I've been studying European History and this question came up today in a lecture. What do you guys think?
1 Answers 2016-01-12
Most people I know get a cold or the flu at least twice a year. Usually this is during the fall/winter when everyone (in temperate climates, that is) spends a lot more time inside interacting with other people with colds. My impression of the past is that this extensive winter indoor interaction is a relatively recent historical phenomena.
So, did people in the past get sick less often than we do?
Obviously, when they got sick it was often much more serious than when we do now because of the advances of modern medicine. I was just wondering if they got the common cold as often as we do now.
1 Answers 2016-01-12
Both Empires severely weakened themselves by civil wars over succession, this happened less frequently in Western Europe (aside big ones like the 100 Years' War and the Norman Invasion of England), it was even a major cause for the decline of the Byzantine Empire, so what prevented them?
2 Answers 2016-01-12
I was reading a book the Ming court that was discussing some of the emperors eunuchs and I was wondering where these men would have come from. I know that castration was a punishment meted out to some famous courtiers like Sima Qian but it wouldn't make much sense to surround the emperor with convicted criminals. So, were these some kind of slaves purchased as children or people punished for their family's actions? Did people become eunuchs voluntarily, and if so why, when their would be conceivably less awful ways of moving up in the world.
Feel free to discuss other Imperial courts besides the Ming, from what I understand eunuchs were more or less a feature of all of the dynasties.
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With monarchs, I mean Kings or Queens. And with distant I meant to a different continent.
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what were the 10 (or even 5) MOST traded commodities globally in that century ? I am reading the book "Empire of the Deep" so the ask. I am guessing it could be ...Spices ? Silk ? Cotton ?
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I assume, based solely on my experience with American politics over the last twenty years that there must have been a number of states that could have gone for the democrats, even if a Republican blowout was inevitable. What were the major errors or missteps in the Mondale campaign? Or, conversely, what were Reagan's specific tactical successes?
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Would the average 'Celt' that lived before the Roman Conquest and Germanic migrations have looked very differently in terms of facial features, eye or hair color etc., than contemporary people in Northwestern Europe (France, Belgium)? In what way? For example, there are currently a lot of people with brown eyes and black hair in Northern European countries. Is this largely a result of mixture with Mediterranean populations, or did these features already appear in Celtic populations prior to the mass migrations that happened after the Roman conquest?
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Non American here. Have there ever been a US president who was a convicted felon and served time for it before taking office? If not, why not?
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Why did the douxes continue to squabble for the throne whilst the empire burned around them.
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In school, I was taught that one of the main reasons so many Native Americans died was because they were exposed to European diseases and there immune systems were not built to fight these diseases. Why did the settlers not have a similar experience with North American Diseases?
2 Answers 2016-01-12
I'm thinking of something along the lines of the sagas that were recorded about the German folk migrations - eg the Volsunga Saga.
Granted it would be hindered significantly by the fact that the Germans were in contact with literate cultures and the Indo-Europeans generally were not, but perhaps some distant memory filtered down through myths or fictionalized heroes like Theseus?
1 Answers 2016-01-12
The brief history of manned space flight has been largely a pacific one, with such combat-oriented aspects of it as there have been being limited mostly to missiles or orbital lasers--and mostly only in theory, at that.
Have two space-farers ever had cause to fight one another while on a mission, though? I don't mean two from competing countries during the Cold War, or anything like that, as I'm sure that would be an event I couldn't help but have heard of; instead, I'm wondering if tensions have ever boiled over on Mir or Skylab, or on a shuttle mission. I won't ask about the ISS due to the 20-year rule.
This is a pretty trivial question, all-told, but it occurred to me that a brawl in zero-gravity would be pretty interesting.
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Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.
Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/MI13!
Take a break from browsing /r/aww and /r/dogsinhats (or maybe /r/birdswitharms?) for some history! Please share any historical information you’d like about beloved historical pets or just animals in general.
Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: Imagine the desert music from Lawrence of Arabia filling the room… we’ll be talking about fantastic journeys in history!
6 Answers 2016-01-12
Hello everyone and welcome to the third 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 rules concerning "No Personal Anecdotes", which while briefly touched on in the post regarding sources as a whole, also deserves its own post for discussion. So first, the rule. As stated, it is quite brief and too the point:
Personal anecdotes are not acceptable answers in this subreddit. They are unreliable, unverifiable and of very little real interest.
But what does that mean? Well, there is a lot more too it than just that, but we all agree that it has been better said than any of us can muster, so credit for the following is fully due to /u/American_Graffiti, a former flaired user who has since left reddit, but not before giving us this gem of a response, among others. We're replicating it in full here though to, as noted, provide a refresher, as well as a platform for all of you to ask questions and seek clarification.
First, people's memories are unreliable; it has been repeatedly, conclusively demonstrated that human memory is not a process of recall, but rather a process of reconstruction and association - people will very often "remember" the past in a particular way because they think that's how they should remember the past, or because they have already been exposed to specific narratives of the past which they feel their experiences should conform to. This isn't conscious in most cases - people can wholesale fabricate "memories" of past events, and be totally convinced that those memories are real, without even realizing it. Psychologists have done experiments where they can get people to recount elaborate "memories" of past events that never happened, simply by having a trusted family member suggest to them "hey, remember that time when X happened?" So that's the first, biggest reason; we really can't trust people's memories of the past - especially about events like the Challenger explosion, which have a lot of emotion attached to them, and which have an established narrative that we're all already aware of and assume to be true. There's a perfect example of this in the thread on the challenger disaster - in defending the posting of anecdotes, /u/jeremiahfelt writes that "there is an ineffable quality to the spirit- the substance of the moment, and the time this tragedy took place in" - this kind of comment sets of huge alarm bells in the mind of trained historians, because it's evidence of a widespread assumption that there was only one "real" or "true" response to the challenger disaster. The statement is evidence that a particular narrative/account of the challenger disaster has already become privileged, and is widely regarded to be "correct" - this makes it all too likely that (whether consciously or unconsciously) people sharing anecdotes in that thread will be sharing memories that have been altered to conform to that narrative and those expectations.
Second, anecdotes posted on reddit are too far removed from the events they supposedly describe. This is related to the the first point, but a bit different. Historians tend to prize a very specific kind of source when we're researching the past; sources that were created at the time of the events we're interested in. The longer the period between when the event happened and the source we're using was created, the more likely it is that the fallibility of human memory and various other factors (ie, political, social, cultural forces that tend to privilege one account/version of past events over another) will have distorted the account that the source gives. Memories of the challenger disaster are years old, but the journal you describe in your example is totally different - it is an awesome source because it was written at the time - probably the day of the events it describes. The writer's memory of those events is fresh and more reliable, and it is less likely to have been warped by other considerations.
Third, we must be able to contextualize primary sources. The journal in your example is useful because we know who wrote it, when, and under what conditions. We can anticipate and account for the ways in which that person might have been dishonest or biased in their relation of events. This is what historians spend a great deal of their time doing; weighing one source against another, comparing them, thinking about what different people's relation to (and stake in) the events they're describing was. All of that effects how we interpret the source and what kind of weight we give to the account it presents. A comment by an anonymous redditor, in contrast, is pretty much impossible to contextualize; we have no idea who this person is, how old they are, where they grew up, what socio-economic class they are, etc, etc... All of those things are absolutely critical for us to know if their account of events is going to be of any use to us at all.
Fourth, we can't trust redditors. This site is an anonymous internet forum. People are notorious for trolling, telling lies, and pretending to be someone they're not on reddit and other similar forums. Reddit (in general) is infested with people who are attempting to manipulate the opinions of others and advance a particular point of view/world view. And what's worse, on reddit people have a powerful incentive to tell people what they want to hear in the form of karma and upvotes.
