This question brought to you in part by the edition of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" I was practicing this morning.

It lists the work as by Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, but I only knew the composer as Mendelssohn growing up (and I was with the Western Conservatory of Music, so they made you recite the composer's name, birth and death date, etc., for exams) and only seemed to encounter the hyphenated form later--it still seems the composer is most commonly called Mendelssohn.

I know he was born Jewish and "adopted" into a Catholic family for what I believe were reasons of education and opportunity, but I've never been clear on whether Mendelssohn was his birth name, or the name of the family that took him in. This then, is the root of the question: Which name was he generally known by, why, and what implications did that have, given longstanding bigotry, discrimination and outright hatred toward the Jewish people and anyone known to have Jewish decent? Does using one name or the other have, for lack of a better term, political connotations? I'd sort of taken the hyphenation as representing a reclamation of the composer's heritage, but if Mendelssohn was his birth name, I'm clearly wrong. So what implications are there of this change and when did it occur?

I'll also just take the liberty of paging /u/erus and /u/caffarelli, since I'm likely well within your bailiwick on this one.

When I took Russian in school I heard a story that Russian soldiers during WW2 (WW1?) would go into Paris restaurants and yell быстро, быстро, быстро!!! Meaning they wanted their food quickly, but the French took the word and named their restaurants that.

I don't know much of japanese history but the names suggeest a relation or is simply a coincidence?

I've heard stories of wealthy Europeans spending years on their travels to China and other distant countries, or how traveling to Singapore by ship 1800's took months before Suez canal, but I've rarely seen any estimates on cost of doing the trip. Same goes for traveling by train or ship in 1800's - I've heard both were prohibitively expensive even for the middle class.

Today, traveling to any major city in the world seems to cost no more than an average worker's two weeks salary and the trip won't usually take longer than 20 hours.

I'd like to know how has the cost and time of travel changed historically through time beginning from middle ages to present. How much an European would have had to pay in today's money for a visit to any major cities of other continents, and how long the trip would have taken?

I picked up a copy of A Short History of The World' by H.G Wells, 'revised and brought up to date by Raymond Postgate and G.P Wells', dated 1965. There was this particular passage that intrigued me.

'Now of all these civilised Semites who were beaten and overrun in these five eventful centuries one people only held together and clung to its ancient traditions, and that was this little people, the Jews, who were sent back to build their city of Jerusalem by Cyrus the Persian. And there were able to do this because they had got together this literature of theirs, their Bible, in Babylon. It was not so much the Jews who made the Bible as the Bible which made the Jews. Running through this Bible were certain ideas, different from the ideas of the people about them, very stimulating and sustaining ideas, to which they were destined to cling through five and twenty centuries of hardship, adventure, and oppression.

'Foremost of these Jewish ideas was this, that their God was invisible and remote, an invisible God in a temple not made with hands, a Lord of Righteousness throughout the earth. All other peoples had national gods embodied in images that lived in temples. If the image was smashed and the temple razed, presently that god died out. But this was a new idea, this God of the Jews, in the Heavens, high above priests and sacrifices. And this God of Abraham, the Jews believed, had chosen them to be his peculiar people, to restore Jerusalem and make it the capital of Righteouesness in the world. They were a people exalted by their sense of a common destiny. The belief saturated them all when they returned to Jerusalem after their captivity in Babylon.'

Any comments? One of my first times posting here, don't kill me mods D:

The modern diet as we know it consists of Three meals and snacks in between. Did we primarily always eat this much? Or were we built to sustain without eating over longer periods of time?

I'm a complete amateur when it comes to history; at the very most I just enjoy learning about different places and times. Anyway, I've been listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, particularly the WWI episode, after a host of recommendations from friends and family and such. I find him to be a great storyteller and he seems to use a variety of sources and makes contention amongst historians on certain issues very clear so you know what is still up in the air. What do more seasoned historians/history enthusiasts think of Carlin? Is there something glaring I'm missing about him because I have seen some scoff at him. Just curious.

After seeing a pic earlier from the front page about a storage room full of ancient Greek helmets I was wondering how large amounts of arms and armor for large forces in these times were produced. Did they have something akin to a factory? With different smiths and craftsmen doing different stages of the production and such?

I know the German economy was bad, Germans believed they got screwed at the end of world war 2, and that antisemitism was pretty common at the time, among other things, but what specifically did they believe the Jews did that they blamed them for most problems? Like for example, how did they think they were screwing up the economy?

