I was watching a video on the German army mechanization and in this part the lecturer talks about going to the armor school at Munster and singing the Panzerlied with German armor cadets. It sounds like the West German army kept most of the traditions of the old army, even from the Nazi era as long as it wasn't explicitly Nazi. Did the East German army do so as well, or were they more throughly indoctrinated by Soviets to reject German military traditions? Did they retain pre-Nazi German/Prussian traditions? Were their doctrines based on Guderian, Clausewitz etc. or Tukhachevsky and Zhukov?
1 Answers 2015-11-06
It seems like being in the very front line of a roman cohort or similar military unit would practically be a death sentence, as you would be the first up in battle to fight the enemy army.
Were lots picked to determine who would fight at the front? Or were orders just given out? How exactly was this determined?
1 Answers 2015-11-06
so today i was curious and thought to myself "what does one have to do to be considered a Criminal when killing is the norm during war. i looked up war crimes and came across this definition :
"A war crime is an act that constitutes a serious violation of the law of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility.Examples of war crimes include intentionally killing civilians or prisoners, torture, wantonly destroying property, taking hostages, perfidy, rape, using child soldiers, pillaging, declaring that no quarter will be given, and using weapons that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering."
while reading this definition i began to think about what was said about "intentionally killing civilians" which is exactly what we did when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed millions of people just going about their day. i don't mean to sound like a snobby millennial or non-patriotic and i understand they the Japanese did in fact attack us first but i still cant help but wounder what would happen to us if we where on the other end of the shoe and being charged ourselves with war crimes. can somebody please explain to me why Americans where not put on trial during Nuremberg? (unless the trial was only for Nazi's)
2 Answers 2015-11-06
I was looking up the meaning of "Soviet" and I learned that it more or less means "Council" but in practice its more akin "(Worker's) Union" or "Syndicate," at least in the context of Syndicalism. Using that translation, "Union of Syndicalist Socialist Republics" seems apt.
My question is two part: a) Did the Soviet Union use that name appear more like a Syndicalist State to the workers of the world? and b) Why did politicians and now historians not translate this term into English?
2 Answers 2015-11-06
My wife is currently reading World Without End. I did the same a while back, but never had the same question she did: In the 14th century leprosy was known since 500 BCE (or so) and the people with symptoms were removed. Why then was the black death not treated in the same way? ie: removal of those with symptoms from those without?
1 Answers 2015-11-06
1 Answers 2015-11-06
My wife is reading a novel where one of the characters is facing execution for deserting the British army during World War I. Was the penalty for desertion really death?
1 Answers 2015-11-06
Did anyone in the recorded history of the business chain of slavery, whether particular individuals, groups or sporadic situations, from the top to the bottom, have significant issues with the immorality of the trade or attempt to assist slaves?
1 Answers 2015-11-05
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1 Answers 2015-11-05
If someone was Half German and half French, were they thrown in a concentration camp with the rest of the people the say inferior to them? Did they have normal lives (like those living in Nazi Germany)? What about if they can trace their genealogy to someone who wasn't German (let's say their Great Grandmother wasn't German), but the rest of their ancestry was German? How far back did Nazi Germany go to determine if someone was "pure" German or not?
1 Answers 2015-11-05
1 Answers 2015-11-05
I googled it and found something relevant on Japan. Looks like arranged marriage caused larger age differences with men being older. With most cultures being patriarchal I assume it was common in most general populations before the modern decline?
edit: focus on Europe, or England, but I'd be interested in any region... off chance anyone else will see this
2 Answers 2015-11-05
I've been trying to find more info about the 12th century renaissance and not finding much. The only real material is from Charles Haskins book published in 1927, who orignially identifed it. Old copies of the book are available through Amazon for a decent price. Is the 12th Century Renaissance out of fashion, or was it ever really in fashion?
