So, I live in Greece, and the following is something that's heard a lot in History classes: because the Greek pushed back the Italians when they attacked Greece, the Germans had to come to finish the job and conquer Greece, and the delay caused by this resulted in Germany invading Russia during the winter, which led to eventual loss of a big part of their army in the Battle of Stalingrad, which was the turning point of the war. Is this true, partially true, or just completely false?
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Do we know enough about Ancient Egypt to have some sense of how much of a burden on the state and people was caused by building the pyramids? Sure seems wasteful.
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Welcome to part 3 of our 6 part series. This week we will turn our gaze to Primary Sources, and the challenges of reading them critically.
/u/Cordis_melum will talk about the basics of evaluating a source critically.
/u/kookingpot will post about some of the challenges involved in research using ancient texts, including:
ancient language barriers, ancient worldview disconnects, inherent bias in ancient sources, and the accessibility of the ancient texts in question.
and /u/textandtrowel will speak about the specifics of using Biblical texts as historical sources, and the critical reading involved.
Next week: we will continue our focus on Primary Sources, discussing how to deal with troublesome Primary Sources
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It's just something I noticed. I figured they would at least have served in the navy, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
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I am going to start a project related to this celebration and I would like to know, how was it celebrated, why it was celebrated (Including its significance to the society) and what dates it was celebrated on.
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I'm reading lots in the press lately about Wilson the racist, but the defense against that has included this article in today's Times, that calls him an architect of liberalism and praises his "leadership during World War I."
But, reading The Great Influenza, I found a very different picture of Wilson's America - a repressive state that brooked no dissent, and repressed information about the pandemic in the name of "morale" on the home front... (Scanned from the book so apologies for typos)
One cannot look at the influenza pandemic without understanding the context. Wilson had realized his aims. The United States was waging total war.
Already two million U.S. troops were in France; it was expected that at least two million more would be needed. Every element of the nation, from farmers to elementary school teachers, was willingly or otherwise enlisted in the war. To Wilson, to Creel, to his entire administration, and for that matter to allies and enemies alike, the control of information mattered…
Total war requires sacrifice and good morale makes sacrifices acceptable, and therefore possible. The sacrifices included inconveniences in daily life. To contribute to the war effort, citizens across the country endured the “meatless days” during the week, the one “wheatless meal” every day. All these sacrifices were of course voluntary, completely voluntary— although Hoover’s Food Administration could effectively close businesses that did not “voluntarily” cooperate. And if someone chose to go for a drive in the country on a “gasless Sunday,” when people were “voluntarily" refraining from driving, that someone was pulled over by hostile police…
The preservation of morale itself became an aim. For if morale faltered, all else might as well. So free speech trembled. More than in the McCarthy period, more than during World War II itself, more than in the Civil War—when Lincoln was routinely vilified by opponents—free speech trembled indeed. The government had the two hundred thousand members of the American Protective League, who reported to the Justice Department’s new internal security agency headed by J. Edgar Hoover and spied on neighbors and coworkers. Creel’s organization advised citizens, “Call the bluff of anyone who says he has ‘inside information.’ Tell him that it’s his patriotic duty to help you find the source of what he’s saying. If you find a disloyal person in your search, give his name to the Department of Justice in Washington and tell them where to find him.”
Socialists, German nationals, and especially the radical unionists in the International Workers of the World got far worse treatment. The New York Times declared, “The IWW agitators are in effect, and perhaps in fact, agents of Germany. The Federal authorities should make short work of these treasonable conspirators against the United States.” The government did just that, raiding union halls, convicting nearly two hundred union men at mass trials in Illinois, California, and Oregon, and applying relentless pressure against all opponents; in Philadelphia on the same day that Kruseh first discussed influenza with navy officials, five men who worked for the city’s German-language paper Tageblatt were imprisoned.
Regarding the influenza pandemic, the feds' attempts at "preserving morale" only made the pandemic far worse than it would have been...
The federal government was giving no guidance that a reasoning person could credit. Few local governments did better. They left a vacuum. Fear filled it.
The government’s very efforts to preserve “morale” fostered the fear, for since the war began, morale—defined in the narrowest, most short-sighted fashion—had taken precedence in every public utterance. As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”
It was a time when the phrase “brisk fighting” meant that more than 50 percent of a unit was killed or wounded; a time when the memoir of a nurse at the front, published in 1916, was withdrawn by her publisher after America entered the war because she told the truth about gruesome conditions; a time when newspapers insisted, “There is plenty of gasoline and oil for automobile use,” even while gas stations were ordered to close “voluntarily” at night and Sundays and a national campaign was being waged against driving on “gasless Sundays”—and police pulled over motorists who did not “voluntarily” comply.
Newspapers reported on the disease with the same mixture of truth and half-truth, truth and distortion, truth and lies with which they reported everything else. And no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza.
I know much of Barry's info on that comes from David M. Kennedy's Over Here, which I bought but have yet to read. All that said...how is it that this part of Wilson's record seems completely absent from today's debate about his legacy?
