He was a corporal in WW1 with little formal education and no professional experience. Next thing you know he's leading the Nazis in the beer hall putsch. I know the Nazis were a fringe party in the beginning but there seems to be a "gap" in his resume somewhere? I'm curious how he was able to go from a corporal to a position of leadership?

In all manner of historical pieces (presented both by scholars and laymen), certain figures are referred to as "mythical" or "historical." Characters such as Ragnar Lothbrok, King Arthur, and Emperor Jimmu are usually referred to as such, and which stories about them are factual (and in some cases, if they existed at all) is often a point of debate.

I am interested in knowing what makes some figures widely accepted as having existed, while others are considered "legendary" or "mythical," with their existence disputed. I assume this is a matter of the amount, type, and contents of primary sources available on them. What kind of primary source is considered acceptable to lend weight to their existence and what amount or breadth of information is "enough" for a figure to become widely accepted as having existed?

I understand that on some level this is a matter of opinion of what each historian might consider sufficient to cause them to lean one way or the other, but I am hoping for some sense of what generally tips the scale. Thanks!

I was watching a documentary about the exploration of Canada, and there were several mentions of British explorers learning local ways of getting around, among other things snowshoes. This got me wondering why they never developed skis (at least the cursory search I did only indicated northern Russian and Scandinavian origins of skiing).

I've tried googling this and I get everything from the Washington monument to renaissance recreations. I know some were moved to London, Paris, and New York. Aside from Helios and Alexandria, are there any others?

I often see in sources certain regions, particularly islands, but also for regions such as Boeotia, that the 'Boeotians' or the 'Lesbians' did something - as if they had one policy and were under a single administrative system.

For example - from Thucydides 1.115.3 and the Samian Revolt in 440BCE.

Accordingly the Athenians sailed to Samos with forty ships and set up a democracy, and took hostages from the Samians ...

However, this seems contradictory to how the politics of the Greek world seems to be explained elsewhere - the idea of a polis and its people dictating its own policy. Rather than a more modern idea of a state, the citizens' allegiance lay with their polis.

I'm asking specifically about the 5th Century BCE, perhaps including examples of Attica, Boeotia and Samos.

So how united were the the cities of these islands and regions and to what extent can they be considered to act as a single entity?

I would at least expect an army general, why Dönitz?

This seems to have been a particular obsession of Japan in its imperial era. What made this patch of land so attractive to Japan and when did Japanese imperialists decide that they had the right to settle it?

From a later post:

I read about this frightening incident where a Japanese imperialist assassinated a liberal, possibly a politician, and subsequently committed suicide. As I recall, he somehow did this in a way that actually sprayed a map of Manchuria in his blood.

I think it was in a biography of Yoshiko Kawashima that I read this. I'd like to know how that fanaticism for Manchuria became relatively common.

As I review my reading lists on late antiquity in the west (or the 'fall of the western Roman empire', if you will), I'm struck by the near total absence of women in discussions of social change. The big threads / debates in the field seem to focus almost entirely on men:

• Barbarians invaded and destroyed everything (women are raped, but otherwise invisible)
• The empire ended, in the west, because of civil war (no women participate in this political struggle, except as mothers or wives supporting the male players)
• The empire was religiously transformed (overwhelmingly focuses on male bishops, with female ascetics occupying the fringes, and being generally less important than the male senatorial elite)
• A period of slow economic change (but no focus on women's work or changing role in the economy)

I can think of exceptions. There are famous religious women, especially when it comes to moments of conversion, and Cooper, for example, has written about changes in marriage, or Bowes about changes in private female religious practice.

But I get the sense that the entire question of whether or not the Roman empire declined, fell, transformed, or what have you is framed entirely from a male perspective. Does a 'decline' and 'fall' even work from the perspective of late antique women?

Am I missing something? Has anyone talked about what late antique regionalization / localization meant for the female half of the Roman world, or - specifically - looked at what women thought and experienced in response to their changing fortunes?

Draft dodgers in West Germany often went to West Berlin to avoid conscription before reunification. What was the origin of the exemption for Berlin? Why did the west German state keep it in place? Did she try to stop the loophole (if you can describe it as such) and if so how?

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What percent of the existing White House is slave built? I know there was a remodel or two.

Also if built by slaves, who's?

Very curious about this. As far as I know, they weren't a major player in the Cold War and they weren't under any immediate threat, so I do wonder why they undertook all of the effort to make a nuclear program.

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I've seen lots of people on the Internet criticize others for making moral judgments about past figures, and they often criticize them in the name of "presentism". The idea seems to be that historians must make sure to keep all moral judgments out of their history, because their moral perspective is inevitably contaminated by present-day norms.

When I googled the term and went to Wikipedia, it recommended the 1970 book Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought by David Hackett Fischer. But when I looked up its discussion of "presentism", it has nothing to do with moral judgments. Instead, it's about historians who tend to ignore historical events that are irrelevant to present-day events, selecting events that are still relevant to focus on. This is supposed to be a bad idea because if you really want to understand the present, you'll examine a more representative sample of past events, and get "knowledge useful in the establishment of present trends and future tendencies".

But not only does "presentism" seem to have nothing do with moral judgments, Fischer seems to say the exact opposite about moral judgments:

Most reasonable men would agree that all historians, without exception, must and should make value judgments in their work.

Fischer's totally okay with moral judgments, as long as they are "functional, or neutral, to empirical inquiry". Historians should make their values explicit, and then "design a research problem in which [their] values allow an open end". That's certainly not what the Internet says!

Of course, that's just Fischer. So I went to Google Scholar, and searched for "presentism history". On the whole, the results have nothing to do with moral judgments, and everything to do with what Fischer discussed: selecting which historical events to examine with an eye to present-day relevance.

So is this whole Internet usage of "presentism" a big mistake, or (if not) can someone point me to an actual scholarly discussion of "presentism" and moral judgments? Thanks!

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Why were the Magyar Hungarians accepted into Europe and not seen as invaders? Why aren't the Turks treated the same? Does it have something to do with culture, religion, history, etc or just how long each group has been in Europe?

What did guys like Strom Thurmond and George Wallace have to say about their segregationist attitudes when they lived in a time in which they were clearly seen as being on the wrong side of history?