Basically i am asking how scientists and smart people said the world became a thing, and how people who believed in greek/roman mythology said the world became a thing.

How did Portuguese, that in all other regards follows the trends common in other Romance languages, end up with such weird, numerical days of the week?

Segunda-feira | literally "Second Market" for Monday Terça-feira | literally "Third Market" for Tuesday Quarta-feira | literally "Fourth Market" for Wednesday...

And so on, with the exception of Saturday and Sunday, Sábado and Domingo respectively, that are identical to Spanish and similar to French, Italian and Romanian.

When did this happen and why was that so?

I read that Edward the III borrowed 1.5 million florins from two prominent banking families to finance an invasion of France, then defaulted when his invasion failed (and ruined those families). How did early bankers prevent defaults when their clients were literally countries in some cases?

I understand there was a time that people started to settle in a place but when and how were the "owners" decided.

Welcome to a belated Monday Methods.

In previous installments of this series, we have already talked about literature as a historical source, video games and the study of history, narrative and the lenses of history. But we have never really discussed film. Not film in the sense of how historically accurate some movies are and if they need to be (that would be a topic for another day) but using film as a historical source to get greater insight and a greater understanding about historical societies that have produced these films.

To that end, today we'll take a closer look at one of the pioneers of the study of film as a historical source and see if his methodology can be applied to other visual mediums like video games: Siegfried Kracauer and his seminal study of German Film of the Weimar Period From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological Study of the German Film.

Kracauer was an interesting figure. Born in 1889 in Frankfurt, he was a writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist. Associated through personal connections with the budding Frankfurt School, Kracauer in his work as a journalist and film theorist was the first German writer of what we today understand as film critique, meaning he was one of the first who published reviews of movies that didn't try to sound like and emulate theater critique but who also included factors such as editing and lightning, camera work, etc. in his reviews. He was also the author of several prominent sociological studies on the subject of cultural taste at a time when the field of sociology was in the process of establishing itself. His 1930 text Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses) is an in-depth look at the culture and taste of white collar employees in the Weimar Republic and what the forms of entertainment they chose can tell us about their political, social, and cultural positions. It still makes for an interesting and at times very funny read but the text we will delve into today is probably Kracauer's best known work in the English language world: From Caligari to Hitler.

##Caligari, Hitler, and the motif

Published in 1947, the text had been many years in the making. Picking up some of Kracauer's favorite topics (taste, art, culture, and film), From Caligari to Hitler investigates what popular German films of the Weimar years can tell us about German society in this time frame. As Kracauer himself writes in the preface to the book:

This book is not concerned with German films merely for their own sake; rather, it aims at increasing our knowledge of pre-Hitler Germany in a specific way. It is my contention that through an analysis of the German films deep psychological dispositions predominant in Germany from 1918 to 1933 can be exposed – dispositions which influenced the course of events during that time and which will have to be reckoned with in the post-Hitler era.

In his introduction, which serves both as a methodological road map as well as an argument for why this is important, Kracauer makes arguments that closely resemble arguments used today by historians applying the methods of cultural history to various subjects. He criticizes the trend of literature at the time to study film as if it were divorced from society at large. Referencing the high praise German film received at the time for their excellent camera work and – again, at the time – boundary pushing technical innovation of having a camera that reached complete mobility, Kracauer writes: "This literature, essentially aesthetic, deals with films as if they were autonomous structure. For example, the question as to why it was in Germany that the camera first reached complete mobility has not even been raised."

Kracauer asserts that no artistic medium is better suited to the exploration of a society's mentality and dispositions – dispositions that, as he highlights, are not natural or imbued by unchangeable national characteristics but subject to a process of historical change – than film. He argues this as follows:

Films are never the product of an individual. Rather they represent a collective effort involving teams. "Since any film production unit embodies a mixture of heterogeneous interests and inclinations, teamwork in this field tends to exclude arbitrary handling of screen material, suppressing individual particularities in favor of traits common to the many", as he writes.

Films address themselves and appeal to the anonymous multitude. Therefore, popular films resp. popular film motifs can be supposed to satisfy existing mass desires. Because it is a medium build on mass appeal and influenced by people basically expressing what is popular through attendance and their monetary payments, these popular motifs capture topics that are of obvious interest to the audience.