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Was Switzerland ever punished in some way for assisting Axis countries or producing arms for Germany? Did Allied forces ever stop trade during WWII with the Swiss? Or were the consensus that Switzerland was acting in self preservation?

I've been reading about the reconstruction of a face from his era. His folk look VERY different from the art I've seen in Protestant churches over the years.

As the title asks, if Hitler was born in Austria and wasn't a citizen from birth how was Hitler able to be elected Chancellor of Germany? Did the Weimar Republic not have laws like the United States that prohibits non-native born Germans to be elected as Chancellor?

I know that most of the colonization of Africa was done from the Berlin Conference in 1884, and that colonial rule ended, for the most part, in the period from 1940-1960s. Which gave the Europeans about 2 or 3 generations of rule over them.

My question is what did the colonial powers do to industrialize, modernize, or in other ways improve the colonies and the lives of the natives they ruled? Also, did the violent revolutions and protests following ww2 that ultimately kicked the Europeans stop those plans, or were they going to continue exploit the natives and resources for as long as possible?

I have heard everything from 1683(siege of Vienna) , to the late 1500s, & the 19th century .

So, what date is it & most importantly why can't the internet agree upon a answer.

The BLM movement is focused on bringing light and change to the institutional racism of the US's police, after the legacy of racism by the police and the many notable killings of black people. To the best of my knowledge, this movement is focused on protesting to bring attention to this. But, many people, especially throughout the Reddit community, focus on the rioting that occurs, and consider the BLM to be "negative," inciting the term "thug" as a description for the rioters.

I'd assume that, like the BLM movement, the Civil Rights Movement received similar negative public perception, and was viewed and criticized for having negative effects, despite attempting to shed light on institutional racism.

I'd also like to know to what extent rioting has occurred in the Civil Rights Movement, and what comparisons there are to the BLM, if possible.

To keep in line with subreddit rules, if necessary, please prioritize answers to the Civil Rights movement.

This is a question for other academic historians: what do you do to improve your writing style?

I'm very good at writing dry academic prose, but I always prefer reading work by historians who use their language well. People like Peter Brown whose metaphors communicate meanings deeper than the words on the page, and draw the reader in by gripping her imagination.

But I spend most of my time reading precisely the wrong sorts of things to improve my own writing - lately, it's been nothing but osteology reports. Nothing strips magic from your prose like reading a bunch of scientific tables held together by clinical description. I feel like I'm training my brain to write the kind of book I wouldn't enjoy reading.

What do you do, fellow historians, to improve your style?

Do you have favorite authors you turn to for writing inspiration? Historians who tell good stories, or pull deep meaning from deceptively simple prose? Great literature (or trashy fiction) whose language you try to copy? Poetry? Art?

Do you have other tricks for nuturing a writing style that adds richness, color, and texture to your academic prose?

I came home recently to spend Christmas with my family and saw that my mom was reading Bill O'reilly's Killing Jesus (among other things--I don't mean to imply that I have some big problem with her reading that book, it's not really my business and in any case she's admirably diverse in her reading choices). I'm not religious, and my mom is, but we're both really open minded and enjoy discussing issues in critical and challenging ways. I voiced my opinions regarding a general distaste for political figures (particularly those who make their living through highly controversial political and religious rants) putting their names on books claiming to be historical/factual accounts (I think it's a disservice to the topic they seem to care so much about, as well as a job that's better left to, oh, I don't know, historians?) and she argued that the book was making no arguments, per se, but rather telling a good story about stuff that is widely accepted as factual. I have issues with that in and of itself, but I'd really just like to get her a book that is considered both entertaining/engaging as well as credible. Whether or not it's in support of Christian ideology or critical of it is not as important to me as simply providing a text that is both fun and trustworthy (or as trustworthy as one could be, given the topic).

I've done a lot of searching in this thread and others on reddit and the internet at large, but although I found a lot of recommendations about academic texts, I didn't really see anything that might strike a good balance between digestible, accessible, challenging, and factually accurate...I know that's a tall order, but I figured if there was anywhere to ask it would be here! I was considering Aslan's Zealot for a while, but it was not very well regarded in some subs around here. I know it's impossible to find a perfect answer to such a loaded question, but I'm still going to put out the request!

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, it's greatly appreciated.