I don't know much about him, but I always thought he was just a war time leader, how come he was reelected 7 years after the war?

Especially in the South where total war was practiced, were there significant amounts of displaced people? Where did they go? How did the social landscape change as a result of the refugees?

I'm also open to a wide interpretation of the question of wartime refugees, if the American Civil War is too narrow a topic.

Hi everyone, this is my first time posting here- I hope my question is relevant.

I have a tattoo of a sea wyvern (photo in comments). I'm wondering now what the origins are of this particular kind of sea wyvern. I believe it may be Welsh or Celtic, but I'm not entirely sure. My questions are:

-What country/nation would have used this specific wyvern?

-What specifically could it have been used for?

-What time period would we have started to see something like this?

-What does a sea wyvern represent in comparison to a dragon or a regular wyvern in terms of flags/crests etc?

EDIT: took out some unnecessary details

I've read accounts of the Nazi extermination camps, and there are many mentions of Ukrainian guards even though the camps were not in the Ukraine. Why were they there?

There are a lot of people who are scared by the thought of self driving cars. People think they are unsafe, untrustworthy, prone to hacks, like the ability to drive, or that they will steal jobs from taxi drivers, truck drivers, or other forms of transportation. But this gets me wondering, were people ever scared by newer methods of transportation like automobiles when they were new? I would think that the automobile would scare a lot of people back then thinking that they were a fad or only for the rich. Were people ever worried about automobiles, trains, steamships like they are now about self driving cars?

I read in this subreddit (please confirm) that even the Crusaders went after the weaker marine/sea walls. That would mean the Theodosian Walls protected Constantinople for over 1000 years (or more? I'm not sure what the Ottomans did with the walls after they took the city), mostly successfully.

From pre-history to the advent of antibiotics and dental care, what were a persons options with rotting or infected teeth? How common was death caused by an infected tooth?

I can see simple removal, but what about cases where there was nothing left but the root and pieces of tooth embedded in the gum? Did it eventually just fall out, and the hole seal up if the person managed to avoid infection?

So I've tried my best over the years to find an unbiased way to view the American Civil War but I've found it difficult. My two main sources of information on it throughout my life have been history class, and my grandfather (who was a very smart man who worked in intelligence at the pentagon and was fairly well read on American history). The problem with the first is that I have found obvious biases in my American history books, namely things like glorifying Sherman's run through the South and overlooking all the really shitty things he did. The issue with my Grandfather is that, as brilliant as he is, he was also heavily biased. He was born and raised in South Carolina and later moved to Virginia and would always tell me that the whole issue was about states' rights and that's that, which I have a really hard time believing, but I'm willing to believe that that's probably what he was taught and brought up with.

Slavery, obviously, was much more prevalent in the South what with the tobacco and cotton trades being so big down there but that doesn't really mean that there weren't slaves up north or even that people up North were these humanitarians who didn't see color. Growing up as I did in Pennsylvania you can see that people not being forced to interact with black people all that much just allows them to keep close to their chest and unadulterated their racist views and stereotypes. I can't imagine that people who were still so racist in their own right (and for so long after the civil war, too) could've possibly fought the whole damn thing because they cared so much that the South had slaves.

If it really was just about Slaves, was it seemingly from a humanitarian-, "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights"-perspective, or was it a thing of economics? I seem to remember a theory (or maybe a fact?) from American History that Lincoln freed the slaves in an attempt to cause unrest in the South, not out of the goodness of his heart. And I certainly remember that before the war, the North had placed heavy taxes on the South for the importing of finished goods from Northern industry, which is, I gather, the sort of action where terms like "War of Northern Aggression" comes from.

On a related note, was there a massive disparity between what the leaders of the war believed in and what your average soldier did? Did Jefferson Davis and Joe Virginia hold the same ideals? Was Lincoln actually a humanitarian's wet dream and as a result did he have to use some other kind of anti-South propaganda to convince pro-Slavery Northerners to fight in the war? If it wasn't about Slavery, why did the Northerners fight in the war?

So, AskHistorians, is it even possible to find some sort of objective reason for the American Civil War's initiation? Is the Southern or the Northern history text book more right? Or are they both wrong?

I am a high school history teacher. My vision is to take my passion and occupation to a higher level -- whether it be working for a university as a professor, writing books, or both. I would also love to create educational podcasts, documentaries, and other multimedia creations. I want to have the academic creds and background to be considered an authority.

I have two master's degrees, one in public administration and the other in teaching. Could these help me earn a phd quicker and easier than the traditional graduate student studying full time and doing GA/TA work? Could I continue teaching high school and earn a legitimate phd from an univeristy that would be completely respected and valid (no for proffit education or online only programs)? My hope is that all the statistics classes and other graduate level classes I've already completed between the two master's degrees would shorten my path to earning a phd.

Having said all this, how are phd's in history earned? Do you need to already be specialized in a field? Can I choose a topic/field I want to become an expert in? What do thesis/research papers look like for phd's in history?

I know these are broad questions, but any insight or direction that you can offer me will help me to get going in the right direction.

I have several versions availiable at my library, one by Hackett publishing, several by Maudslay, one by Keatinge, and some other translations. What's the difference between translations? Which is the most accurate or best?

I was listening to an episode of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History last night, and he made a point to mention that when Luther translated the Bible into German, he bypassed Latin and translated from Greek. As a member of the clergy, presumably Martin Luther spoke Latin, and could have translated the Latin version into German. What was the significance of translating directly from Greek?

Another way of asking the same question, but if somebody translated the Bible from Latin into German at that time, would that version and Luther's Greek-to-German version have differed? If so, how?

I saw the below article (on Facebook) and found the content interesting but don't particularly have any reliance on the source - not least because it's from somewhere that would definitely have a bias in this area.

But I find the content interesting and would like to clear up anything in my head that might be wrong about this before I end up remembering it all as fact or something!

So I was just wondering if someone could either point out if there's any glaring inaccuracies, truth-stretching, etc. or anything. Or even just give a basic overview of Irish slavery ignoring this article, would be great. Thanks!

IRISH SLAVERY

The Irish Slave Trade

The Irish slave trade began when James I sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

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I suppose my questions is really a question of if the Papacy has always been reactionary to current social trends to keep its status, or if it was truly the pioneer creator of society that it is typically assumed and depicted to be.