I looked this question up on google and didnt seem to find any answers

After the recent coup that took place in Burkina Faso, which was launched by a lieutenant colonel, I noticed that many coups that I am familiar with, especially those in Africa, seemingly have been lead by people with these ranks but not Admirals or Generals. This is purely conjecture on my part of course. However it is interesting that so many colonels and lieutenant colonels are able to gain enough support to launch coups in the first place. This there any precedent to this? Am I right with my hunch?

The fictionalized story depicts Chamberlain being tipped off of Hitler’s true plans for Europe before the signing of the agreement. Chamberlain decides to go forward with it anyways because it will at least give the UK and her allies time to mobilize for the inevitable war.

The film, therefore, depicts the Munich Conference as a victory for the UK rather than an act of dangerous naïvety as it’s often described. The end credits even go as far to imply that the allies may have lost the war if not for this crucial year of mobilization between the Munich Conference and the outbreak of WWII.

Did military mobilization actually begin in Britain after the Munich Conference? Was a second war with Germany really considered inevitable in the UK during the mid-late 1930’s? To what extent is this a fair and/or accurate perspective of the Munich Conference and the situation between the UK and Germany as a whole?

Thanks!

I am particularly interested in the Incan, Mayan, and Aztec empires. Preferably revisionist/critical sources.

A major feature of modern political discourse is intense tribalism, with a small but vocal contingent arguing that "both sides are crazy." This "both sides" worldview is widely ridiculed by progressives, who view self-described centrists as drawing a moral equivalence between inequivalent ideologies, as seen on the subreddit /r/enlightenedcentrism. Was there an equivalent discourse in the lead up to the American civil war that laid blame on anti-slavery forces for "pushing away centrists"?

Yestreen I wed a lady fair,

An ye wad believe me,

On her cunt there grows nae hair,⁠

That's the thing that grieves me.

​

​

It vex'd me sair,

it plagu'd me sair.⁠

It put me in a passion,

To think that I had wed a wife,

⁠Whose cunt was out o' fashion.

​

This poem is quite vulgar even by modern standards and seems positively scandalous by eighteenth-century standards.

Did Burns face any consequence or criticism for this poem?

So I guess first the question sort of depends on how would a regular Roman join the legions and get assigned? But let's say I'm a Roman looking to do something other than farm or be a bakers apprentice or whatever. I get assigned to some general in Britannia. But I hate it there. It's cold and rains all the time. And worse I think my general is an idiot who's going to get everyone killed the next time we fight the Caledonians. I heard the Sassanians were pushovers and the weather is nice. Is there a way for me to put in a transfer? Or even just transfer to a different general even if I have to stay in Britannia?

I'm teaching early Chinese dynasties. I don't know where the cut-off between the ancient dynasties and classical dynasties is. The difference seems very subjective. Is Qin the start of classical China? Why?

I am genuinely curious as to if the Party Switch did actually occur, and if it did occur, when. Any books or articles that you can send along my way as well as with your answer would be greatly appreciated.

With inflation all over the news, I’ve been wondering how the current rate of inflation compares to estimated rates from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. I assume there are limitations to how this could be estimated, but would think one could put a finger to the wind and estimate annual CPI for any historical society with a monetary currency, and written records of the value of a given basket of goods.

I understand that there have been four main periods since CPI was first recorded in 1913 where it rose more than 5% annually. It seems to align (at least in the US) with periods of war or great uncertainty.

Couldn’t find any studies looking at estimated CPI figures since the dawn of mankind, but given what a hot topic it is these days, I’m curious to learn how we’re actually tracking compared to century-long averages, if such a thing exists.

Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

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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: Time & Timekeeping! The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the concept of COVID time - where our collective sense of time seems out of whack. Do you know of other times in history when something similar has happened? Or of a historical society or culture with an interesting approach to time and timekeeping? Today's thread is a space to share all the cool things you know about how the passage of time has been documented.

I was just watching 30 Rock and I know it's a comedy and they make a lot of shit up, but one of the characters, Jack Donaghy, just said of another character, Kenneth Parcell, that he's technically a diversity hire because the county he grew up in never officially rejoined the Union and technically he's a foreigner. And I know it's a joke it's played for laughs, but it made me wonder are there any holdouts that were just overlooked to this day and are technically not part of the Union?

For example, Wikipedia lists the Ming, the Tang, and the Han dynasties seperately on their list of the largest countries by land area. Did the Chinese people start that trend or was it more modern historians dividing China's long history into smaller chunks to make it easier to talk about specific time periods?

I’ve read about Nazis in places around the world. But when I read about Nazis in places like Greece or Russia I fail to grasp how people from those ethnicities could admire the ideology of a group of people who not only would have regarded them as inferior but in some cases, at least in the case of Slavic countries like Russia, actually wanted them exterminated. How did these groups emerge and how do they reconcile that tension?

*I would prefer answers that aren't a colony fighting for their independence from the colonizer. For example: The American Revolution. They got their independence without getting London, and how would they? It's on another continent.

Content warning: violence against women, mentions of rape and abduction

In the Star Trek: Deep Space 9, the dynamics of a colonial empire and its conquered subjects are heavily explored in the Cardassians and Bajorans, respectively. In the episode "Wrongs Darker than Death or Night," the Bajoran officer Major Kira consults a religious icon which shows her a vision of the past, which shows her mother being taken by Gul Dukat, the colonial administrator, to the space station in orbit of Bajor. While there, she is taken from her family and forced to become a "comfort woman" for him.

Over time, she develops feelings for Dukat, which upsets and angers Kira, who had believed she died when she was very young. She sees her as betraying her family and her people for having some feelings for Dukat, who treats her with kindness. Other Bajorans also see her and the other comfort women as collaborators, and view them with almost the same distaste as they do for the Bajoran overseer Basso.

This prompted the question to me: is this how people saw the comfort women of Korea during Japanese occupation? To me, it seems clear cut that these women were victims of heinous acts of rape and abduction, but were contemporaries less sympathetic? To what degree were they seen as on the side of the Japanese?

Thank you