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Today you have politicians making a career out of trying to keep us on fossil fuels (especially in Ohio and Kentucky, but anywhere coal is mined and oil is drilled). Were there congressmen/senators in coastal states promising to keep the US using whale oil?

Or was the cost savings so big that it wasn't a fight that could be won?

I read alot of conflicting sources on the Internet hence the question. In regards to trade I know the Arabs played the middle man role but is there instant of direct contact?

I know that they were seen as heroes because their image appeared on stamps and postcards, but were there any other opinions as them?

Edit: I can't believe I misspelled "Thermopylae". So sorry.

A recent Cracked video talks about the Spartans of the time being very non-democratic and not natural allies of the Athenians. How friendly or hostile were the two city-states in the late 5th century BCE?

Is there any more recent translations from the original Latin? I'm basically just looking for the best version out there. I'm mainly concerned with the sections on King Arthur. I've just finished The Discovery of King Arthur by Geoffrey Ashe and wanted to delve more into the source material.

Watching The Sound of Music, Captain Von Trapp has orders to enlist in the Kriegsmarine from the Austrian navy following the Anschluß. What actually happened to the Austrian armed forces? Were they folded into the German army or was there any attempt to distinguish them? Were there any hold-outs against unification with Germany?

As what kind of weapons would the use, what kind of tactics would the use, and so on.

Bonus question, only semi-related, what would Iroquois warfare look like pre-Columbia (or, because I don't think they existed just yet as a political entity, their direct ancestors)?

There was this comment on a post about the oldest mention of Jesus Christ and I was wondering if it was true.

Comment:

This is genuinely a favorite subject of mine.

What you are undoubtedly asking are for non-Christian sources, as the gospels themselves are proven to be very old (an extant scrap of the Gospel of John, "Papyrus P52," has been proven to be as old as 90 CE, though debatable).

There are two, and both hold significant value to academia.

The first is Flavius Josephus. He was a first century Jewish historian, and boy did he history. He wrote two large works made up of several smaller books. Today, the works are published together in really small print, double-columned, and it is still larger than the average textbook. Which is probably how you would describe it--it was a World History textbook that started from the creation narrative of Genesis (according to how Jews believed) and told of just about every known event to Jerusalem up through the sacking of 70 CE.

He directly names Jesus twice: in his "Book 20" of Antiquities of the Jews, he gives a lengthy description of the stoning of "James the Just," the brother of "Jesus who was called Christ."

But a little earlier, in "Book 18," is where you have the "Testimony of Josephus." The passage is short enough that I can quote it here:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

Right away, there are questions. If you've been following, you will note that Josephus was not a Christian--he was Jewish. It stands as odd that he would say "He was the Christ." This is what makes the passage the most debated of all of Josephus's writings.

There are of course only two possibilities: he either wrote the passage or he didn't. Stylistically, nothing in the paragraph appears out of line from how Josephus otherwise wrote. By the time we have extant ("surviving") copies of Josephus's works, you get into the 14th century, so it's not like we can just go back to the original.

Still, the amount of detail leading up to and following the passage in surviving copies (spread out over large geographic areas and not limited to Christian sources) lead us to believe that had the passage been altered entirely, it would become obvious. Yet it cannot be discounted that a Jewish man, who would be waiting for the appearance of the Christ, would not likely "testify" of Jesus with so little fanfare. Was this Christian revisionist history, or was Josephus making a public profession of faith in Jesus in his own way? A 1900-year-old question.

Thus, the scholarly argument lands in the middle, as these things often do: Josephus must have written some core truth in those passages, but perhaps Christians (and it would have to be very early in the second century) transcribing their own copies sort of "helped a brother out" by interpolating bits here and there while keeping the rest of the work unchanged.

There is a third passage of note from Josephus, also in Book 18, that speaks in detail of John the Baptist who was performing baptisms in the desert and was executed by Herod Antipas, an account corroborated (but interpreted slightly differently) by the Gospels

I mentioned two sources. The second actually is a Roman source, though not one contemporary with Jesus, like you said. This is written circa 116 AD--still very close to actual events. The author was a Roman Senator named Tacitus.

His passage in his book was written to describe events after Rome was burned in a great fire during the reign of Nero. While we don't know why the fire happened, you may have heard of Nero's callousness (he allegedly--but probably didn't--fiddled on his balcony while watching Roman society collapse). But one thing we know about Nero is his persecution of Christians. According to Tacitus, Nero believed Christians both started the fire and fingered him as the source to advance the Christian message, and Tacitus' account of what was next thus reads:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.

What makes this interesting is there is no pro-Christian spin on Tacitus's works. Here we have a Roman writing of events that his audience (or at least their parents) could have been alive to remember. He mentions not only Jesus, but we know we have the "right" Jesus (as "Yeshua," or the modernized "Joshua" was actually a not-uncommon name at the time) because of mentions of his followers and his death at the hands of one Pontius Pilate.

What is notable of these extra-Biblical accounts is that they can be read in parallel with actual Biblical accounts, and the sources will not disagree (from a historical perspective). Thus, non-Christians will use the Bible to a degree for its historical value.

By the time you get into the second and third century, you have more surviving accounts-of-accounts that mention Jesus that I won't go into here, as I think we have enough evidence to show a conclusion for your purposes:

The earliest mentions of Jesus are so varied and survived from so close to the actual events they record that it is considered a univeral truth that:

1. There was a specific man named Yeshua.
2. He was baptized.
3. He had followers of at least some number.
4. He was crucified.

Now, the interpretation of the significance of Jesus rests on you to figure out.

Is this info true??

Having done some reading on the early history of Christianity, it occured to me that while "miracles" feature very strongly in the writing of early Christian writers (e.g. St. Augustin), the way these writers reason about miracles as acts of God seems to presuppose a concept of "determinism" in the natural world which, in my impression, appears out of thin air at the turn of the Christian era. To pre-Christian paganism, almost anything was the act of some deity, except perhaps for very mundane events, such as gravity and basic mechanics. Why do the crops grow? Demeter. Why are there storms at sea? Poseidon. Why is there thunder and lightning? Zeus. Putting the measurement of early Christian writers to the assumptions paganism had about the natural world would make almost any phenomenon a "miracle", and yet we find that Christianity did not simply reattribute all those acts of pagan deities to the One God, but instead, to Christianity, miracles are a few very isolated instances. So, where did Christianity take the idea of declaring most phenomena to not be caused by divine acts? Is it inherited from Judaism? Or were there philosophical traditions influential before the turn of the Christian era that informed the concept of natural determinism, or at least declared that some acts beyond the "usual" acts of deities were "miraculous"?

This is a follow up to the Genghis Khan question. I'm aware Timur was greatly aware of Genghis to the point he wanted to ressurect the Mongol Empire. Were there any famous Western conquerors like Frederick or Napoleon that knew of Genghis?