As a cultural Jew and not a religious one, I cannot think of one real Jewish holiday that focuses on the liberation of Jews from the concentration camps, or the defeat of the Nazis. I know of Yom HaShoah, but that is really an Israeli holiday and not one for worldwide Jewry in the same way that Passover is.
1 Answers 2016-01-09
I'm curious. Since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, how often has the US tried to rekindle our reputation and alliance with Iran? And if we have, what's kept us from being successful?
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Today:
Saturday Reading and Research will focus on exactly that: the history you have been reading this week and the research you've been working on. It's also the prime thread for requesting books on a particular subject. As with all our weekly features, this thread will be lightly moderated.
So, encountered a recent biography of Stalin that revealed all about his addiction to ragtime piano? Delved into a horrendous piece of presentist and sexist psycho-evolutionary mumbo-jumbo and want to tell us about how bad it was? Need help finding the right book to give the historian in your family? Then this is the thread for you!
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If yes, who were they? What's their story?
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What were the biggest guns(naval and land) that saw action in the Napoleonic Wars? I think that muzzleloading operation set a limit for a gun's possible size, and made anything huger than a 12 pounder impractical. But what about experimental breech loading artillery that would be possibly quite big, even in the Napoleonic era technology, were they ever built? If so, where where they used(probably siege warfare and fort/anti-naval warfare would be most practical as it would be really hard to move such a big gun)?
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In V.C. Letemendia's novel The Licence of War, which is set in the English civil war, and it is said that the protagonist's family was one of William the Bastard's Conqueror's Norman invaders, and were ennobled(is that the word?) by him following the conquest of England.
What I am wondering is though, if a 17th century English nobleman would be proud of his Norman, which, I would guess, would have been linked to the French, ancestry, seeing as the English had been in a rivalry with the French for centuries at that point. Would it be more prestigious for a noble to say that his family is descendent from a pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon noble family?
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I've read that the English names for a few days of the week come from the worship of specific deities on those days like Wodensday (Odin?) and Thorsday? Is this true? If so, it woukd suggest to me they had their own calender and lead me to wonder what kind of understanding those peoples would have had of the calender/passage of time before Christianization.
2 Answers 2016-01-09
Everyone's got a watch or a phone to keep track of time, but what was it like in the 1920s? What was the price of the cheapest mechanical wristwatch? How common was it to wear wristwatches? How did ordinary people keep track of the time?
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It seems that women's role in history was erased by Victoria 'scholars'. Women's role in the medicine and autopsies was suppressed until recently (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/04/debunking-a-myth/) (http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/antiqua/women/) and women were turned from people into a helpless caricature in literature and society (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damsel_in_distress).
I don't mean to sound biased, but was there an effort by historians in the Victorian era to redraft history to be more socially appealing to their era?
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Apologies for the vague question but... I've just been on a holiday to Berlin, and I visited DDR museum and other East Germany tourist sites. The life in East Germany under SED is represented everywhere in overwhelmingly negative light, and I remember that's how the period was taught in school as well. Emphasis was on the lack of intellectual freedom, the Berlin Wall, lack of luxury goods, the military service etc.. But, now and there I could also find little underplayed facts such as there was no hunger or extremy poverty, no unemployment to speak of etc, and I also came across this Der Spiegel poll that slight majority of Germans saw more good than bad things in DDR. So, is the way I've learnt about DDR at school maybe just very biased and 'anti-communist'? I can understand that policies such as travel restrictions were unpopular but, were people generally really all that miserable under DDR?
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I never really knew my grandad, but he was a flight instructor during World War Two, and mum has shared many stories about him. By her account, he said that the average life expectancy for newly trained RAAF pilots was just six weeks once they went overseas. I realize there are a number of factors that need to be considered here - which period of the war he was referring to, which theatre he was referring to, or indeed either he or my mother misremembered his claims.
Ultimately, whether there's any truth to his purported claims regarding mortality rates for RAAF pilots, I also know very little about the role of the RAAF during the Second World War. If anyone would be able to clarify the RAAF's main activities and areas of operation, that would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
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It's obviously a loaded question but recently a famous Irish MMA fighter was scolded for taking advantage of white privilege by a very famous black boxer. A google will tell you who is who. But it got me thinking about the history of Irish slavery in the US and the history of oppression of the irish in general.
Specifically, the man said that you would get killed for just having the last name "MacGregor" for instance. Is this true? How have the Irish been oppressed? Were they enslaved? Traded? Sold? Killed?
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As an example:
Why did the germans used 88mm instead of a nice round 90mm? Why was the PTRS chambered in 14,5mm instead of 15mm, why did the germans used 10,5cm howitzers instead of 11cm howitzers? Why did the russians used 76,2mm instead of a round 76mm?
And so on...
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Reading the wiki page on motivations of the U.S for the 1953 coup. It says historians are not decided and then gives two examples.
Ervand Abrahamian says is was about oil, that Iranian nationalization would set a bad precedent and threaten U.S. economic interests. He gives a response by the secretary of state to Eisenhower as evidense that the threat of communism was just a "smoke screen"
The rest (and majority) is summarizing Gasiorowski. That this was right after they had "lost China" and fought in Korea, fear of Communist expansion was at a high point. That the U.S. looked at the Oil in Iran as something the Soviets must not get their hands on, regardless of legitimate that fear is in hind sight.
link to wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#United_States_motives
2 Answers 2016-01-09
My friend represented Taiwan in our Model UN delegation to a nearby city, and mentioned that in addition to being replaced in the UNSC by the People's Republic of China, that Taiwan/Republic of China was also removed from the UN as a whole.
This seems incredibly harsh/unlikely to me, so I did a very quick hunt around to see if it happened. A wikipedia article says something very similar to what my friend said, while a map I found of the UN member-states shows Taiwan as one. So was Taiwan expelled, even temporarily, from any of the UN organizations/committees outside of the UNSC, as a result of the same resolution which caused its replacement in the UNSC?
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A recent trip to the Met in NYC reacquainted, and then got me fascinated with this pharaoh, particularly the Aten cult he helped establish. Does anyone know any good, readable histories or scholarly biographies of this guy's life and times? I'm especially interested in how he overhauled, or failed to overhaul Egyptian polytheism. Anyone know a good non-fiction (no historical fiction please!) account to start with?
2 Answers 2016-01-09