Films reflect not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions – deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below dimensions of consciousness. Other mediums do this too but the fundamental difference is that film is a viscerally visual medium. Film, in the words of Kracauer, "scans the visual world", it captures "innumerable components of the world they mirror: huge mass displays, casual configurations of human bodies and inanimate objects, and an endless succession of unobtrusive phenomena". What Kracauer means by that is that because film is a visual medium in motion that mirrors the visible world to be believable, it tends to capture for example actively unseen parts of human interaction. He uses the example of how the visual montage of things like the clasping of a hand, the interplay of fingers or the close-up of a face reacting captures for us clues to the inner life of a person as expressed in visual cues an audience would culturally understand.

By reviewing such clues and actions, by looking at what films across the board contend with, Kracauer concludes:

What counts is not so much the statistically measurable popularity of films as the popularity of their pictorial and narrative motifs. Persistent reiteration of these motifs marks them as outward projection of inner urges. And they obviously carry most symptomatic weight when they occur in both popular and unpopular films, in grade B picture as well as in superproductions. The history of German screen is a history of motifs pervading films of all levels.

The motifs that Kracauer identifies for German film of the Weimar Period are motifs of cultural and political uncertainty and the expressed need for the charismatic figure, the tyrant to lead the German people into certainty.

In the title-giving giving 1920 movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a mad hypnotist, Dr. Caligari, uses a somnambulist, Cesare, to commit murder. Celebrated as an expressionist horror movie, the original authorial intent of the story was fundamentally anti-authorian. Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, the authors of the script, intended it as a metaphor for the German war government in which Caligari stands for an unlimited authority that idolizes power as such, and, to satisfy its lust for domination, ruthlessly violates all human rights and values while Cesare is a mere instrument, literally hypnotized to do Caligari's bidding. And as such it would work. But that was not the full account of the movie.

The story of Dr. Caligari and Cesare is told with a narrative frame as introduced by director Robert Wiene. This frame is that the story is told to the viewer by a man named Francis, who investigates Dr. Caligari and his crimes. Francis tells the story through flashbacks, about how he saves his fiance from Cesare and Caligari and how he discovers Caligari runs an asylum and uses the inmates to commit crimes. In a shocking twist ending that proves that M. Night Shyamalan studied his film history, the movie ends with a return to the present and it is revealed that it was Francis who was insane the whole time. He was a mental patient in the Asylum run by Dr. Caligari and imagined the whole story as part of an insane fantasy.

It is this framing devise that lead Kracauer to his analysis of the motif, writing:

Janowitz and Meyer knew wh they raged against the the framing story: it perverted, if not reversed, their intrinsic intentions. While the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority, Wiene's Caligari glorified auhtority and convicted its antagonists of madness. A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one – following the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to the lunatic asylum.

It is this theme, this motif that Kracauer traces through the whole of German in the 1920s forward to 1933. The basic theme of the seemingly unavoidable alternative of tyranny or chaos. Nosferatu, Dr. Mabuse, Metropolis and M – from high brow cinema to the popular to the B-movie; it pervades German cinematic culture. And lastly, it is this disposition as Kracauer argues that helped the rise of Hitler and the Nazis.

Kracauer's writings were and are still controversial in this conclusion. Some have interpreted him as trying to establish a casual relationship: As in, because cinema pushed this motif, people voted for Hitler. This, however, is not an accurate reading. Kracauer sees these films and their motifs as an expression of dispositions shaped by historical and cultural circumstances and while the popularity of these motifs and narratives in turn enforced them in culture, they are more expression than cause in Kracauer's theory.

##Taking Kracauer further: Wolfenstein, Doom, and the lone fight against Evil.

Kracauer's text is an immensely interesting one both for historians as well as students of film. In many a way, his approach to film as a historical source, written in 1947, predates the way cultural historians would later start working from the 1980s forward, albeit missing some ingredients, such as discourse as a concept, that would only develop after him.

But can we use Kracauer's method as in the search for generally common, popular and pervasive motifs that tell us something about the cultural and social context from which they arose be applied elsewhere in history?

In the following, I'll try to sketch a few thoughts of how Kracauer's methodology could be applied to the study of another, equally visual mass-medium that Kracauer could not have foreseen: Video games, in this case specifically the early Ego-shooters of the 1990s, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D (this focus in the following sketch is in part due to the 20-years-rule here since one could also make the case of using the modern military shooter e.g. but it is also because these early titles bring up some interesting cases).

Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, published in 1992 resp. 1993 are generally considered the titles that popularized the Ego Shooter as a video game genre and have, both in subsequent years, as well as until today spawned countless similar products. What Kracauer writes about films, holds up, with some modification of video games:

Like Films, video games are never just the product of an individual, especially since exactly the generation of video games that Doom and Wolfenstein represent. While the early to mid-90s saw the brief rise and fall of the auteur (as in the person that like the director in movies in seen as the driving force behind the medium video game), exemplified in the case of John Romero, it is here that the pattern is established the video games like they are today are seen even more than movies as the product of a team effort. Think about it: While you are watching a Joel Schuhmacher movie, meaning you expect a certain aesthetic and narrative, you are playing a Blizzard or Gearbox Game, not an Erich Schaefer Game (the exception being Hideo Kojima here but his exceptional role confirms the rule here).

