I assume this only applies to the upper class, but were gifts such as 'A partridge in a pear tree' and 'three French hens' common, or at least not unusual? I'm also guessing that all of the people listed in the song were not given as gifts per se, but would a procession of ladies dancing and drummers drumming, e.g., have been a common gift among the elite?

I have scoured the internet up and down to find some solid proof that the Holodomor was a genocide. However I have yet to come across anything that very clearly proves that it was premeditated and planned.

To my understanding the Holodomor was caused by a mix of factors centered around the USSR's grain procurement and collectivization, and it was ultimately triggered when the USSR went after wealthy farmers who resisted collectivization. And with those wealthy farmers who previously ran farms gone chaos started, and combined with a drought that caused grain production to drop drastically thus causing mass starvation in Ukraine.

What am I missing? Where is the proof and why are so many historians so sure?

I seem to half-remember, but now can't find it, that civil rights from about 1950-1997 were divided based on religion in Northern Ireland. Namely that Anglicans (Church of England), Presybeterians (Scottish Protestantism), and Roman Catholics each had different civil rights due to their religion, with Anglicans getting preferential treatment under the law. Is this true, and if so what were the details (such as the ability to vote, get a job, have a career, and so on)? If this isn't exactly true, what was the situation?

Considering that it involved so many individual conflicts across the world. Does that mean there's a classification for types of war for it to not count? Does it have to do with casualties and economic impact?

'À la mémoire de Gérard Lebovici, assassin à Paris..."

Can someon who knows more about the situationists let me know in what world they were a legitimate target for political murder because that doesnt mesh well with the general artistic activism I know of the group and I need clarification.

Thanks.

In many fantasy settings there are examples of the aristocracy of a society maintaining an old version of a language that is distinct from the common people's language of that society, such as high Valarian in Game of Thrones, or high Gothic in 40k. What I'm wondering is whether this is purely an invention of fantasy authors, or is this a real phenomenon that has been present in societies in the past? How extreme are these examples, is a 'high" form of a language completely incomprehensible to the common man? Did any go as far as naming themselves "high"?

Thanks in advance

Many years ago my high school history teacher mentioned that the Temperance Movement gained widespread acceptance and membership among women due to extremely high rates of alcoholism (and therefore drunken domestic violence) in pre-Prohibition America. I believe he also mentioned that rates of alcoholism in the US were permanently diminished by Prohibition, despite the policy's other failings. Is this true?

It seems like many of the major world religions use a collection of books or one book as the basis for their religious belief. Jewish people have the Tanakh, Hindus the Veda, Christians the holy Bible, Muslims the Koran, and so on. However, I haven’t been able to come up with a book like this for the ancient Greeks. The closest that comes to mind is Hesiod’s Theogony, but that doesn’t have the same characteristic as being divinely inspired as the other religious texts mentioned above do.

Upon further thought, I also couldn’t come up with a book like this for the Vikings, the Irish, or the ancient Egyptians. I’m sure there are other ancient civilizations that similarly don’t have definitive religious texts. I’d appreciate an accounting of why this is for many ancient (and perhaps some modern) religions. Is there some relationship to the polytheistic nature of these ancient religions? Or, is there a text that just has been lost to time? Or perhaps there’s some other reason.

Edit 1: I mean modern capitalism

So of course we know Iceland was entirely uninhabited until the late 9th century, but after it was discovered and settled, did it have much contact with the rest of Europe?

As a follow-up question, Icelanders surely knew about Greenland, so did any of the rest of Europe know about it? And if so wouldn't they have known that, at the very least, there were some lands to the west (or, at least, the northwest) of Europe?

I am currently a history student who is doing research, which naturally involves gathering primary sources. What are some of the best places online to find primary sources, in terms of getting access to scans of the documents or just knowing what sources are out there? My current methods for finding more sources mainly are citations (Wikipedia and secondary sources) and searching on databases that my school has access to (such as the Bibliography of British and Irish History, although I've sometimes had trouble discovering what's out there by doing this). My particular period of research is 17th Century Britain and the English Civil War period, but I would be incredibly interested to know the process that others use to find new sources in general.

Hi All,

I'm reading a lot of pulp science fiction right now, and it struck me as to how much of it is set within our solar system, having our species fight off Martians and Venusians... Now today the notion of jungles of Venus and civilization on Mars don't sit. Just trying to understand the psychology behind why so many wrote of aliens in our solar system.

At the time, the collapse of the USSR wasn't really on anyone's radar, so there was no particular reason to expect a major change in the relationship between the province and the Baku leadership, which could have justified reluctance in remaining a part of the SSR of Azerbaijan.

So, why did it become such a popular cause within the province and within Armenia proper, while Armenian-majority regions in Georgia, which have no lesser Armenian heritage, stayed quiet ?

I was thinking of the treaty of pereyaslav between the Zaporizhian Cossacks and Muscovy. The cossack side apparently said that Muscovy would be allied with the cossack state, while muscovy's translation apparently said that the cossack state would become under muscoy, essentially the cossack state became a protectorate. The translations are still disputed today.

Does anyone in this sub know any famous examples of translation errors that changed the outcome of history? Either in documents or in speech?

Thanks!

I recently found out that my great-grandfather served in the Italian military from 1915-1919. I don’t have any written material from him, but are there any records on how Italian soldiers felt when it was announced that they’d be switching sides part way through the war, joining their former enemies and fighting their former allies?

Just looking at the flags of the recent G7 and all of them were rectangle-shaped and it came to mind how did a bunch of the countries around the world agree to this standard?

This was a passing comment in 1491 (p. 88) without much context, other than how the plague "shook Europe to its foundations".