In 1945, Okinawa was a full-fledged prefecture of Japan, but with its own cultural traditions, a different native language, and its military annexation only just passing out of living memory. In the months surrounding the Battle of Okinawa the civilian population suffered at the hands of the Japanese army, including seizure of food supplies, forced drafting into "volunteer" units, and heavy pressure to commit suicide before allowing themselves to be captured. After the population was devastated during the battle for the island they continued to suffer under the American occupation, with estimates of thousands of rapes and murders against Okinawan civilians either unreported or ignored.
My question is about how the perception of Okinawa and the identity of its population influenced this. Did the Japanese military see them as colonial subjects, more expendable than "real" Japanese citizens? Did they feel that Okinawa was an integral part of Japan, making this the first attack on the home islands, or just one last outpost? In the occupation did the Americans still think of the surviving widows and elderly as the same enemy they'd been fighting for three and a half years?
1 Answers 2016-12-19
Sporus was the name of a boy whom the Emperor Nero had castrated and subsequently married. After Nero's death, the Emperor Vitellius planned to rape and murder Sporus in a public re-enactment of the Rape of Proserpina. Sporus committed suicide to prevent this. Was Vitellius just mad, or did the Romans actually do things that horrific in public?
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Greetings!
I have tried to find information about this online, but frankly I have no idea where to look and as such my searches have been pretty futile.
I am curious what levels of losses - in particular to infantry units - harmed them so badly that they no longer could be expected fulfill their task, both at a tactical and operational level.
I have read numbers such as that 10% actual casualties (platoon or company level) was enough to disrupt function and require consolidation, and that 30% losses effectively destroyed the unit for the time being and required substantial effort to consolidate. Doesn't seem unreasonable since 30% losses would be to lose an entire platoon in a company, and you'd probably need a whole platoon's effort just to initially take care of the wounded and regroup. On top of that your effective frontage would either be cut by a third even after consolidation, or it'd retain its width but become weaker overall.
However I fail to find any sources for these numbers other than if I want to start reading dozens and hundreds of actual military reports, so I wonder if anyone here know the answer, or at least can point me in the right direction?
EDIT: I realize that there simply is no clear-cut answer to the question, but there ought to be some rules of thumb that the different nations used to calculate the effectiveness and strength of a company, battalion, or division? Or maybe there is some post-war research that has been done in this area that I've simply been unable to find?
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Sorry if this isn't the right place, I'll remove if it isn't- but I'm looking for a good book to buy for my mum for Christmas with detailing Irish Celtic history. I though she'd appreciate it having lots of Irish ancestry but haven't found anything decent online. Could anyone suggest anything? Thanks.
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It seemed to be strategically less important to them than for example Sevastopol. Also if I recall correctly, it was offered once to Lithuania, but turned down (due to the mainly Russian population). Russia was also in quite a weak position during the dissolution, so how did they manage to hang onto it, as they didn't really push for Crimea either.
So what was the story behind its occupation? was there more plans to get rid of it and to whom (Poland, Lithuania, even DDR)?
1 Answers 2016-12-19
The Soviet Union copied a Boeing B-52 B-29 to make their Tupolev TU-4. Wikipedia, referenced by a Reddit TIL at the time, mentioned that the TU-4 was such an exact copy that they copied design mistakes such as an errant rivet hole into their TU-4. It is an amusing example of blatantly copying something.
Reddit TIL link here, also links to current Wikipedia
Since that time, Wikipedia was updated to remove the rivet hole fact and I cannot find any evidence that the rivet hole information was accurate.
How precisely did the TU-4 copy the B-52 B-29? Was there anything that the Soviets copied that would be similar to the rivet story?
(Edit: I typed the wrong B designation, corrected now. Thanks tlumacz!)
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Why is Marxist history, which seemed so popular some decades ago (I'm British, and therefore thinking of Hobb, Hobsbawm, Hill, Thompson etc), not an approach commonly practiced by modern day historians? Did the cold war (and fear of communism) push Marxist historical practice out of popularity? Or has Marxist history been shown as 'wrong' (and if so... why is it wrong?)
Thanks all.
Edit: Clarity
4 Answers 2016-12-19
Welcome to Monday Methods!