Here's some info I found in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century Charles H. Haskins was the first historian to write extensively about a renaissance that ushered in the High Middle Ages starting about 1070. In 1927, he wrote that: "[The 12th century in Europe] was in many respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The 12th century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry...[7]"
Aristotles work was found during the Spanish Reconquista in the 1100s and seems to be one of the main events of the 12th century renaissance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism "The renaissance of the 12th century saw a major search by European scholars for new learning. James of Venice, who probably spent some years in Constantinople, translated Aristotle's Posterior Analytics from Greek into Latin in the mid-twelfth century,[12] thus making the complete Aristotelian logical corpus, the Organon, available in Latin for the first time. Scholars travelled to areas of Europe that once had been under Muslim rule and still had substantial Arabic-speaking populations. From central Spain, which had come under Christian rule in the eleventh century, scholars produced many of the Latin translations of the 12th century. The most productive of these translators was Gerard of Cremona,[13] (c. 1114–1187), who translated 87 books,[14] which included many of the works of Aristotle such as his Posterior Analytics, Physics, On the Heavens, On Generation and Corruption, and Meteorology. Michael Scot (c. 1175–1232) translated Averroes' commentaries on the scientific works of Aristotle.[15]"
Apparently the 12th century Renaissance was derailed due to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Late_Middle_Ages "A series of famines and plagues, beginning with the Great Famine of 1315–17 and especially the Black Death of 1348, reduced the population perhaps by half or more as the Medieval Warm Period came to a close and the first century of the Little Ice Age began. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. Soil exhaustion, overpopulation, wars, and epidemic diseases helped cause hundreds of famines in Europe during the Middle Ages, including 95 in Britain and 75 in France.[2][3] In France, the Hundred Years' War, crop failures and epidemics reduced the population by two-thirds.[4][better source needed]"
1 Answers 2015-11-05
EDIT: Middle Ages in Europe, obviously.
As I understand it, since you need quite a lot of training to be an effective soldier, not to mention have the money to buy gear for yourself, being a soldier who was not simply a peasant with a spear seems like a lifetime career.
Now, for knights, this isn't too weird. Knights were generally wealthy enough to afford gear, had enough time to train themselves, and since they often also owned land, they weren't as I understand it depending on war as a career to sustain themselves.
But what about the other soldiers in the army, who obviously weren't fabulously wealthy minor nobles? Crossbowmen, pike or spearmen, generally the infantry as a whole, have always confused me on a number of points:
From what sort of social class did they come? Were they peasants? It seems wasteful to train the people harvesting your food to be full-time soldiers.
How did they even go about becoming soldiers anyway? Were you conscripted by your local lord, did you join the army as a volunteer, or did you just go to your local Ye Olde Weapon Shoppe, get some gear and look for an army to fight in?
And once someone became a soldier, what would they do with their lives if their kingdom wasn't at war? Go fight in someone else's war?
For simplicity's sake I am narrowing the field of view to the middle ages (Which really is wide enough to begin with), but if you have an answer that relates to earlier or later periods, feel free to throw them in as well!
1 Answers 2015-11-05
It always seemed strange to me that nobody painted hyper realistically before cameras were invented as you would have thought the idea of replicating something perfectly would have been more popular when we weren't able to do so at the click of a button.
1 Answers 2015-11-05
I've always thought of older languages being spoken in a very formal tone. But is that really the case? Do we know when we started to do so (Stone age? Roman? Medieval..)?
Sorry, ment abbreviations in the title.
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1 Answers 2015-11-05
Seems like if Matilda's son became king, then he would still be a Norman. Why does the dynasty end so suddenly?
1 Answers 2015-11-05
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1 Answers 2015-11-05
As the title says, why did the first quebecians(?) move there? Was it for similar reason to why the pilgrims moved to america? I can't see any reason as to why you would move your entire family across the Atlantic ocean to then have to adapt the the new environment.
Also, how/when did Quebec become independent from France, if it is.
2 Answers 2015-11-05