I recently took a modern German history course, and due in part to my real life political leanings was quite intrigued by the German Revolution. However, it seems that there's somewhat of a paucity of sources on the subject, and I can't seem to find anything in the subreddit reading list, and the couple previous AskHistorians questions I can find list only one or two sources, most of them more general histories on Weimar or the rise of National Socialism. Would anyone be able to point me to some good, preferably somewhat recent, works on this period?
2 Answers 2015-07-20
I'm not sure how to ask this question.
I have a friend who, when African slavery comes up, insists that the Irish had it worse in America and that black people should just shut up. I don't know if there's a word for it but he grew up poor, white, and currently lives paycheck-to-paycheck and continues to claim that racism doesn't exist. He flies a Confederate flag on his porch.
He's not a person I can cut out of my life (his family are close friends, we run in the same circles, etc.) and he's constantly forcing me to engage the issue. I tell him that the numbers and the social impact aren't comparable but he continues to rant about it. He keeps saying there were more Irish slaves in America than African slaves.
r/AskHistorians, what do I need to know to have an informed conversation with him?
1 Answers 2015-07-20
1 Answers 2015-07-20
I've always heard that one of the reasons Germany lost the war was because it did not move the million-something troops it had in the east to the western front, even after fighting there had ended. What were the official plans for eastern Europe had it won the war?
1 Answers 2015-07-20
This may be a long shot.
The tune at around :46 is so familiar and I've only ever heard it instrumentally and I have no idea what it's called. Can anybody help out?
1 Answers 2015-07-20
1 Answers 2015-07-20
And also, how much effect on their world did the Norsemen have?
1 Answers 2015-07-20
I'm just curious as to how the whole "X marks the spot" came about. Also, did pirates and privateers really bury gold and chests in random islands?
1 Answers 2015-07-20
All of the genocides you hear during the 20th century (the holocaust, Rwanda, etc.) ended due to an opposite power coming in and taking action. Has there ever been a genocide that ended in the death of all the victims or the government deciding they completed their mission?
2 Answers 2015-07-20
We all know Captain Cook visited Hawaii in 1778 while voyaging north to look for the northwest passage and after returning a Tahitian to his homeland. That's the accepted start date of the opening of Hawaii. But do we have any other evidence to question that start date and/or suggest an earlier time-frame?
What I know of now includes:
The Lono figure, whose "kinolau" or body form looks remarkably like Western sails.
Accounts of Spanish or Dutch ships passing near or wrecking at Hawaii.
An apocryphal map of a Spanish ship capitain showing an archipelago about 400 miles north of Hawaii.
Pre-cook sweet potatoes, and pre-cook alcohol (okolehau).
Just curious. :) Thanks for any help you might be able to offer.
1 Answers 2015-07-20
I remember hearing at some point that madness became common amongst European royalty due to the lack of genetic variety in the royal gene pool and that it affected the monarchy's power. Is there any truth to this? Did it happen in multiple countries? What about outside of Europe?
2 Answers 2015-07-20
1 Answers 2015-07-20
I was just wonderding if the technology seen in earlier civilizations was temporarily lost, or if they were not common due to other focuses, decentralized feudalism, etc.
1 Answers 2015-07-20
1 Answers 2015-07-20
I did post this as a quick friday free-for-all comment, last friday but didn't get a response so I thought I'd give this it's own thread for more visability.
As a Psychologist (as well as a Historian) recently, I've started to wonder why some of the most pioneering psychologists of the 19th & 20th Centuries are mainly German or American: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner, Edward Thorndike, Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram, Masters & Johnson, Alfred Kinsey & Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Just to name a few are all examples of this.
So it begs the question of what on the earth (if anything at all) caused this shift in certain circles within the German & English-speaking countries to go from viewing Psychology as a subsidiary of Philosophy as late as 1860 (upon the development of Gustav Fechner's "Psychophysics" to pioneering theories such as Freudian Psychosexual development, the psyche, Jung & Individuation, Operant Conditioning and The Kinsey Scale. And Is this shift in anyway linked to the occult movements in 19th & 20th Century Germany & America? If so, how?
