I'm under the impression that the nasal helmet evolved into the flat topped helmet in the high middle ages. However, from a pure protection perspective, it seems like the nasal helmet's round top design would be able to deflect overhead blows while the flat top design would just stop whatever weapon swung at it and absorb the force entirely, causing more injury to the wearer.
So why did flat top helmets become so popular?
1 Answers 2016-03-13
sinking battleships with no air cover doesn't seem to have been a particularly difficult task during world war 2.
in the pacific, the japanese wiped out force z without much trouble; the americans did the same to yamato and musashi.
even in protected harbors with air cover, the japanese did a number on the u.s. pacific fleet's immobile battleships at pearl harbor, and the british did the same to the italians' navy at taranto.
so what went wrong? why did it take the allies 15+ tries to sink one lousy battleship?
1 Answers 2016-03-13
I've looked around a bit (the history today article is behind a paywall now sadly, I remember it being wuite thorough) and most text i can find tends to phrase pretty explicitly '[the knowledge of the round earth was very widespread] among educated people' or in a smiliar vain. Does this mean that common folk believed in the flat earth, and are there any estimates on how big the share of people believing in a flat vs round earth (or maybe vs something else as well) was?
In a smiliar vain, how common was it for such knowledge to be passed from for educated people to common folk? I am aware that it's probably not very useful to generalize for all of european people in medival times, but are there notable trends on how much 'scientific' information was passing from educated circles to lower ones? Should I imagine knowledge to be rather elitist in medival europe? Again, are there notable trends regarding time and/or place?
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Why didn't Inner Mongolia declare independence too? Did the population of Chinese outnumber the Mongolians there, the way it does today?
2 Answers 2016-03-13
I know this is definitely a dumb question, but I'm trying to follow along with the readings on one of my elective units for uni (a history one about the Holocaust, never studied anything about it before, excluding on a basic high school level) and I'm getting really confused. If the Nazi's were the National Socialists, why did they hate the socialists, communists and other left parties? Also where does capitalism fit in? I'm so embarrassed to be asking this, but I'm not finding anything useful with google searches!
2 Answers 2016-03-13
I thought the film was absolutely fascinating, but I was left unclear as to whether the phone call was a real event or merely a useful plot device. Is it widely accepted as true, debated, or entirely fabricated?
^(Please note, my question relates to the real events in 1977, and as such falls beyond this subreddit's 20-year embargo. The 2008 film merely prompted the question.)
2 Answers 2016-03-13
The actor portrays Oswald as not being able to say his Rs, did Lee actually struggle with this?
2 Answers 2016-03-12
So I was poking around this subreddit like I do, and I came across some info on how pikemen formed large formation squares surrounding themselves with pikes. and the musket infantries in the Napoleonic era (this was all for the protection against cavalry charges).
But I came across this idea:
squares have corners...
infantry squares have corners...
So, wouldn't it be easy for a cavalry charge to weaken the corners of infantry squares? (because there's less men, rather than a long wall of them like on the sides). So I thought since circles don't have corners, it would be more difficult to penetrate a circled formation of pikes/spears/muskets, rather than an infantry square...
Or am I just wrong?
2 Answers 2016-03-12
I know the name gotham refers to new york, but it predates the comics book creation for the batman universe. The oldest reference that I am personally aware of is the New York gothams in 1883 which was the first season for the baseball team that would eventually become the San Francisco Giants. So where does the name come to? And how was it created and or choosen?
1 Answers 2016-03-12
I'm looking for a good book about the Mexican Revolution as an overview, rather than specific biographies of say Pancho Villa or Emiliano Zapata (although those would be okay to). Anyone have any recommendations?
1 Answers 2016-03-12
And as a bonus question: What are the known details of his encounter with Michel Ney and the regiment sent to arrest him? Did Napoleon really say, 'Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish', or something along those lines?
1 Answers 2016-03-12
Hopefully my title makes sense (Reddit really needs a larger title character limit)...
So I was watching the final episode of World War II in HD Colour (episode 13: "Victory in the Pacific") which discusses the "Japan Campaign" of the Pacific Theatre; battles of Iwo Jima & Okinawa, Ten-Go & Tokyo Bay naval battles and the atomic bombings between June '44 & August '45.
Actor Robert Powell narrates the series (unfortunately I'm not sure who the historical consultant was for the episode), between 47.35 & 48.13 minutes whilst discussing Japan's surrender (and Stalin's continued Manchurian invasion) he states that not only did it take "weeks for the news to reach isolated Japanese garrisons" but he also says that "some of those troops would remain in those jungles for more than 30 years". If this statement is true, do we have any accounts on those soldiers lives in the jungle and their thoughts upon resurfacing that not only had VJ day taken place but that they world was now in the midst of a cold war?
Thanks for reading :)
3 Answers 2016-03-12
The most famous historians on the topic of Stalin's USSR seem to admit that their evidence comes from rumors and such:
My collaboration with the people I have mentioned was based exclusively on personal initiative and trust. I did not make use of or have access to any closed archives, “special collections,” or any other limited-access depositories and I am not familiar with any.
[...]
In the nature of things there could not be a published source for much of the information in this book; it was passed on by the victims of repression or their friends or relatives.
