Basically what the title says.
Ive been trying to look up Photographs of late Qing Emperors when I began to notice this. In fact of all I managed to find it seems only Puyi was the sole one ever photographed and its interesting that most Photos of him were taken before and after he was the last reigning Qing Monarch.
Was there a rule in the Qing era against photographing an Emperor? Seems kinda odd considering how Emperors tend to pose for portraits.
2 Answers 2022-01-24
1 Answers 2022-01-24
I'm reading Timur Kuran's The Long Divergence and he mentions:
" As late as 1585, three times more spices were transported to Europe via the Middle East, partly by Middle Eastern caravans, than were carried around Africa on Portuguese ships. But by 1750, the round-the-Cape spice trade had extinguished the caravan-based spice trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean."
Obviously in the book he mentions the shortcoming of Islamic finance which contributed to the stagnation of the Middle East's economy and overall power. However, the inferiority of Islamic financial institutions couldn't have been so severe that it led to Europeans dominating the spice trade, right? I find a hard time believing merchants found it more advantageous to sail around an entire continent than to buy spices from the Middle East. Couldn't European traders just buy spices from the Middle East sail that far to trade directly from India? Was it really worth it?
1 Answers 2022-01-24
I once heard something to this effect, but can't find any source.
1 Answers 2022-01-24
I am Greek and we learned in school that the term was introduced later since the people of that era called themselves Romans. Wikipedia claims that the term was introduced by Hieronymus Wolf. However in the first printed Greek book, the author Constantine Lascaris called himself Byzantinae even before Hieronymus Wolf was born (https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-lascaris-constantine-erotemata-in-greek-milan-1932394/?from=salesummary&intObjectID=1932394&sid=01781b2b-798b-4af2-a666-d48967aa2ed0)
So who and when introduced the term Byzantine empire?
edited: fix typos
1 Answers 2022-01-24
1 Answers 2022-01-24
While I've read that the Spanish Flu had several waves over several years and I've seen pictures of students completing lessons by radio, I haven't heard of anything else regarding the disruption of student life or any long term impact of distance learning on educational outcomes.
What was education like during this period for students? Were students socially promoted to the direct grade? Were there any reports of widespread educational deficits or what we would call today social emotional disturbances?
And while I'm mostly referring to the US during this period I would love any insights about other countries as well.
1 Answers 2022-01-24
As the tile says, was it common to use cavalry to sneak back behind enemy lines to destroy artillery? And thus was it common to have some kind of guard for the artillery? Interested in pretty much the whole gunpowder era when horses were still used. Thanks!
1 Answers 2022-01-24
Some Presidential candidates choose running mates because they think s/he will help the campaign. Others because they think the Vice President won't interfere with the President once elected. One author claims Nixon chose Agnew because Agnew could win MD for Nixon, as if MD's few electoral votes counted that much. Or because Agnew was known as a liberal/moderate Republican to balance Nixon's supposed more rightist thinking (he who as Pres went to Red China). If Agnew was chosen because Agnew would disappear into the background, it didn't happen (not with his financial scandal and attention-grabbing miscalculated public remarks). I'm not satisfied with these explanations. So why, then, did Nixon choose Agnew as running mate in 1968? (Why Nixon chose Agnew again in 1972 should be a separate question; I am focused only on 1968).
1 Answers 2022-01-24
I've just read that according to one theory, the Germanic gods Loki and Odin were derived from the Celtic god Lug. Were then the Germanic tribes in some way "descendants" of the Celts?
1 Answers 2022-01-23
The supporters of James II of Scotland were called Jacobites. Since Jacob is the same name as James, it left me wondering if he was called Jacob during his lifetime?
1 Answers 2022-01-23
There is some sayings that Confederate generals were so much better than Union generals that if the Confederates was given the same amount of men the Union had they would win,just how true is this statement???
1 Answers 2022-01-23
1 Answers 2022-01-23
I wanted to do a flyover in a flight sim and the forts are hard to find if you don't know what town they are next to. All the maps I have found are mostly just a line along the German French border. Thanks!
1 Answers 2022-01-23
So I know that Constantine was converted into christianity, And it spread across the roman empire. But it took another 300 years to get the British Isles. So what happened?
The UK is a part of the roman empire, so why did it take that 300 years.
1 Answers 2022-01-23
From what I understand, Hitler ordered fighting to the last man because he wanted to punish the German people for "failing" him. I also watched a lecturer who made a case that German generals knew perfectly well that the war was unwinnable, but kept sending men to their deaths out of a desperate desire to protect their own status, and out of a hope to preserve their post-war future.
But what about Japan? Apparently, there was a plan in place to mobilise basically the entire civilian population against the coming American invasion. Crappy, single-shot rifles were distributed, and schoolgirls were expected to charge the invaders with sharpened bamboo sticks. One estimate predicted 10 million Japanese civilians would be killed during the beach landings.
One source I watched claimed that even after the two atomic bombings, some of Japan's military leaders STILL wanted to keep fighting, and after the emperor stepped in to force a surrender he was very nearly overruled via coup.
Why was Japan's military junta THIS determined to never surrender? Were these men willing to see their own nation utterly destroyed purely for their sake of their own personal pride? Or was it true religious fanaticism regarding the sanctity of the imperial family?