Like Film, video games address themselves and appeal to the anonymous multitude. They are an entertainment product that sell on mass appeal. Therefore, popular video games resp. popular video game motifs can also be supposed to satisfy existing mass desires.

Connected to that, they even go further than film. Whereas film in the words of Kracauer scans the visual world, i.e. must make the story they tell understandable through commonly understood visual clues and work with a generally believable depiction of our world, video games go even further in that they – due to the nature of the medium – must make the player's participation in the story believable and understandable in general terms. In essence, they must motivate you to set out to do what the makers of the game intend you to do as a player, both through mechanics as well as through narrative. In Diablo, you go down into the dungeon because you want to save Tristram and you want to get better loot. Saying "Fuck Tristram, I'm going back to where I came from and explore other lands" is not an option within the game world, meaning what the developers want the player to do must be both on a game play and narrative level the most interesting thing to do for the player.

In this effort, there are also tropes and motifs that in the case of Wolfenstein or Doom must be even more basic and powerful in the sense of satisfying a cultural desire because of the technical limitations of the time. Real-time 3-D worlds are a hard. So thing to create, in the early 90s even more so than nowadays and thus both Doom and Wolfenstein turned those limitations in essential framing devices: Real-time 3-D worlds are easiest to create when they are empty and empty spaces is most easily interpreted as one in which something went terribly wrong. AI was limited so creating characters that were on the players side was difficult to impossible, so the player stands alone in their fight against evil. Complicated narratives are hard to tell beyond the use of scrawling texts so the world needs to communicate to you visually and easily why you are here and shooting at things, so turn the things you are shooting at into culturally easily recognizable representations of evil like Demons and Nazis.

Basically, the technical limitations of the time demanded culturally very powerful motifs as framing in order to motivate the player to do what the devs wanted them to do. And Doom and Wolfenstein chose motifs that went on to become very successful and thus can be seen as powerful in the sense that they appealed and spoke to social desires. The overarching motif is easy to discern here: The lone hero, stranded and lost in an unfamiliar and dangerous environment battles forces of evil with a massive arsenal of powerful weapons. It's a motif so powerful that it pervaded the genre, from attempts at serious and creative story telling (System Shock 2) to parody (Duke Nukem 3D) and is still present today, so much so that it was even subverted and deconstructed relatively recently (Spec Ops: The Line).

So far, so groovy. While I am unable to in this space deliver a full analysis of the motif akin to Kracauer and his history of German film, here are some basic thoughts: It is a motif that certainly comes from the very foundations of the medium and that has evolved over time since. It's purest form in Doom and Wolfenstein was at the time not a new motif. 80s Action movies had previously brought this motif in its purest form to perfection in films like Predator, Commando, Conan, Rambo: First Blood II, and so on and so forth.

Historians of film have seen these action movies largely influenced by the Reagan Era of politics and its reversal of previous detente with the Soviet Union. The image of the lone fighter up against armies of opponents or a technically superior opponent but supported by a technical arsenal of weaponry and his own ingenuity can be relatively firmly established as motifs that speak to the need fight evil and the underlying fear of being technically outclassed, i.e. the need for an arms race as to not face the Predator or the Terminator, who can be defeated by smarts but is still dangerous and destructive.

But Wolfenstein and Doom all take place after this has passed. They use the same motif but in a different context and thus can take on a different meaning. With the Cold War over they can express a search for the security of being the good guy. We have won but what is next in a world where there is no more evil to fight – is it the end of history? Or are we using these motifs to express our desires to be positioned as good via having an other to differentiate us from. Is the fight against the legions of hell or the legions of Nazis a motif that reassures us that we are still good because there is still evil to fight?

These are question where Kracauer and his methodology could lead to further and fruitful investigation. Rather than confining him solely to what he wrote, we can contemplate his method as still useful to us in a further exploration of our past and our world by applying it today. And there lies the worth of methodology as a whole. By giving us certain guides with which we can easier navigate whole slews of topics and subjects.

Further reading:

• Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film.

