Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

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this thread is for you ALL!

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: Dinosaurs & Fossils! Know of a moment from the historical record when someone speculated about an unexpected find? Want to share an anecdote about how paleontological records were handled by those who found them? This is the place to let your inner Fred Flintstone go wild!

I was reading up on the Soviet Concorde a couple days ago and it got me to thinking. While I know very few people ever took that, the Soviet design bureaus did manufacture a lot of passenger jets (some still in use to this day in N Korea and Iran). So my question is: how attainable was (primarily domestic) jet travel in the USSR? I know international travel was difficult for the average citizen, but were plane tickets something the average worker would have had access to? How much did they cost compared to a train ticket the same distance? And were there any changes over the course of the decades to attainability and/or the widening of availability?

So from my admittedly limited reading, it doesn't sound like the 1980s property asset bubble was associated with a housing crisis. If not, what is it about Japanese demographics, economy, or urban planning made it so?

It's a movie based on a book called The Last Duel by Eric Jager based on the famous last duel officially sanctioned by the King in the late 14th century France. The movie is an adaptation and is said to follow the book fairly closely.

There are varying accounts of the duel and what exactly transpired between the characters.

My question is not just restricted to the duel itself or the events that lead up to it, but on the overall film. Are the costumes accurate to the time period? The political setup under the king? The lifestyle depicted of lords and knights as well as attitudes towards women? Things like that.

I thought it was a fascinating film and provided good insight to the duel itself as well as life in 14th century France. At least it amde me interested in discovering more.

I had a debate on twitter the other day where a person of historical background gave some references (which I couldn't verify myself) about Hinduism trying to adopt Monotheism several times in history.

Examples given were about Buddha, Jain, Sikh and some more communities who pray to a single god.

My side of argument was, Hinduism is as big about a billion people and whichever god you pick, there would a few million followers at the very least. What's more important is that even after choosing their god, they remain a part of Hinduism.

Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism - I'm not sure how it's treated by western world or historian community but a general hindu person treat it as as a part of them - only that they chose their own god.

I'm interested what historians think on it.

Reading about the KKK in the 1920s, I notice that Indiana is consistently appearing everywhere. Some material even states that 10% of Indiana's population was in the Klan. So what's the deal with that? How did a northern state that remained solidly loyal to the Union end up becoming a KKK hotbed? I understand that the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant sentiments were not exclusive to the South, but why did the KKK itself become such a big deal and why in Indiana of all places?

I recently watched United 93, which depicts the events on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. I wonder how much of it is speculation and how much is probably true. For example, how exactly did the hijacking occur? Do we know with certainty that one of the hijackers had a fake bomb? How do we know they used box cutters? How do we know the pilots died? How do we know they put on bandanas? I could go on.

What can we say with certainty about the hijackings and what is our basis for knowing this?

I'm doing a bit of family genealogy and discovered a story about my grandmother's relatives (French Swiss but living in the German part of Switzerland.) Thing is I'm not sure how much of it is true/lost in translation.

Apparently they hid a Jewish family who were later discovered and taken by the German authorities. The community were largely pro Nazi and told on them.

I'm trying to find out what happened to the grand-relatives whose house they were hiding at? Any ideas as to the fate of Swiss citizens who aided Jewish people? Would they have been arrested or punished in any way? Were the Gestapo even allowed to move this way in Switzerland?

How historically accurate is this story?

I’ve heard before that the Portuguese missionaries that visited Japan in the 16th and 17th Centuries wanted to convert the populace to Christianity, my question is did they have a concrete idea of what a Christian Japan would look like? Did they envision any changes to the Japanese social hierarchy like the division between Emperor and Shogun? What did they believe would happen with the Emperor’s claim of being descended from the Sun Goddess? Ect.

Alternatively, did any later missionaries think about these things at all?

Thanks

Someone gave me a brief explanation about this, saying some of them were royalists who fought in the English civil war. And some others were Scotch-Irish, and came from a rough culture where they were conditioned to be aggressive and vindictive, because to be otherwise could mean they'd be exploited by someone else who was.

My friend also said many of them were from an anti-establishment background in regards to religion, trusting the literal word of the Bible over authorities who might have tried to gatekeep Christianity, a la Catholicism. And while the Baptist church started in the north, southerners adopted it and mixed it with their own sentiments.

Those are my words, btw. Not his. I'm recalling what he said from memory.

I'd love to find some good reading material about this. I've been interested for awhile now in how the white south came to be, and the deep roots of southern evangelicalism, going back to Europe and then the earliest days of Europeans, especially in the Southern Delta, around Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

I wondered how historically likely the mob violence described in John 8 of the New Testament is considered to be. In short, a woman was caught in adultery and is about to be stoned to death. 1) I believe only the Roman government could execute someone so wouldn't this be illegal? 2) By this time hadn't Judaism created legal loopholes until capital punishment was almost nonexistent? 3) Would the Roman and Jewish leadership turn a blind eye to honor killings like this or would they try to intercede?

I am not quite sure how to phrase my question well... But why did the US military forces decide that the second bombing was necessary after they saw what happened when Hiroshima was bombed?

Thank you very much

As far as I can tell, in many areas where there was seasonally extreme weather like severe winters, monsoons, or extreme heat there has been a fighting season when militaries would fight and a not-fighting season where they would wait out the weather for months. While there have been some exceptions to this in history (Napoleon etc.) it seems to me that for the past 100 years or so, modern militaries have done away with the idea of a fighting season when fighting each other and now fight year-round wars in a variety of climates.

Is this a real trend or am I just not seeing the whole picture? If this is real, when did it happen?

For clarification: I am aware that fighting seasons are still a thing in many parts of the world but those conflicts generally do not seem to involve fully modernized militaries on both sides of the conflict (Afghanistan and the US).

I am going through Chris Stewart's History of China podcast. When I listen to history podcasts, I often get an accompanying atlas so I can keep track of the political maps. For example, the I listen to a few medieval podcasts and the Penguin Atlas of Medieval History has been incredibly helpful. I am finding Chinese geography particularly hard to keep straight, given my usual European focus, so I was wondering if anybody had book recommendations that contain political maps of China over the various dynasties?

In the early 20th century, there was a large influx of Italians to the United States, especially Southern Italy, and with it came the Italian Mafia, which gained quite a prominent foothold there. Since Argentina also received a large number of Italian immigrants, was there such similar presence of the Mafia there? If so, I'd like to know more about the Italian Mafia present there. If not, what was the reason the Mafia didn't become as established there?