For no other period [the Great Purges of the 1930s] or topic have historians been so eager to write and accept history-by-anecdote. Grand analytical generalizations have come from secondhand bits of overheard corridor gossip. Prison camp stories (“My friend met Bukharin’s wife in a camp and she said…”) have become primary sources on central political decision making. The need to generalize from isolated and unverified particulars has transformed rumors into sources and has equated repetition of stories with confirmation. Indeed, the leading expert on the Great Purges [Conquest] has written that “truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay” and that “basically the best, though not infallible, source is rumor.” [The Great Terror, 754]
[Footnote: Such statements would be astonishing in any other field of history. Of course, historians do not accept hearsay and rumor as evidence. Conquest goes on to say that the best way to check rumors is to compare them with one another. This procedure would be sound only if rumors were not repeated and if memoirists did not read each other’s works.]
As long as the unexplored classes of sources include archival and press material, it is neither safe nor necessary to rely on rumor and anecdote.
[...]
[Footnote: The basic works on the Great Purges are uniformly based on memoir sources. Conquest, Terror, Medvedev, History: and Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag Archipelago, all rely almost exclusively on personal accounts.]
Soviet history has no tradition of responsible source criticism. Scholars have taken few pains to evaluate bias, authenticity, or authorship. Specialists have accepted “sources” that, for understandable reasons, are anonymously attributed (“Unpublished memoir of”), and treat them as primary.
[Footnote on Page: Much of the documentation in Medvedev’s and Solzhenitsyn’s works is of this form, as is much of the samizdat material. Such documentation is methodically unacceptable in other fields of history. One would be dubious about a footnote to the “unpublished memoir of the Duc de” in a work on the French revolutionary terror.
[...]
Each of the emigre and defector sources represents a variant on the vast pool of such rumors and stories [regarding the Kirov assassination], but clearly none of them was in a position to know anything about their veracity. The authors seemed to pick the stories that fit together into particular schemes, and subsequent historians followed suit.
Indeed, in the rush to support a particular scenario, scholars have been strangely selective in their use of emigre memoirs. They have accepted and used those that supported their preconceptions and ignored those that did not. Students have embraced the rumors and flawed stories of Orlov, Barmine, and Nicolaevsky while ignoring accounts that call Kirov a “conservative,” describe underground oppositionist plots in the ’30s, and argue for the existence of a planned military coup against Stalin. The point is not that these unused memoirs are any more credible than the familiar ones, but that all memoir accounts should be subjected to intense critical attention that takes contradictions into account. All claims or hypotheses based solely on secondhand gossip or rumor should be rejected according to the elementary rules of evidence.
(A LOT more here)
So, I ask: What sources do historians use to verify Stalin's supposed killings and deadly purges, besides rumors and stories?
2 Answers 2016-03-12
[To slightly narrow down the question, the time frame I'm interested in is from late Medieval, through early modern, to Napoleonic era]
I've heard that cavalry charges were quite often a game of chicken. Either the infantry broke their formation and started to flee as soon as they realized hostile cavalry is coming their way, or if they didn't, the cavalry broke the charge to avoid the clash.
My question, however, concerns those cases when the infantry stood its ground, wasn't disturbed by enemy fire or artillery and the charge wasn't called off. Would the cavalry really crash into a dense mass of bodies at galloping speed (~40km/h)?
The more I think about it, the more it sounds like a complete disaster for both sides. Several lines of infantry could be mortally trampled due to the momentum, but the same momentum would throw the raiders off the saddles, seriously injure the horses or just impale them on spears, pikes and bayonets.
Yet there are known cases of successful head-on charges against pikemen (PLC 'Winged' Hussars at Kircholm), or successful counter-charge defenses (impenetrable infantry squares of Napoleonic era).
Does it mean that cavalry charges were in fact conducted at much slower speed than we think?
4 Answers 2016-03-12
For instance, the Seljuk monarch and the Abbassid Caliph.
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Hello /r/askhistorians, a relative of mine is getting married to a historian who specializes in Qing Dynasty China. What are some things I should read to be able to discuss that time period somewhat with him? I went through the FAQ book list, but none of the titles explicitly listed the Qing except two very specific titles covering only the Taiping rebellion and rural farm life.
My only reading background on China for that time period is the Cambridge Illustrated History of China and a textbook I read back in high-school. Any additional more general readings are also welcome.
As a side note, I'm also interested in technology or art trends that were unique to the Qing that did not exist in earlier periods such as the Ming or Han. An art or culture book would definitely be great too!
1 Answers 2016-03-12
Shouldn't they be more in favor of the pro-Taiwanese party rather than the KMT?
4 Answers 2016-03-12
If yes, could you provide visual examples?
If no, what objects could reasonably be used as such(in your opinion)?
1 Answers 2016-03-12
In the latest season of the History Channel's Vikings, a slave trader brings a Chinese slave among his slaves to Scandinavia, to be purchased by a Viking queen. Could this have been possible during the real Viking Age? How much contact and trade, if any, did the Vikings have with China and the rest of Asia? I am aware that silk managed to make its way to Scandinavia, and that there was a good amount of trade between the Vikings and the Middle East, but I do not know how extensive the contact between Asia and Scandinavia was at the time, especially in regards to East Asia.
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