Or, rather, when and how did the people of the British Isles come to share a common language? Did the peoples of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland start sharing a common language mostly because of conquest and such, or did, say, the Irish start commonly speaking English before the English conquests? It's hard to imagine that the Stuarts didn't speak English in their courts before they became English monarchs, so around when did English spread to Scotland? Was it a slow, progressive thing -- do medieval Scottish/Welsh/Irish documents written in English become progressively more common over time? Did English become the language of royals and nobles and such in Scotland and Ireland and Wales first, or the common people, or the merchant class?
Would really appreciate some help with this. Thanks, all. Cheers.
3 Answers 2016-03-01
Why did so many South American countries legalize homosexuality in the 1800s? Did it have something to do with decolonization?
3 Answers 2016-03-01
So I think it's ok to ask for suggestions here, feel free to delete if it's not.
I was just looking for a few suggestions for either books or journal articles, doesn't matter which, about the impact of the reformation/confessional division on religious culture?
Doing a bit of work for a presentation in one of my tutorials, I've read my assigned readings and a few things I have found myself, but it's a topic I find interesting and the more the better so I thought I would ask.
Cheers for any suggestions.
1 Answers 2016-03-01
This may just be from being more used to seeing thousands of men fighting from fantasy and various large scale action/war/historical films. But, I thought perhaps battles of this era were small in number (maybe population or whatever) as they generally only show up to a hundred men or so, and do not bother "CGI"ing any more. So how many men, typically, would be involved in the battles of the Viking era, either English or Viking numbers?
1 Answers 2016-03-01
I mean things like spellcasting, potions brewing, and the manufacture of magical technologies. I went to the Griffith Observatory in LA recently and saw a show where the person talked about how astrology, alchemy, and other kinds of magic in certain societies drove people to hypothesize, abstract, and perform experiments. Are there specific examples of this in European cultures, where 'magic' has driven 'science' in this way?
And if this is the case, how much of our scientific expertise stems from subaltern, Wiccan, pagan communities etc.?
[edit: syntax]
1 Answers 2016-03-01
Meaning the US and just any of the US history. Not really sure when primaries started either.
2 Answers 2016-03-01
Hey folks I'm looking for a source in English (preferably online but obviously a book will do) that would go into the most minute details of the Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union.
Basically I want to know the numbers, the data, the cold, hard facts. What was delivered, how much, when, where, when it reached the frontlines - and which ones, things like that. I can find the overall numbers easily but not any kind of detailed overview.
Like, 4000 Shermans, right? But I want to know which models! When were they shipped (and from where)! When did they arrive! Where did they unload! How long did it take for them to reach the front! When they first saw combat!
Some of those questions (e.g. first combat) are perhaps pushing the 'data only' query, while answering them would be nice, it's really the logistics part I'm most interested in. What shipped where and when.
Really a bunch of tables and numbers and graphs is all I need, I don't need a lecture on the topic or many words.
Any help?
1 Answers 2016-03-01
1 Answers 2016-03-01
Hello everyone and welcome to the sixth installment of our continuing series of Rules Roundtables! This project is an effort to demystify what the rules of the subreddit are, to explain the reasoning behind why each rule came into being, provide examples and explanation why a rule will be applicable in one case and not in another. Finally, this project is here to get your feedback, so that we can hear from the community what rules are working, what ones aren't, and what ones are unclear.
Today's topic is addressing the rule concerning "No Poll-Type Questions". So first, the rule.
"Poll"-type questions aren't appropriate here: "Who was the most influential person in history?" or "Who was the worst general in your period?" or "Who are your Top 10 favourite people in history?" If your question includes the words "most" or "least", or "best" or "worst" (or can be reworded to include these words), it's probably a "poll"-type question. These questions do not lend themselves to answers with a firm foundation in sources and research, and the resulting threads usually turn into monsters with enormous speculation and little focussed discussion - and, as such, are banned here.
While it might seem to be pretty straightforward, I'm here to break it down, and provide some explanation as to why this rule exists, and why it is an important one!
##What's wrong with those type of questions?
Questions about "best," "worst," "favorite," "most," "least" and the like can be great pedagogical questions, because they get to issues of historical methodology. A question such as:
Who was the most influential person in history?
can be really useful in the classroom, because it forces us to ask a lot of questions: what is influence? how is it measured? does the nature of influence change over time? can a person from the past be more influential than modern leaders with access to nuclear weapons? is influence about military power, or the power of ideas, or the power to inspire? etc ...
But the major drawbacks of asking that type of question on this type of forum are made apparent by the above paragraph:
the question by itself raises more questions;
the answer to the question is largely dependent on how you frame it, as in how you answer those other questions;
because of 1 and 2 above, there's unlikely to ever be a definitive, well-sourced historical answer to that kind of question.
Because the goal of AskHistorians is, after all, to answer questions about the past, we find that allowing questions to stand that aren't answerable runs counter to that policy. Answers to questions like this are inherently opinion-based, not facts-based, and this isn't the right place for them.
On a more practical level, threads that are poll-type question threads really quickly devolve into half-baked, half-remembered answers with little to no focused discussion. And they're nightmares to moderate, and while our mod team is legion, we are all volunteers who are not unlimited in our time we have to spend on the sub.
##But I really want to know why historians think some people, events, or time periods are more important than others!
