just as a loss of human material in war but in a way that affected potentially up to 46.000 families. The thickness of an armor plate on a WWII tank becomes more than a number to be factored into another, more abstract number of "battle worth" and instead can become something that some people labor hard for to make possible and in other cases, something that takes on the meaning of the only protection between an actual person and their death. A photo of women dancing naked for US soldier somewhere in the European theater transforms from a curiosity to be gawked at into a testament for the difficult choices people in the aftermath or a destructive war and breakdown of order had to make.

This acknowledgment that when talking about history, one talks about actual people, this intellectual extension of personhood to the subjects of one's own curiosity can also help in the formulation of what I really want to know and putting that into a fitting format. The consideration of "what do I really want to know" before posing a question can help immensely in getting a better question and a better answer out of it. Do you really just want to know what the first beer was or would you rather hear what first lead people to brewing beer and how the drink and its alcohol affected these people, their society and their economy? The first one delivers an interesting tid-bit, the second one is a deep dive into specific past economies, technical possibilities and the relation between humans and intoxicants.

Thirdly, thinking about the subjects of your curiosity as actual human beings will in most cases lead to more... consideration in how to phrase and express said interest. Let me us a rather blunt example for what I mean here: We get questions about child rape – more than we'd like in fact. And also more than we'd like not only employ a very casual tone but are also exclusively concerned with either the gory details or how perpetrators did it. This is not only a problem on a purely academic level in the sense of there being very few circumstance where valuable historical insight can be gained from merely recounting the gory details of the past without further insight but also on another level that /u/sowser referenced above:

We have an academic obligation as historians to give a voice to everyone in the past, but a moral obligation to do whatever we can to draw out and amplify the voices of those who were made to seem voiceless. Not only because it helps us understand history better, but because of our shared dignity as human beings, we must help focus attention on the margins, and work to bring theh margins to the center. The past cannot speak for itself but rather it is us who occupy the place of expert who can assert their perspective. That is why it is our duty to make sure all our our historical subjects, all people of the past, are heard, including those whom others tried to silence.

So in order to ask better question, more engaging questions, and more interesting questions as well as questions that don't amount a "how to" guide for rape in the past, consider the humans behind the topic of your curiosity.

I know that the further we are removed from the past the more it seems like fiction. And that there is this distinct notion that,despite knowing on some level that that is not the case, that it certainly feels the same in that the neither the outcome of fiction nor of history changes depending on us and that history like fiction has already been written in a certain sense. That despite the knowledge of the difference, the Battle of the Bastards and the Battle of Agincourt can have a similar "feel" to a reader. But it is important to make the actualization within one's own mind that while nobody really died at the Battle of Bastards, at Agincourt 10.000 actual people perished. That the fundamental difference between Ned Stark beheaded and William Wallace beheaded is that the latter was an actual person being actually beheaded while the former is not a real person but Sean Bean pretending to be somebody else and not really being beheaded.

And finally, have also a little empathy with the people answering your questions here. All of us here love answering your engaging, funny, interesting, thought-provoking questions but sometimes even these questions can be incredibly hard, not just because it is though to find the stuff required to answer to them but also on the level of being a subject that can be emotionally draining. We are after all not history robots solely built to provide entertainment and education to people but also actual people who are intellectually and emotionally impacted by what we write here – the same way we hope you will be affected by what you read.

http://imgur.com/a/gLxmg

Got this from a friend. I can't find anything about them on the internet. From what I have found, they are probably patron saints regarding people working with medicines.