St. Louis native here, and as much as the City/County split is a major topic of discussion around these parts (espcially lately), I don't know of anybody who knows how it actualy got that way. And I understand Baltimore is in a similar situation - is that a result of a similar historical factors or is it a whole different story?

Surely the outcome would've affected any of the major powers in Europe or Asia, and yet as far as I'm aware none of them got involved. Why not, or did they in fact get involved?

Trying to avoid overly political answers, but obviously what people mean by jihad has been quite a loaded term. People use it to describe contemporary acts of terrorism, the early conquests of the Islamic Caliphate, or as a kind of internal struggle to achieve piety. Just wanted to get the historical perspective of what this word meant, especially early in the history of Islam and whether the meaning behind the word has changed since then.

Can anyone point me in the right direction ? Im interested to see detailed events in common peoples lives.

So, every so often we get a question about "The Ancient World" or something similar and the OP is the stock response. It seems to me that it doesn't really help. I've been thinking about asking a question about the middle ages, but I was thinking I'd get that response. So perhaps instead of that answer, we simply go "I am an expert in ... In this time period they did ..."

Or am I missing some reason for this?

I was reading about TBAC and I stumbled across some proposed theories that biblical "Eden" was an actual place somewhere in the Mediterranean that Semitic people's were violently driven from during the TBAC. I don't really buy that idea, but it sparked a hypothesis in my mind, that the whole "fallen world" concept originated from the stories illiterate peoples told to explain the TBAC.

This is a particularly strong with the Greek mythology of the forever lost "Age of Heroes." I've heard the Greek Dark Age as "a dark age so dark they didn't even know it had happened" due to the total and complete loss of literacy. But, at least during the earlier parts of that dark age, these newly illiterate people would have been living near the ruins of the old palaces. Homer's epics clearly show that the Greeks had at least some cultural memory of the palace culture and the social organization that existed in the past. So it seems really obvious that they would explain the fact that people in the past achieved inconceivable things by describing those people as demigods, and the change from that past to the much less glamorous present as a theological fall from one "age" to a lesser "age."

I don't know as much about where the Semitic peoples were and what they were doing before, during, and after TBAC. But the original sin story has explicit references to farming, and farming becoming harder: first with the image of a "garden," then with references to how humans had more or less natural "dominion" over animals, then with the punishment that Adam will have to earn these things "by the sweat of his brow."

This kind of myth is, to my knowledge, absent from ancient Egyptian culture. I find that very telling, because unlike the Greeks and Semitic peoples, the Egyptians retained literacy throughout TBAC. Some of their records about it survive today, but the Egyptians living immediately after TBAC almost certainly had access to much more detailed records about it, and thus less need to explain it in mythological terms.

To my knowledge, cultures that have "golden age" mythologies outside of the TBAC zone (Indian, Norse etc) tend to emphasize that there is at least one golden age in the future, at some point. I'm curious about cultures that have a golden age that they place irreparably in the past, who believe that the world is fallen rather than just going through a bad phase.

So my question is, does the primary source evidence support this idea? Is there evidence against it? Or is this hypothesis non-falsifiable?

I would imagine they would contract civilian blacksmiths?

If a time period needs to be provided for explanation, maybe 100 AD?

Since Columbus Day is almost here I thought of this question that I really want to see answered.

As far as I know, when the first colonists came to the Americas, it seemed like for the most part the native people were really peaceful and did nothing to really stop them from coming over. Of course we know in the coming years the colonists would go on to enslave and decimate the native population in North and Central America.

The thing that kind of bothers me is that when they first came over, how come the Native Americans never fought back or stopped them from coming over? I mean, there were only a few thousand European explorers and colonists coming over versus the hundreds of thousands of Native Americans living on the continent already. I'd think that for such a large amount of Natives they could have easily taken out the colonists from the beginning since there were so few of them.

Plus if they had fought and killed off the Europeans as soon as they came here it'd stop them before they got too big to handle and before their diseases spread to the Native Americans and caused most of them to die.

Me and my friend are doing our final high school paper (PWS for the dutchmen) on why Alexander the Great's generals remained faithful to him during his conquest in the east from 333 B.C. to 326 B.C. Because after Alexander's death they declared war on each other and only cared about themselves.

We've read the main sources on Alexander's life (Plutarch's Parallel lives and Arrian's anabasis). We have also found some great secondary (technically tertiary) sources on Alexander the Great's life and conquest. But we've found surprisingly few on the general's personalities. Most books, including Plutarch and Arrian, zoom in on Alexander (which makes sense). And while that's super interesting, we really need some detailed info on the personality of the generals.

There are some books about famous generals like Ptolemy, Seleucus and Cassander. But what about all the other generals? From Alexander's experiences we can only guess what kind of persons they were, but we would really like some facts.

If you guys even know one source, you would really help us out.

I have some Catullus books that refer to 300 as "any formulaic large number" like how the Old Testament uses 40 days to signify a very long time, not literally 40 exact days.

-sources: The Poems of Catullus: a Teaching Text by Phyllis Forsyth

The Student's Catullus, Third Edition, by Daniel Garrison

If this statement about 300 being a stand-in for a large number, does this mean (could this mean) that there were not really exactly 300 Spartans defending Thermopylae, but just some great number?

So, like it says in the title. What was the number of guards in a medieval city?

Hi all,

The following flaired users have all agreed to participate in an AMA about the history of the Balkans. Ask away!

/u/Fucho - I'm working on my PhD thesis related to socialist Yugoslavia. My main areas of interest fall within cultural history and history of the everyday life, writing mainly about youth.

/u/notamacropus - an amateur historian with a well-equipped library and a focus on Habsburg history.

/u/yodatsracist - Yodatsracist is a PhD student in sociology, specializing in sociology of religion and historical sociology. His dissertation is on religion, politics, and internal migration in contemporary Turkey. His connection to the Balkans is mainly through his study of the late Ottoman Empire. He's not sure how many question he'll be able to answer with this narrow base of knowledge, but does love modern Balkan history.

/u/rusoved - Though my primary focus lies outside of the Balkans, I am happy to answer questions about (the history of) Balkan Slavic languages, particularly the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic, but also the modern languages Macedonian and Bulgarian, and to a lesser extent, Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS). I can also answer questions about the Balkan Sprachbund.

I'm asking because I heard from someone that Jews weren't considered a race or ethnicity before Hitler's campaigning against them. I highly doubt this and want to know the truth.

During the Salem Witch Trials in 1692, it appears as if there were no defense lawyers or witnesses. I'm aware of the existence of petitions for the innocent, but did people in the town ever speak in court for the accused?