Long time users of the sub as well as us moderators are fairly familiar with questions like "What race were the ancient Egyptians?" or similar popping up from time to time.
These are always hard to answer and often create kind of stir, mostly because of the concept of "race" involved. This concept has many a different meaning and usage and also political connotation, depending on the cultural/national background of the person asking the question and providing an answer (for example: For me as a German speaker, the German word for race as well as many concepts associated with it culturally give me the creeps since it has a very "Nazi" connotation here but for somebody from the US, this context and connotation is different).
Even within a cultural, political or national context where the concept of race is still in use, it creates all kinds of problems in a discussion because of the multiple uses and functions of the term: There is the use as an essentialist category, meaning a description of assumed cultural and personal traits inherited from the supposed group a person belongs to; there is the social function of the category, where based upon the assumptions contained within the first usage, differences across a society are postulated; and then there is its use as a historical category, as a concept to further study and understand societies of the past.
These usages can not be wholly separated from each other and in terms of the historical study that's among the reasons, why it is so difficult to answer the aforementioned questions about the category in history beyond certain points in the 19th century.
Generally, academic historians will make the point that "race" as an essentialist category is a product of the 19th century, of modernity. In short, the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement that gave birth to bourgeois society changed the way how people thought about the world around them. With God no longer a sufficient explanation of why the world was the way it was, new categories explaining the world – in this case, most importantly, why people were different, had different societies, and looked different – needed to be found.
With the great emphasize the Enlightenment way of thinking placed on rationality, reason, and thereby science, people took it upon themselves to find a scientific way to explain why people were different. Within this context arose the concept of different races of mankind and as explanations are often wont to embrace dichotomies, a normative classification of those supposed races. Meaning, that not only were the differences in life style, social organization and looks of people explained with traits inherited through blood but also a hierarchy constructed.
The concept of race birthed the concept of racism: The idea that social and personal traits are inherited and that there are those who inherit greater and better traits and it makes them the better "race".
Many of the ideas and methods created during this time – phrenology or taxonomic models – have been thoroughly debunked by modern science and advance in genetics. But because of its use in the context like colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, the concept linger as one with influence in our society.
Race is constructed but that doesn't mean it is less real for those who have experienced or still experience the force of the concept within modernity, from association of skin color with crime to the same being associated with good math skills.
The study of this phenomenon and its hold as a social category is studied intently by many historians of the modern era and has spawned its own sub fields of study. One of the main questions though when it comes to the aforementioned topic of the ancient Egyptians or similar, is how to deal with a social concept that didn't exist in the form we are familiar with before the 19th century?
Can we as historians use a social concept unfamiliar to the past societies we study as a tool in said study? The answers vary as e.g. this thread on exactly this subject shows.
What this shows is that while it is certainly possible to gain a better picture and deeper understanding of how societies divided themselves internally and the world externally according to assumed traits and characteristics, concerning race, as /u/deafblindmute, states:
As some others have pointed out, there have been various means of group categorization and separation throughout history. That said, race as a specific means of categorization only dates back to around the mid 1600's. Now, one might say isn't this only a case of "same thing, different name" to which I would reply, not at all because the cultural logic of how people have divided themselves and the active response to that cultural logic are worlds apart. Race isn't the only method of categorization or separation that is tied to social hierarchy and violence, but it is a great example of how a method of categorization can be intrinsically more tied to those things through it's history and nature.
In line with that, it is imperative to realize that applying our cultural logic to societies of the past can be an incredibly difficult if not impossible task for societies as far back as 70 years and becomes near impossible for societies as far back as 3000 years in history.
To return to the titular question: Is it possible to tell what the ancient Egyptians looked like in terms of what color their skin most likely looked like? Yes, many of them most likely looked like modern Middle Easterners when it comes to their complexion, while others looked like people from Sub-Sahara Africa. Is it possible to tell how they divided their society? Yes, based on the evidence we have, we can say that we can discern how they divided their society with good approximation. Can we tell their race? No, not really since that concept in its approach to humanity and the social logic behind it was utterly foreign to them and projecting current social trends ind ideas backwards into history is most likely going to get someone into really hot water really fast.