Did the German & American intellectuals have any influence on each other?
Thank you to anyone who answers :)
1 Answers 2015-07-20
Hi there, recently I acquired this "officers" stick. It is about a metre long and belonged to my great grandfather. Unfortunately my Gran is slowly losing it and doesn't seem to know much about him. I also can't really afford for any of the ancestry websites to trace him.
With the photos below, could any of you say what rank he was in and what sort of role he would have had? Anything at all would be really appreciated.
His name is David Kenneth Stewart Thomson (The initials KT are engraved into the wood). He is from the London Scottish Regiment, he was injured somehow but that's all I know.
Thank you so much for trying to help :)
Edit: forgot photos
2 Answers 2015-07-20
Hey im trying to find sources relating to the impacts Christianity has had on traditional aboriginal religion. I was hoping someone could lend me a hand as i've been trying for the past few hours but have had no luck.
1 Answers 2015-07-20
I read this article, which actually technically a chapter in a book, and it just throws up a bunch of red flags. Some of the claims seem extremely over the top, and I'm curious about Reddit's opinion. It has many footnotes, but they mostly link to other books that I don't have access to easily. Here is the link: http://psychohistory.com/books/the-origins-of-war-in-child-abuse/chapter-8-infanticide-child-rape-and-war-in-early-states/
Here are some of the things that stuck out as questionable:
"Right up to the Reformation it was common that “a boy until seventeen should sleep in the same bed as his mother,” so that maternal incest was common. The result of this new family arrangement was that mothers, grandmothers and aunts became all-powerful in the family, taking out their own enormous frustrations and abandonments by their husbands and their huge responsibilities for feeding and clothing their families by routinely killing their newborn, dominating them and calling them “sinful, greedy beasts” for needing them, tying them up in tight swaddling bands, battering and torturing them, handing them over to cruel nurses and adoptive parents for daily care, and giving them to neighboring men and teachers to rape."
"Most children in antiquity would therefore have watched their mothers drown, suffocate and stab their siblings to death. Mothers often simply gave birth to their babies in the privy, smashed their heads in and treated the birth as an evacuation. Romans reported watching hundreds of mothers throwing their newborn into the Tiber every morning."
Even when people built new buildings or bridges, little children were usually sealed in them alive as “foundation sacrifices” to ward off the avenging maternal spirits who resent the hubris of building the structure.
In antiquity, since “women were an alien and inferior species,” sex with wives was a rare duty engaged in mainly to provide offspring, and men were addicted to raping young children, both boys and girls, in order to prove their virility and dominance. Their rapes were almost always agreed to by their parents, who often pimped their children and slaves for a price, rented them out to neighbors as servants to be raped, sold their virgin daughters for marriage for fifty pieces of silver, gave their children to pedagogues for sexual use, made their children serve at their banquets so they could be raped after dinner, went to war in order to rape the children of enemies, and handed over their children to the brothels, bath-houses and temples that could be found in any city of antiquity. Physicians advocated the rape of children as a way to overcome depression and as a cure for venereal disease. Most political leaders kept children to rape, like Nero, who roamed about daily, raping boys who he found in the streets and in brothels
There's lots more in there that I'm curious about, and I'm very curious about the origins of violence, I just wanted to know whether this author can be trusted, since he seems to write about it alot.
2 Answers 2015-07-20
I've been wondering lately about the Jewish Temple at Onias. This is all I know about it:
1. It was destroyed just after the Second Temple.
2. Josephus mentions it twice, somewhat contradictorily.
3. Talmud discusses the validity/sin of offerings made there, and that their priests cannot officiate in Jerusalem, but can partake of the priestly portion etc. (also that it's in Alexandria...)
What else can I learn? Is there any evidence to suggest its practices were different from Jerusalem? In the Hebrew Bible there is a lot of motivation/historiography about the building of the First and Second Temples. But do we have a justification for the building at Onias? Like a postBiblical document or a secular source? (like the Elephantine scrolls) Why does the Talmud consider Onias valid? And last, is there any archeological evidence, like on Elephantine?
EDIT: I corrected point 3.
1 Answers 2015-07-20