1 Answers 2016-05-20
I've begun to read some classic chemistry papers like Lewis' "The Atom and the Molecule" and was really happy to see how readable they are, even for me, someone with at best a lazy undergraduate's knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology. But through Wikipedia and several chemistry education websites, I've learned there's roughly two centuries of work in chemistry where the periodic table was developed, several elements were first identified, atomic masses were calculated, the gas laws were formulated, etc., before the development of quantum theories in roughly the first quarter of the 20th century.
Can anyone recommend a book or article that surveys this period and describes the observations and experiments that led to these discoveries? I'm frustrated by the typical timeline presented in high school and undergraduate general chemistry classes that begin with very advanced theories of the atom and subatomic particles like ionization energy, quantum numbers, Planck's constant, apropos of nothing!
I doubt I'm the first to make the analogy, but it's like science is taught like religion. A bearded man said something a long time ago and it is true. Don't ask how we know the number of atoms in a gram of carbon-12, just memorize 6.02 x 10^23 and know that it is good.
Edit: I just rearranged the last sentence of the first paragraph to make it clearer.
3 Answers 2016-05-20
I know that the idea of "childhood" is a relatively new concept, but are there examples of people in history who behaved in unexpected ways or came to tragic ends who were married very young or sexually abused at a young age (by 2016 standards)?
Edit: I've barely gotten to read any of these yet but I'm excited to dive in.
I'd also like to clarify (since I'm assuming there was some vitriol about this, although I never saw it thanks to u/commiespaceinvader who I'd like to sincerely thank again) I don't think there's an age cut off when it comes to sexual abuse, and I'm certainly in no position to define for anyone the proper age of consent in any time, place, or location. I'm doing research on France in the late 1600s and I'm finding information about marriages involving teenagers under the age of 16--thus the question and my age cut off choice.
Thanks again! I may post with further questions as I read.
9 Answers 2016-05-20
Hi, does anyone know of any good sources for a research paper on the Communist and Labor movements in the US? My specific area of study is from the Depression to the early Cold War. Thanks in advance.
1 Answers 2016-05-20
In school, I am to write a research paper based upon themes in the book The Things They Carried, a novel about the Vietnam War. I want to write about the Viet Cong, given that it's a topic I find interesting that I don't think my other classmates have considered. Can anyone point me to good sources on the VC or maybe help give me a better idea of how their lives were during the war? Any help is greatly appreciated.
2 Answers 2016-05-20
The original article is posted here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1857/12/where-will-it-end/308749/ I haven't read much from abolitionists. I had figured they focused on the evils of slavery. Instead, this writer painted a bleak picture of what slavery did to the entire South and it's impact on whites as well. What he describes reminds me of North Korea. I pasted some of his key statements below. I’m wondering how much of this is true? I know there is a lot of agreement that reconstruction failed after the Civil War but this makes it seems that the South wasn't well “constructed” to begin with.
Possessed of all the raw materials of manufactures and the arts, its inhabitants look to the North for everything they need from the cradle to the coffin. Essentially agricultural in its constitution, with every blessing Nature can bestow upon it, the gross value of all its productions is less by millions than that of the simple grass of the field gathered into Northern barns. With all the means and materials of wealth, the South is poor. With every advantage for gathering strength and self-reliance, it is weak and dependent.--Why this difference between the two?
The “why” is not far to seek. It is to be found in the reward which Labor bestows on those that pay it due reverence in the one case, and the punishment it inflicts on those offering it outrage and insult in the other…. Hence the difference so often noticed between tracts lying side by side, separated only by a river or an imaginary line; on one side of which, thrift and comfort and gathering wealth, growing villages, smiling farms, convenient habitations, school-houses, and churches make the landscape beautiful; while on the other, slovenly husbandry, dilapidated mansions, sordid huts, perilous wastes, horrible roads, the rare spire, and rarer village school betray all the nakedness of the land. It is the magic of motive that calls forth all this wealth and beauty to bless the most sterile soil stirred by willing and intelligent labor; while the reversing of that spell scatters squalor and poverty and misery over lands endowed by Nature with the highest fertility, spreading their leprous infection from the laborer to his lord. All this is in strict accordance with the laws of God, as expounded by man in his books on political economy.
And in the blighting shadow of Slavery letters die and art cannot live. What book has the South ever given to the libraries of the world? What work of art has she ever added to its galleries? What artist has she produced…
When we speak of the South as distinguished from the North by elements of inherent hostility, we speak only of the governing faction, and not of the millions of nominally free men who are scarcely less its thralls than the black slaves themselves. This unhappy class of our countrymen are the first to feel the blight which Slavery spreads around it, because they are the nearest to its noxious power. The subjects of no European despotism are under a closer "espionage," or a more organized system of terrorism, than are they. The slaveholders, having the wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of, employ these mighty instruments of power to create the public sentiment and to control the public affairs of their region, so as best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction, even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in safety. A Christian minister in Tennessee relates an act of fiendish cruelty inflicted upon a slave by one of the members of his church, and he is forced to leave his charge, if not to fly the country. Another in South Carolina presumes to express in conversation his disapprobation of the murderous assault of Brooks on Senator Sumner, and his pastoral relations are broken up on the instant, as if he had been guilty of gross crime or flagrant heresy.
