The Venetians destroyed significantly the building, particularly the frieze which collapsed. I read somewhere that the Ottomans thought they would not dare do it given the significance of this monument. If the Venetians chose to do what they did, how is this possible? Were there not instructed and enlightened individuals in the army? The Renaissance in Italy had started almost 200 years before these events and Ancient Rome and Greece were studied extensively. Surely they knew this building was about 2000 years old by that time. Did they not know that it was one of the most glorious temples in history and its significance for history, architecture and the arts?

It strikes me as unusual that of all people of all times, it was the Venetians that did most damage. Venice - a cosmopolitan centre of enlightenment, art, science, philosophy, classical philology..

I know of the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest as the moment that marks the end of Roman expansion into Germany. In the subsequent years, decades and centuries, was there ever any serious effort (whether intellectually or militarily) within the empire to rekindle conquest beyond the Rhine?

Dialects are primary mode of communication in Norway and Bokmal is seldom used. IIRC even when two Norwegians do not understand each other, they are more likely to use English than Bokmal.

Roman gods were modelled after Greek gods, with major gods having one-to-one correspondence in terms of referring to the same entity (although I'm sure there were slight cultural variations in the attributes and myths/legends of said entity, or at least the ones considered most important).

Did the Greeks agree to this interpretation, both before and after Greece was conquered by Rome? As the original "authors" of their Pantheon, and generally pretty snobbish towards any non-Greek cultures, were they proud or offended at their pantheon being renamed, and possibly mutated, by a foreign culture (which ended up dominating over their own)? Did they just see the Roman pantheon as an uncontroversial translation difference, or did they see it as a second-hand copy, derivative, cultural appropriation, or even heresy? Would a Greek visiting Rome pray at a Roman temple to Jupiter exactly as they would pray to Zeus back home?

A related (and broader) question would be asking about the Greek world had a concept of heresy, or taking offense when other cultures (or factions in their own culture) had a different interpretation of the nature or role of the gods, priests, and religious rituals, compared to the "mainstream". I know the Greeks had a much less personal and dogmatic relation with their gods than the Judeo-Christian tradition, so I wonder whether differences between pantheons such as the Greek and Roman ones would be along religious dogma lines, or rather simply along cultural/tradition lines. Were religious "schisms" a thing in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world? Did they ever escalate to a major political issue rather than a purely religious one?

Hello, I've stumbled upon a video about Dionysus on YouTube once and found it very interesting.
I'm looking for a bibliography/some sources on Dionysus (books or articles, french or english) and I'm interested in something understandable and scientific, not for some freudian reinterpretation or spiritual speculations without sources. Can anyone help me ?

Do we know? Were they under pressure from lack of resources due to population growth, had territorial clashes among themselves, or saw changes from things such as climate change? Why Goths, Vandals and others had the need to invade the northern Italian peninsula and other areas of the Roman Empire?

How common were sheriffs in the Wild West (1870-1890ish)? Did every town have a sheriff? Was it a county thing? Was there only one sheriff and a bunch of deputies? Thank you.

I have been researching for a novel I'm writing that involves this. I have been investigating in books, articles and academic documents, but I have found no satisfactory answer. I've found things related to constellations and astronomy, but I would like a more detailed explanation of how did the ancients determined the locations and how precise it was.

Obviously those three are way more complex than the best parts of their legacy, but what they stood for was selflessness, freedom, equality, and nonviolence. Who embodied those ideals up to say, the early 20th century? Jesus? St. Francis of Assisi?

I'm looking online and the closest thing I can find for a survey text about the history of Kazakhstan is Sarah Cameron 'The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan', which covers the just a relatively small period of time. Otherwise a few works about Central Asia more broadly have been published as well.

I've heard plenty of stories about immigrants in this era / the late 19th century having their legal names in the US be at the mercy of whatever the immigrant officials chose to write down. How common was this actually? Would this happen even to immigrants fluent in English who could clarify their real name? Did the immigrants in question get their names corrected or were they just stuck with whatever they got?

I have just read with much interest a series of blog posts arguing that the modern obesity epidemic is driven primarily by environmental contaminants that disrupt our bodies' natural weight regulation, which I am not linking because the autobot thinks it is spam. I will attempt to make a comment with the link.

