I saw a Reddit comment that said that the Vikings landed on America and knew it wasn't India, unlike Columbus. That's only true if they knew what India was. Would they have?

...myths offer life models. But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now. And that is what we are not doing.

Joseph Campbell is a cultural anthropologist whose ideas and writing I'm not familiar with. I'm trying to understand this passage in a historical and philosophical context, so does anyone know if he is referring to any specific events that happened?

I'm also a little bit confused as to what he means by several things :

• What does he mean by 'our time'? Can it be interchangeable with something like, say, social atmosphere?
• What is the moral order? Is it a relativistic sort moral convention, bound by time? That should conform to the moral necessities of each moment of life?

Thank you in advance for your help!

In Vonnegut's novel Mother Night, the protagonist (who is a nazi war criminal in hiding) is badly beaten and wakes up in a neo Nazi compound. Looking around his room he sees old flags with swastikas and a framed picture of Hitler and remarks that he has been 'captured by Hottentots'. What does this South African tribe have to do with the Nazis? Or is this just a literary device im misinterpreting?

Speaking more towards Victorian era sailing, or even later Roman period, I am curious what the various ranks on a ship at sea were, military ships/ranks or the equivalent, and what duties they held. I know Captain and First Mate (If that's actually a thing), but I was wondering if there were any more, and what exactly each's 'job' was, if you will.

Hopefully this is the right place, please let me know if it isn't!

The Divine Comedy is filled with historical, political, and literary references and allusions. Many are still relevant today, but most require notes to fully understand. Would most people of the time been familiar with them?

I realize the answer will be different based on different areas, etc, but let's say Western Europe. Did men groom themselves in the same or similar way as they do now, ie: trim their beards, keep their hair a certain way?

The title basically says it all. Some of the tips from the old U.S. ads seem darkly funny in a kind of absurd way, given what they were advising people to do compared with what a nuclear bomb is capable of, so I'd love to learn if there are any similar things from the other side of the Iron Curtain.

I know that some of the organisations that later became the mafia do predate the unification, but not always by much. So I'm wondering if the unification of Italy had any part in their rise to power, or their propagation. I'm curious if there were any benefits that a united Italy would have posed for them, even if only contemporary to the period of the unification. Also, to clarify, I'm talking about the peninsular mafia, not the American one.

Yes i know most holocaust histroians rejected his theis but very few scholars have may attempt to explain why it is wrong to the public.

I'm asking because my grandmother told, that her first encounter with American troops was an African American soldier armed with an automatic weapon who entered their building. I wonder if it really could have been a Black person because as far as I know there were few to no African American fighting units in Europe.

More in general, how was communication work in that time period? Did the Germans receive their orders through a radio or something along those lines, and then fed it into the Enigma to decode it, or did the machine itself transmit the orders as well?

I was just looking at the sunset now and surely for people who lived before modern understandings of space, light, and optics, it would seem like a daily miracle.

I've heard plenty of myths explaining the sun and sky etc, but never anything specifically about sunset.

I visited Dachau with school today and we were told, that they never used the gas chambers to kill people systemitacally. Even if it was finished in February 1943 and the camp was freed on the 29th of April 1945. Had they special reasons to never use them or was the SS there milder than in the other concentration camps?

(Purposefully trying to exclude those who are one or two gen removed from the Africa)

I especially notice that people with these names come from either non-religious or very Christian families and gave their children names like Aisha (Ayesha), Rihanna, Jamal, Rameel.