Why are they subjected to a censorship of the press, which dictates to them what they may or may not read, and which punishes booksellers with exile and ruin for keeping for sale what they want to buy? Why must Northern publishers expurgate and emasculate the literature of the world before it is permitted to reach them? Why is it that the value of acres increases in a geometrical ratio, as they stretch away towards the North Star from the frontier of Slavery?
4 Answers 2016-05-20
Pretty much what the title says... Ive been doing a lot of reading lately trying to learn about the daily lives of native peoples who inhabited Southern California (and the Southwest in general).
Today I realized I dont think I have seen a single reference to what ancient people did regarding waste. I have seen a couple places where how they cared for babies is documented (moss or other soft natural material stuffed into the baby's carrier) but nothing about adults!
Anyone have some info on this subject?
1 Answers 2016-05-20
I was reading the book "Ghosts of Cannae", about the Second Punic War, and when it was talking about Carthage's society, it mentioned that it was believed Carthaginians practiced ritual sacrifice of infants. From what I understood, the evidence was a cache of ancient jars containing the burned remains. Is it sure if these were actually sacrifices, or could it have been some kind of ancient cremation?
1 Answers 2016-05-20
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1 Answers 2016-05-20
Once upon a time I was told that one of, if not the primary, reason she for Custers defeat was that the US Government had given the natives their surplus repeating rifles and then in the interest of saving money had made the standard issue Army rifle a single shot model...and as a result the US troops were very much outgunned. Is that right, if so how big a role did the difference in fire power actually play?
1 Answers 2016-05-19
The number that I made in the title is just something that I made up. One example of this is the BF 109F2. It had 2 MG 17s, even though it was built and designed in the early 40s.
2 Answers 2016-05-19
1 Answers 2016-05-19
If so, how prevalent was it in the Western world? If not, when did it become prevalent? When was it first possible to buy a plane ticket in any large city in the US and fly to any other large city?
3 Answers 2016-05-19
So I read that two-handed swords were introduced in the late middel ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zweih%C3%A4nder). But in the 15th and 16th century knights wore armors like these: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B4%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B5%D1%85.jpg , so how would a longer and heavier sword be effective?
1 Answers 2016-05-19
For example, did they have contact with other Indian Ocean regions through the Indian Ocean trade network, or contact with pacific island peoples such as the Maori?
1 Answers 2016-05-19
I think of the battle chariot as a weapons platform of the Bronze/Iron Age. And according to Wikipedia, the saddle-hung stirrup wasn't popularized in Europe around the 6th century.
Were battle chariots still used in the Middle Ages? If not, was it perhaps because the stirrup took its place as a better means for stabilizing horse-powered archers/lancers?
1 Answers 2016-05-19
I've seen plenty of suggestions that King John's downfall was the loss of Normandy, so his crimes were more acutely felt by the English who had to put up with his presence so often.
I'm sceptical. I think that this was a part of John's downfall, sure, but I'm not sure that every king from William I to Edward II would have faced rebellion more if they hadn't spent around 60% of their time on the continent, as every king up to John (excluding himself and Stephen) seem to have done.
I'd like to know what others think about this. Was kingship more effective from afar? Or were John and Stephen crappy kings anyway? What was going on?
3 Answers 2016-05-19
This is in the context of the Rhodes Must Fall movement- looking particularly not at the aim to remove statues but to decolonise institutions of learning and curricula.
I've heard at least one historian (Peter Frankopan) dismiss this, suggesting that students do some reading about slavery in other cultures. I disagree with him. To my mind, other forms of slavery neither mitigate the crimes of (say) the British Empire, nor do they have the same influence that colonisation has had upon the Eurocentric nature of knowledge and learning worldwide.
I'd be interested in other people's thoughts, however.
3 Answers 2016-05-19
Why do histories tend to ignore them and say things like wikipedia here:
but the centuries-old system of farming was destroyed in a region so fertile it was once called "the breadbasket of Europe"
Weren't the collectivist farms closer to the "centuries old system"?
Why did the peasants resist the Kolhoz if there was such a small period of uncollevtivizedness?
Could some issues with the Kolhoz at first be ascribed to the Stolypin reforms combined with increased confusion due to recollectivizing (besides civil war)?
1 Answers 2016-05-19
1 Answers 2016-05-19
I've heard that the Goths, Vandals and various Germanic tribes were one of the largest bases of Arian Christianity so I assume the shared name isn't coincidence.
2 Answers 2016-05-19