1 Answers 2022-01-23
1 Answers 2022-01-23
Currently studying History and I'm aware that there were three threats to Edward. The challenge from Aethelwold, losing control of Mercia and the Danelaw. But I'm really confused about the topic of the Danelaw. If it was to unite the Danes and allow their own territory for Guthrum, why would it be a threat to Edward the Elder?
1 Answers 2022-01-23
The wikapedia page for Constantine XI states that a few days before the city fell a mysterious light phenomenon was observed both by the defending Byzantines and the attacking Ottomans. Can anyone give more details on whether this happened and what it might have been?
1 Answers 2022-01-23
I am researching for a story based on the US Homefront during WWII. Trying to determine what would have been sent home to a soldier's family if he was MIA or POW.
1 Answers 2022-01-23
1 Answers 2022-01-23
we listen to music more and we can almost always find the exact version to replay again and again. before this technology existed, when only live music existed, what did people do if it got stuck in their head? just hum it until they forgot it? if they were likely to never hear the same song again.
1 Answers 2022-01-23
Hello r/AskHistorians, I’m Nancy Reagin, a European historian of gender and popular culture, and my most recent book is Re-living the American Frontier: Western Fandoms, Reenactment, and Historical Hobbyists in Germany and America Since 1900. Related to that, I’ve also edited a series of historical readers’ companions for a variety of fantasy and science fiction series.
Fandoms emerged alongside the rise of pulp fiction and mass commercial entertainments during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries; the word “fandom” was first used in print in 1903. Although fan communities emerged around sports teams, film and music celebrities, and other commercial entertainments, I am most interested in the development of literary fandoms and (sometimes linked to or overlapping) historically-focused fandoms during the 20th century, and their transition to online communities after the 1980s. Early literary fandoms grew around pulp fiction genres, including detective fiction (especially the Sherlock Holmes stories), science fiction, and Westerns. In these groups, fans participated in many ways; parsing and analyzing their “canon”; recreating scenes and artifacts from the stories; publishing essays and stories that reframed and retold the original stories; creating fan art in a wide variety of media. In each case, their communities used new media formats that emerged in later decades, but also altered and adapted in ways that reflected broader social and political changes. In writing my book, I narrowed my focus to the fandoms rooted in one type of genre literature (Westerns), but these communities show many parallels to other literary fandoms.
Re-Living the American Frontier asks: why have the historic and mythic elements of the Old West exerted a global fascination for more than 200 years; how have fans used, understood, and repurposed stories and artifacts set in that historic world; and how did their fandoms alter over time, reflecting political and social change? My book discusses the differences and similarities in how white Americans and Europeans saw the West and Indigenous cultures, and the fan communities that they built around Western stories, particularly those of best-selling German author Karl May and Laura Ingalls Wilder. In both Germany and the U.S., Western historical narratives based on what was seen as the “inevitability” of white colonial settlement were once seen as “apolitical,” and were central to most white Americans’ understanding of their nation’s history. But over time, the American West was reevaluated and politically repurposed, seen and used very differently by authorities during the Nazi period in Germany, and in East Germany after 1945. During the late twentieth century, academic and popular understandings of the West changed again, as the violence of white settlement and displacement of Indigenous peoples became a flashpoint in culture wars in the United States, while Indigenous resurgence and activism affected European fans as well. In both the United States and Europe, popular understandings of the history of the West changed yet again, as Western fans negotiated and responded to a shifting cultural terrain, and the gradual decline in Westerns’ popularity.
Things you might be interested to ask about:
- The history of Western entertainments in the 19th and 20th centuries; the ways in which Western entertainments shaped white Americans’ understanding of their national identity and history; differences in how Germans and Americans understood Indigenous cultures; the biographies and fictional worlds of Karl May and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the fan communities that formed around each author; the growth of Western historical reenactment in Germany before 1939; how Western fans and reenactors had to adapt to very different political environments in Nazi Germany and East Germany; how new media forms, like blockbuster films, affected Western fandoms; how Indigenous activists engaged with, and sometimes challenged, white Western fans in both Germany and America; how Western fans in both nations have responded to changes in how academic historians and popular culture understand white colonial settlement of the West and its impact on Indigenous peoples; and why many East German Western reenactors chose to switch to Civil War reenactment after Germany’s reunification.
Things I might be able to answer but are outside my primary area of expertise:
- the history of other fandoms of genre fiction, particularly science fiction and the Sherlock Holmes stories; the global growth of varied forms of historical reenactment before and after World War II; how public history has expanded since 1945 to include varying forms of reenactment, including “living history,” open air museums, and experimental archeology; hobbyist historical reenactment.
Finally, if you are interested in a copy of Re-Living the American Frontier, academic press books are expensive, but I can offer a discount code for mine. If you’re interested, go here and use the code FANS40:
Ok, enough intro text. Ask away!
Edit: 3:17 p.m. This has been a lot of fun, and I want to thank the mods for inviting me to do this, and making everything run so smoothly. So many of the questions here have been smart, and pointed out things that I want to think more about. I couldn't answer every query, but I hope that my responses were helpful and interesting for some of you.
--- Nancy Reagin (twitter @ NReagin)
33 Answers 2022-01-23
I know there were large debates in Judaism about whether gelatin made from pig bones were kosher or not due to the tremendous amount of processing it underwent to be turned into gelatin. Did similar debates occur with insulin?
1 Answers 2022-01-23
Today:
Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Sunday Digest (formerly the Day of Reflection). Nobody can read all the questions and answers that are posted here, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.
2 Answers 2022-01-23