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So, Caligula has always been fascinating to me, but I really need to know if half the things I've read about him are even true. I know Nero did not actually play the fiddle while Rome burned. Things like having Tiberias killed, believing himself to be a God, throwing massive sex orgies, making his horse a consul, watching lions devour people for his own amusement, chewing on the testicles of people he planned on killing, publicly executing people left right and center, incest etc... how much of it is actually true and not descended from heresay and myth? Some of it seems a little bit too outrageous to be true.
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I have been doing some reading lately on Weimar Berlin, largely in reference to women's shifting roles and the rise of LGBT cultures/acceptability. While it's hard to generalize (especially given my limited reading), it sounds to me like women and LGBT folk absolutely faced discrimination, but were able to socialize in ways that were fairly unprecedented in many western European countries. For example, the New Woman was challenging norms by entering previously male-dominated spaces (e.g. universities), and homosexuals were able to be out in bars and clubs designated for them (although this was largely just for men and transwomen) due to the relatively lax policies of Meerscheidt-Hullesem. There was a present queer culture and a push for improved women's rights at the social and political level.
But how did the experiences of white, middle-class women and LGBT folk differ from that of lower-class folk and PoC?
In terms of class, obviously the lower-classes included white people. Were they ostracized from the middle-class dominance in Weimar culture?
In terms of race, while Germany is not necessarily the most racially diverse, there must have been Turkish, black, and other racial groups present, right? Were these people accepted by the white, middle-class groups generally speaking? Were they ostracized by their own communities? Were they more likely to face discrimination by those not in the community than their white, middle-class counterparts?
Note that I know my research is not incredibly rigorous. I am getting more books to be better read, but few of them seem to tackle class and race. So I completely understand if anything I said here is erroneous and said to be such by any commenters.
Sources I am basing a lot of this off of:
Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. New York, NY: Vintage, 2014.
Lybeck, Marti M. Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890-1933. Albany, NY: SUNY, 2014.
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The Austrian-Hungarian Empire and Polish-Lithuanian Empire for instance. How did they benefit?
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Im doing a research paper and i would love the help. It doesnt have to be indepth tho.
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I know they used horses for artillery, but they lost almost 180k horses on eastern front, thus they had some cavalry charges, right?
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Who was it closed to? This term doesn't seem to make sense to me. Also there is no wikipedia page for it.
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Was there ever a time when death was not feared or when the fear of death influenced people and their thinking the most? What were the historical reasons for this?
Perhaps war and poverty in some cases? I know that this is a very specific question but perhaps someone can help. Had a discussion about the fear of death with friends just now and i also read about some shift in the way ancient greeks thought about death sometime around 500 BC so that got me thinking. Thanks!
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In school, I learned that Benjamin Franklin's lighting rods were very popular in France because they stopped the plague of churches catching fire from lighting strikes. At the time churches were the tallest things around, with a metal cross on top to boot, so were hotbed for lightning strikes. The French people were very upset because God kept smiting their churches. So Benjamin Franklin, while serving as ambassador, gave them lighting rods which solved this problem, and French opinion of the Colonies rose dramatically enough to support them in the Independence War.
Or so the story went.
I find it hard to believe that churches burning down was that much of a problem, or that solving it with a simple invention would have factored into the decision to support a war on the other side of the Atlantic. How big of a deal were the lightning rods really?
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While doing some family tree work, I came across a guy in English history, that was an M.D. or roughly the equivalent (not really sure of how that all worked in that era), with the same last name. Whether he is my ancestor or not I dunno, but it got me curious.
In this work, Physicians and Irregular Medical Practitioners in London 1550-1640 Database., he is listed as a person who essentially investigated doctors who had complaints registered against them, or were reported to be working without "joining the college". This indicates that there was a system of regulation and essentially a licensing board in existance for the practice of medicine established enough to maintain records and standards as at least as early as the mid-16th Century in England.
How far back does the idea of professional licensing and regulatory bodies go back?
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After news of the disaster of the battle of hattin, how did western rulers and the papacy react?
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I was reading an article about how King Tut's mask may have actually been made for someone else, when I noticed an interesting side note: chiefly, that Akhenaten's attempt to convert the Egyptian religion to one that worshiped his singular supreme deity coincides with the traditional time for Moses and the Exodus. Is there any evidence or hints that Akhenaten's attempt may have been an influence or contribution to Judaism?
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Both are islands so you would assume that there breakfast would be heavily sea based. Does anyone know why we have the current pork, sausage and eggs and no fish?
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What theory is widely held as being the most probable?
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http://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/134246499753/so-if-donald-trump-is-huey-long-would-that-make
I'm most interested in the veracity of the claims made in the last two paragraphs:
The media/establishment view of Reagan started as "joke candidate" who "can't win" and evolved toward "fascist" who "mustn't win". Were opinions of Reagan during the 1980 campaign really that negative?
The seismic rightward shift of the Reagan/Thatcher era shocked the establishment because there was a consensus belief at the time that "society was working up to a major leftward shift" instead.
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