Fifth, no one single source is really of all that much use. One thing that historians-in-training learn very quickly is that there are 2, 3, or 30 sides of every story; even if we have 10 different eyewitness accounts of a past event, that were written on the day it happened - you can bet your ass that those accounts will conflict or be contradictory in some way. One of the core skills that historians need to develop is an awareness that really any telling of a past event is just one of many possible views of that event. Our job is to collect many of those views, put each of them in context, compare them, and weigh them against each other in order to try to understand what actually happened in the past - and what those events meant to people at the time - as best we can. The people who post anecdotes here seem to be of the opinion that because they experience the past in a particular way, that must mean that "that's how it happened" - that their account is "true" and therefore proves that past events occurred in a particular way. As historians, we know that this is hogwash; I can guarantee that no matter what past even we're talking about, people saw, experienced, and thought about that event in a wide variety of dramatically different ways. One person's account (and again, especially one that we can neither trust nor contextualize) is just one perspective. It "proves" nothing. To understand the event we're interested in, we need to assemble many different sources representing many different points of view - and preferably sources (as I've already said) that we can trust.
Sixth, (a more practical consideration) - everyone who was alive at a given time probably has a memory of that event. Which is fine, but if we let everyone who had a memory of the challenger disaster post their own story about it here, whole threads would become clogged with reminiscences that we can't really use or trust, rather than actual analysis. This is /r/askhistorians not /r/ask-grampa-what-he-did-during-the-war. The sub's readers are interested in hearing about the past from people who've spent much of their lives training and practicing to properly interpret the past, and the academic experience/skills/authority of those historians are what gives this sub its cachet. In other words, people come here to do the equivalent of reading a history book that someone's written after researching the subject in depth. They don't come here to wade into fileboxes full of documents or decipher centuries-old manuscripts to try to figure out history for themselves. Allowing anecdotes to pile up in every thread where someone is still around to remember the event is really no different from telling someone who asks "how did the Vietnam war start" to go to the national archives and figure it out for themselves, rather than telling them to read one of the many well-researched and well-sourced books that historians have written on that question.
A quick addendum, since I know this might come across as harsh or disconcerting to some people: don't mistake my pessimism about the reliability of people's anecdotes on reddit for pessimism about the reliability of any memories. We can make effective use of people's memories of the past - we just have to do it in the right way. Historians use written memoirs and oral histories all the time - but we use them in a specific, very careful way. Memoirs are used very critically, and cross-checked with other sources like newspapers, government records, and even other memoirs to try to get an understanding of how reliable they are and when (or if) we can trust that account of the past. Oral historians have developed a whole set of very sophisticated rules and procedures that they use to collect people's memories of the past while minimizing the chance that the account they get will be too distorted. It takes years of training just to learn not to ask leading questions or the wrong questions in oral history interviews. And even then, we are very critical in the way that we analyze oral histories, always putting the source in context and cross-checking the account it gives with other sources. In other words, people shouldn't feel like their memories are invalid because of what I wrote above - it's just that reddit is emphatically not the place for those memories to be properly collected, preserved, and analyzed.
If you have any further questions, please ask them here, and the mod team (or other users!) will be happy to help you out.
10 Answers 2016-01-12
Hello everyone.
I was adopted at a young age and know very little about my family. I do know that my Grandfather was an SS officer, but that is sadly it.
Is there a place I can go to look him up in maybe a data base of SS officers? I have his name.
It would be really nice to have some kind of connection with my biological family.
ok, thanks.
2 Answers 2016-01-12
The Holy Roman Empire had (for most of its existance) seven electors. Three spirtual (Archbishops of Trier, Mainz and Cologne) and four secular. These were: Bohemia, Saxony, Brandenburg and the county palatine of the Rhine.
I know what a Count(y) is and I know what the Rhine is. However, I don't quite understand how a Count Palatine differs from a regular Count. Was it "better" to be a Count Palatine? Why was the palatine bit added to this particular elector title?
Thanks!
1 Answers 2016-01-12