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I've been listening to a lecture series about the mesoamericans in which the speaker conjectures that the Maya saw the end of the long count calendar as a time for renewal and change, pointing to how many Maya cities were abandoned within a few decades of the end of the b'ak'tun coinciding with the end of the classic period. He pointed out that we can't know for sure how they felt about it, though.
But shouldn't we have an idea? The 11th b'ak'tun ended in 1618, and there were still a handful of independent Maya cities then, weren't there? So how did they react to the end of the long count calendar? Were there changes in leadership? Cities abandoned? Or did life go on without a pause?
EDIT: Corrected date (1618, not 1612).
1 Answers 2016-12-19
I keep seeing online that he either owned a bulletproof vest but was not wearing it on the day he was assassinated, or was indeed wearing it but was shot in the neck rendering it useless.
1 Answers 2016-12-19
Hey all,
Long time lurker, I'm a computer programmer looking for some guidance and insight. Etymology in particular has always fascinated me. It's interesting being able to trace a word back to its roots, or see how latin and greek combined and then evolved.
There are a number of software tools that can measure how different two pieces of text are and return a number, e.g. soundex & string distance. This is one library of tools that can be used to analyse text and otherwise manipulate it.
I'm on the hunt for objective analysis using tools like these and others which mathematically compare measurements in the differences in a reference text that has evolved over time.
Are there any good sources of specific texts that have changed throughout history but have a clear and distinct transformation alongside a common language? I would like to try my hand at using these tools to analyse phonetic / stem / string distances over time as well. I'm thinking the Bible might be one such example?
I understand I may come across as vastly underestimating the complexity of language evolution as there are no doubt breaks in continuity, sudden surges of change followed by periods of relative stability too, not to mention completely new words come and go, so I am also keenly interested in learning about all of this.
My goal is to be able to work in reverse - take a modern text and degenerate it toward a faux-ancestral language (or multiple ancestors). Input x years and use key metrics to guide the de-evolution. The end result doesn't need to be 100% accurate to the real-world evolution, so I wouldn't expect to put in english and get fluent ancient roman, but I would like to be passably close for a casual observer beyond simply randomising phonemes.
Thanks in advance, and if there's a more fitting form for these questions happy to be pointed in the right direction.
2 Answers 2016-12-19
Japan is very unusual in having such a long period of ceremonial monarchy, where the Emperor didn't really have the power. Am I correct that, originally, they did rule like other monarchs? How did they lose this power, and why were they kept around for so long rather than being replaced as Emperor? And when the Shoguns took over, what exactly did the Emperor do, just religious ceremonies? I know this occasionally happened in China (for example, I remember in Romance of the Three Kingdoms Cao Cao kept the Emperor around to do sacrifices and so on), and various other places, but I wonder how Japan managed to keep military dictator/ceremonial monarch for so long in such a stable way.
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Why did the builders of the Erie canal spend so much effort digging west through New York State when they could have diverted north to Oswego, used Lake Ontario to go west, and used a much shorter canal near Buffalo to scale Niagara Falls?
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Or more precisely, is what we understand about some historical events possibly not correct because it was transcribed through the lens of the victors with bias?
Do historians have to try to account for this? Or are texts generally taken at face value?
Like if the winning side wrote down "this tribe attacked our homes and raped our women, so we went to war with them and wiped them out", would that be what was understood to have happened if there was no counter evidence available?
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I ask broadly because I don't even know how to clarify this question. One answer may be in terms of leaders who "choose" the subsequent leader pursuant to some ritual, but I understand that it may be more complex than that.
Basically I'm wondering about the longest line of succession without a major intervening factor.
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After Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Congress passed the 22nd ammendment, limiting presidents to two consecutive terms. This was to prevent a leader from dominating the executive office like he had, and to prevent any potential abuse or misuse of power.
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The journey of the fleet led by Christopher Columbus from Spain to the Americas has been much detailed and understood; I wondered when they decided to return to Spain, was the journey much smoother or still as dangerous as the way they came? My guess is maybe the return was really made easier for them once they knew the way to come, but how was it made easier?
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I can't imagine poor people had many options to pass the time back then. Did they just work all day and bang all night? Like not to sound unprofessional but what's up with that
1 Answers 2016-12-19