Part of the argument is the claim that humans, barring various rare conditions, simply didn't get particularly fat, no matter what kind of diet they ate, before the industrial age. And that in about 1980 there was a fairly sharp upswing in the rates of obesity worldwide - including among domestic and to some degree wild animals.

Are these claims accurate historically? Were obese people rare in history, and dieting to lose weight essentially unheard of?

In Agatha Christie's "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook" set sometime soon after the great war Hercule Poirot interviews a domestic servant who believes her friend has been kidnapped by "white slavers" who have whisked her off to the near east. This seems a ridiculous fear for the period, with most of the near east being a western mandate of some form or another. And indeed Christie, writing in 1923, presents it as a foolish idea of a dimwitted person. Is there any record of this being realistic? Something that a dim witted domestic servant of the era might have actually worried about?

I do research in privacy and as a result I became very interested in the concept's history. One slight problem is that the term "privacy" originates from an 1890 publication called The right to privacy by Warren & Brandeis. Before that there are some works relevant to the formation of the concept, but all within a few decades of that defining article. However, I can find hardly anything describing privacy before that time.

I do find a lot of sources of varying quality that describe what we nowadays associate with privacy. Some examples:

• Anthropological texts from the 17th century onward describing encounters with and studies of tribal life. They point to privacy-seeking behaviour, like couples in the Huron tribe getting intimate in the area surrounding the single room longhouse. This behaviour had a strong effect on seasonal birth rates. Or descriptions of tribal life where nudity was commonplace.
• Philosophy texts are possibly the best documented. Both Plato and Aristotle discuss private and public life, and so do the Romans. Pliny the Elder even complained about the same issues as contemporary celebrities: “Great fortune has this characteristic, that it allows nothing to be concealed, nothing hidden; it opens up the homes of princes, and not only that but their bedrooms and intimate retreats, and it opens up and exposes to talk all the arcane secrets.”
• Developments in housing, such as brick chimneys leading to the division of common houses into separate rooms. Or how increased wealth leads to smaller household sizes, a relation that still seems to be hold nowadays. The sources I have for this are all over the place though.

Researching privacy before its conception is a challenging task, because seeing how those findings relate to privacy is my personal interpretation. I encountered pieces of the picture in a wide range of topics. These include art, architecture, government administration, public (and political) culture, philosophy, religion and sexuality. By approaching the subject from multiple angles, I hope to develop a well-rounded image of privacy throughout history.

So far I'm finding my way through Ancient Greece and Rome, as those happen to be the historical periods I'm most familiar with. Before or after that I'm feeling rather blind and I could really use a trained eye to point me in interesting directions. As a result, my query is rather broad:

What are interesting works that can further my investigation of the concept of privacy throughout (mostly European) history?

I hope I managed to describe what I'm looking for, but feel free to ask for clarification. Any help is appreciated.

As far as I know opium was also sold and consumed in countries like Britain

My mother (b. 1948) said something the other day that struck me as strange. She said that growing up, ear peircing wasn't very common.

She grew up in Minneapolis, and according to her, the only women who had their ears pierced were Latina.

She didn't get her ears pierced until she was in college by her friend, which was accomplished one drunken night with the help of some ice cubes and a potato.

I had assumed that ear piercing and earrings had ubiquitous popularity in the modern era, but this appears not to be the case.

When and where was piercing popular? When did it become common to pierce your ears as a young girl? Did it fall in and out of fashion? And if so, why?

Thanks!

This phrase is obviously used by contemporary Christians as big proof that the Founders meant that our rights were God-given by Christian God and the founding fathers therefore intended that the US be a Christian country.

But how much was “their Creator” an intentionally ambiguous phrase at the time? Was that phrase chosen to imply that citizenship was an inalienable right by birth, instead of being lesser citizens whose rights were determined at the whims of a King?

Like how much do scholars think it was meant to mean “God given” versus “Dad given?” Or was it just designed to imply both?

It is often said that nationalism is a very modern concept which first originated in France just before the French Revolution. But the Roman concept of citizenship, Romanitas ('Romanness'), and especially their idea that anyone could be a Roman if they accepted Roman civilisation sound awfully similar to modern American notions of civic nationalism. Thus, wouldn't it be correct to claim that the ancient Romans had a modern concept of nationalism, especially after Caracalla granted full citizenship to all free adult males in the empire?