• Jared Poley: "Siegfried Kracauer, Spirit, and the Soul of Weimar Germany" (pp. 86-102). In: Revisiting the "Nazi Occult"

• Patrice Petro: From Lukács to Kracauer and beyond: Social Film Histories and the German Cinema. In: Cinema Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Spring, 1983), pp. 47-70.

• Noah Isenberg: "This Pen for Hire: Siegfried Kracauer as American Cultural Critic" (pp. 29-41). In: Culture in the Anteroom.

My understanding is that iodine is extremely rare in the earth's crust, and so it is naturally found only in some vegetables close to the sea coasts. Given, that humans have lived away from sea coasts for a very long time, how did they make up for iodine in their diets?

In the wider context of Cold War studies in high school history, we really only hear bout the fact that Yugoslavia was one of the only socialist countries to defy Stalin and accept the Marshal plan.

All I know is that Tito ruled with an iron fist to keep the several republics together and had a form of socialism that was both moderately prosperous and kept to socialism. Can any historians tell me about what life was like back then?

As far as I can tell Rome and Carthage didn't own the lands between them. How did the people living there react to the war? Did they take sides or try to stay out of it?

I don't get it. They inherited an economy that was in shambles from the Romanovs, they were recovering from a Civil War, they were dealing with Stalin's purges and collectivization, they were in the middle of the Great Depression, and they owed money to a bunch of countries. How the hell do they have the money to do this shit?

Please feel free to go deep, e.g. we're living in a neoliberal social imaginary in which the logics of late capitalism constitute a dictatorship of no (perceived) alternatives, and most, unconsciously if not consciously, believe alongside Fukuyama that with the end of the Cold War and the triumph of capitalism as the basis of all human structure and organisation, we have reached the end of history (in which case the public, in general, sees little use anymore for the study of history).

Specifically looking for answers or examples in regards to allied countries in WWII, but am interested in hearing different countries perspectives.

I have heard of penal battalions before, but I am not sure if this is just historical fiction.

Did criminals or prisoners take part in the war effort and in what capacity?

Thank you!

Hitler wrote some pretty heavy shit about Russia and Bolshevism in his book, and yet they seemed to play so nice together in the Spanish Civil War, also the invasion of Poland.. Was it like a "frienemies" type relationship or something?

I've fired replica black powder rifles that represent the type used in the American Civil War, and they take at least 30 seconds to reload (if you're quick.) That's enough time to fire 3 volleys of arrows at the opposing army. Why then use such an inefficient weapon?

Apologies if the question is worded awkwardly.

I was thinking today, there are a few peculiarities to driving on a major highway like I-95 which aren't present when driving on smaller roads. Like, using entrance and exit ramps, driving at prolonged high speeds, and continuing relatively straight for long periods of time. I would assume that American drivers, before the construction of these highways, were not accustomed to driving in this way.

For example, not having to make an actual turn for hours on end would probably be strange to someone when the highways were first built, and I'm guessing that there were drivers who could have fallen asleep or something because of a lack of stimulus.

Are there any documentations of Americans having to relearn their driving habits, or adjust how driving was taught in response to a newly built highway system?

Hi All,

I'm going through another one of those tears through the history of the Roman Republic, and I just noticed something I'd taken for granted. I checked and I didn't see this asked already.

So Roman politics in the 50's BCE were bad. So bad that the death of one faction's leader resulted in the Senate burning down. Pompey was given extraordinary powers as a sole Consul in 52BC following the death of Clodius. The Senate passes the senatus consultum optimum, allowing Pompey to introduce martial law to end the anarchy in Rome.

Rome's was in anarchy because they had no police force. Caesar's big moment was him crossing into Italy with an army so that he wouldn't face charges over any of the things he'd done prior to or during his Consulship/Procunulship.

So how did Pompey implement martial law? Was there an italian legion sitting around in Campagna or something? Were they levied and paid for by Pompey or by the Senate? Did these guys flee with him across the Adriatic when Caesar made clear he was coming with an army? Or was there no army, just Pompey riding around on a donkey throing javelins at n'er-do-wells while shouting 'SPQR'?

Thanks!

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I thought this question might be interesting due the continued interest with chivalry into the Tudor age and the ramping up of the Tudor propaganda machine (which perhaps may have liked to play on chivalric mythologies and romances). Even with the continuity of Regnal numbers starting at the Norman Conquest. would Arthur II have ever been considered?

I have read in several places that people in the past were on average substantiality shorter than the average person today. For example it is estimated than the average soldier in Greco-Persian wars was only 5'4" (Thanks Dan Carlin). That seems really short to me. Was this due malnutrition or disease? Or are just that because tallness is considered a desirable trait in many cultures, so we are just descended from the taller people. Thanks!