Something to keep in mind about this is that we all study what we find interesting; I'm a naval historian because boats and ships fascinate me. Other people on our sub study gender, or politics, or military histories; or the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance; or areas or regions; or some mashup of the above. A lot of times that's just because it's what we think is cool, or what we became interested in through our coursework or an inspiring professor or a book we read when we were 10, and so we're leery of ranking our field in comparison to others.
But, that said, in our fields we are generally comfortable discussing what things are more influential than other things, or that are studied more than other things, and we do allow questions that ask about methodology, such as:
Lincoln is generally rated as the best president. Why do historians think this, and what criteria are they basing their arguments on?
What skills did Horatio Nelson possess that lead us to characterize him as a brilliant admiral?
Why is St. Augustine considered the most influential early Christian theologian?
Why are the Councils of Nicaea considered foundational in early church history?
and so on. The basic idea is that asking how historians have ranked things will produce more insight into how history works than simply polling a group of people online.
##Where can I ask a poll-type question, then?
There's always our Friday Free-for-All thread, where (almost) anything goes and which is generally lightly moderated. You might also consider posting questions of that nature on our less strictly moderated sister sub, r/history.
3 Answers 2016-03-01
Because, you know, facebook said so and now I'm curious.
1 Answers 2016-03-01
There's debate whether Vermont can go 86%+ to Bernie to make Hillary non-viable. I'm wondering if this has ever happened in a nomination contest.
1 Answers 2016-03-01
I assume this is because comments get deleted by the mods. Why can't the comment counters be decremented when this happens?
1 Answers 2016-03-01
This is a very politically-charged question, so I'm looking for a more unbiased historical opinion of how Reagan contributed to the end of the Cold War.
How did Reagan contribute to the end of the Cold War? It was almost certainly some combination of:
What was the precise combination of these things? It seems like #1 is what you see most conservatives pointing to as the biggest contribution, whereas liberals are more likely to point to #3 (or #2 if they're being generous). It seems to me that there's merit to each of these arguments. It's difficult to argue that Reagan's foreign policy played no role. Yet it's doubtful that had Reagan been president say during the Truman administration, he would have been able to end the Cold War.
Some more specific questions:
2 Answers 2016-03-01
I've seen so many people say the Confederate Flag is synonymous with racism and oppression, many of the arguments coming from people who are very misinformed on a lot of other political topics. I've also heard some arguments about it that seen legitimate.
I'd like to know the ***true and factual *** meaning of the Confederate flag, how it came about, and the history behind it!
5 Answers 2016-03-01
Many roman statues don't have pubic hair, did they already shave it or were only the statues made like this?
1 Answers 2016-03-01
It seems like around 1200-1000BC, such a wide range of cultures moved into the Iron Age, from the Greeks to Mesopotamians to Indians and I've even read of iron smelting being used in Sub-Saharan civilizations (such as the Nok) starting around the time. I've heard of the Bronze Age collapse possibly caused by the mysterious "Sea Peoples", but that wouldn't explain Vedic civilizations using iron.
To me this points to some global weather pattern/geological shift that made iron more available and logical to use or made tin less available. Is there any evidence of the sort? Or is it all one massive unsolved coincidence?
1 Answers 2016-03-01
Would it likely be just an accident from getting dust on some wood and it starting faster, or something like a witch-doctor member of the tribe who experimented all the time? I know I'm asking for a good deal of speculation, but hopefully this still fits within the rules of the sub.
1 Answers 2016-03-01
I hope this hasn't been asked before, but if it has, please direct me there.
I was listening to the 10 American elections podcast discussing the 1964 American presidential election, and the speakers were discussing the split between conservative and liberal Republicans at that time (Goldwater and Rockefeller respectively). I grew up in the 1980s and never heard of a "liberal Republican" -- parties in my mind have always reflected a political ideology. If you were a conservative you were a Republican, a Democrat if you were liberal. There were "wings" and centrists to each party, but the fundamental split between the parties was ideological.
So my question is, why, before 1964 would somebody be a Democrat or a Republican if party loyalty wasn't based on a particular philosophy of government?
Thanks.
1 Answers 2016-03-01
I was under the impression that in the early days of the US it wasn't uncommon for US Presidential Candidates to pick their running mates from other parties and that this wouldn't hurt their chances at winning the presidency (in fact it might help bring in a broader vote).
As far as I can tell it only happened a handful of times [DeWitt Clinton (Democratic-Republican) ran with Jared Ingersoll (Federalist) in the 1812 Election; John Floyd (Nullifier) ran with Henry Lee (Federalist/Democrat) in the 1832 Election; Millard Filmore (American Party) ran with Andrew J. Donelson (Democrat) in the 1856 Election; John C. Breckinridge (Southen Democrat) ran with Joseph Lane (Democrat) in the 1860 Election ^(I'm not sure if these are different parties); Abraham Lincoln (National Union) ran with Andrew Johnson (Democrat) in the 1864 Election].
But what I did find odd is that most of the men, especially before 1940 had several parties listed. It seems that many of the candidates changed their political party for election years.
Why? And what did the general public think of this? Was the transition/evolution more natural that how it seems to me 100+ years later?
I would have a hard time trusting a candidate that went from Whig, to Republican, to Know Nothing, to Federalist.
1 Answers 2016-03-01