As I understand it, "being white" referring to skin color and associated racial superiority is a 16th century American concept, right?

And the Nazis were going on about the supposed "Aryans".

Are you aware of any primary sources where the Nazi leadership / most influential intellectual supporters of Nazi/NSDAP ideology related to the concept of "being white"?

Was there any discussion of it?

Did any of them transferred that to be relevant to the German Volk / did more than a simple word translation to "weiß"?

I read somewhere that Japanese-Americans in internment Camps were being paid a higher salary than us soldiers fighting in the pacific, is this true?

Also, were german and Italian POWs paid higher than us infantrymen?

I heard a story that during the viking raids of Paris they had done something to mock the Christian God, They were subsequently hit by a plague and perhaps questioning their mockery of the Christian God performed a fast in honor of the Christian god to please him and let the plague be ended. Was there any truth to this or is it just an ironic story?

As I understand it, the concept and practice of a University was created around the 1000-1100s in Europe. What I want to know is what exactly makes these institutions different from other learning institutions in other parts of the world and time (Library of Alexandria, House of Wisdom, Academy of Athens, etc)

In his book, ''The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen", Appiah argues that dueling died in England as it was no longer exclusive to the aristocrats. Other sections of the society could afford guns, and unlike swords, guns did not require a lot of training. Is this claim correct? To what extent do guns or pistols change public attitudes (or social morality) towards dueling?

Glass is painfully expensive even nowadays, and tempered glass didn't become a thing until the 1950s, so I feel like shipping large panes of fragile, untempered glass to somewhere like 1870s Tombstone would be both difficult and expensive.

I just discovered that my family has a lot of Celtic/Irish/Scottish royalty in it so I’ve just been learning a lot about the history lately. Any help is appreciated!

So I’ve been doing some research on my family history the last couple years, and I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff. There is one bit of information that stands out to me among the rest, and I’m curious to know just how impossible this was/how rarely this happened.

I never knew my bio-dad growing up, so when I set out to research my family history (both his and my mom’s), I knew that was going to be a bit of an issue. Thankfully, I was able to find him and get in touch with him, and I learned that he and his family were Jewish. My grandfather was originally from Vienna, Austria and came to America on the Kindertransport when he was 13 years old. He was unfortunately the only one of his parents and 6 siblings to survive the Holocaust. My grandmother is an even more intriguing story, and is what I’m asking about here.

My father told me that she and both of her parents escaped an actual concentration camp...together. When she was only 9 years old. The three of them fled to America afterwards.

I’m not quite sure how accurate this story is, because it was told to me secondhand and I couldn’t find any information on her or her parents in the Holocaust survivors and victims database. Plus, she was apparently so traumatized by what she went through that she refused to ever speak of it.

If it is true, though...how rare was it for children to escape camps with both of their parents? I mean, I know that people actually managing to escape a camp on their own was rare enough, but a whole family escaping together? It sounds like an impossibility.

This may break the 20 year rule, but I am unsure where this question really fits.

The Shinkansen is now over 50 years old and boasts a very impressive track record. Japanese ministers always point towards its zero fatility rate, it is famous all over the world and as someone that has travelled on it from Fukuoka to Osaka and then Tokyo, it was a very enoyable ride. Yet when it comes to modern day train exports you have 3 big players from the West: Bombardier, Siemens and Alstom. Canadian, German and French. China is also trying to enter the race as is visible in recent biddings in the Southeastern Asian area.

However, outside of one track in Taiwan I don't remember the Japanese train technology being able to be exported anywhere. Why? Japan was able to engineer an amazing high speed train and network over half a century ago, one would think this would be a great foundation as an export hit. Yet this never happened and eventually the West caught up and Japan now seems to even lag behind.

As an example: my country Germany had no high speed rail road till 1991 and basically only since post reunification. One would think that the Japanese would have a huge technological advantage and would be able to export their trains to nations seeking to upgrade their railroad public infrastructure when it comes to high sped trains. Yet today Siemens is a global player in the international market, while no Japanese company really is part of it. This seems rather weird to me.

Why has Japan historically not been able to sell its train technology in the 20th century when, at least from my view, it had a huge advantage over the rest of the world?

I know that during and at the end of the Algerian War, just about all the Pied-Noirs of Algeria packed up and left. What I don’t understand is what prevented the Pied-Noirs from setting up an Apartheid-like government in the newly independent Algeria. At their peak, the Pied-Noirs made up about 1/6 of Algeria’s population, which isn’t that much less than the percentage of White South Africans when apartheid was established. Why did the Pied-Noirs have to leave/choose to leave? Not to sound morbid, but I assume the white Algerians likely had the means to keep the Arab Algerian masses down if they had wanted to.

So, i was recently watching a WW2 documentary about the P-51 Mustang and a few of the more extraordinary fights some of it's pilots were in and it briefly mentioned that the ME-262 was the first "operational" jet fighter, and that got me wondering, was there other jet fighters prototypes or plans or ideas that were around, and if so, what were they called (if if known) and was germany the only nation to try jet powered aircraft at the time?

This is a topic I really want to explore and research.

Why is it that England produced such massively popular and talented rock bands such as The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones, etc. compared to the US that had a few bands from the 60s and 70s that could only slightly compare in talent and commercial success?

I'm curious to know if anyone has done any research and published their findings anywhere. Down below is my question and my hypothesis.

Research question: What motivated young British teens to turn England into a rock and roll powerhouse between 1960s and 1970s?

My hypothesis: Based on several documentaries (Eric Clapton Life in 12 Bars, Jimmy Page's autobiography, several Black Sabbath documentaries, and several Pink Floyd documentaries) I hypothesize that post-war England had a profound impact on the lives and upbringings of the musicians. Specifically, the parenting styles and societal values of people that just recently overcame the war led many young people born after the war to be discontent with what society had to offer. As such, these rebellious teens would have rather ventured away from the career path of going to college or working in factories and instead followed their passions for music. Their experiences of being brought up in a society that was still recovering from the devastating war and raised by parents still psychologically impacted by the war fueled their lyric writing. That coupled with England's fascination with early American blues led the youth to form a "counter culture" of sorts that used the blues as a basis for their own music and writings against war and English societal values.

With the recent controversy of events occurring, I wanted to look back at the history of the region. Please correct me if I’m wrong about what I’m about to say.

From my bit of research, apparently millions of Jewish people wanted to leave their ruined communities in Europe (presumably due to the Holocaust) and go back “home”. I assume they wanted to go back to the Middle East due to the previous Jewish history that existed. The UN would then cut out a section of land for Israel but did it poorly, and when Israel had independence, what came along was the conflict that we see to this day.

But here’s where some of the details to me get weird. I keep hearing different retaliations of what happened, and I would like a person who knows history about the region to help answer. There's just so much information I'm not sure what to believe especially nowadays.

Apparently? The Jewish people illegally migrated to Palestine, and in large amounts. But although the Palestinians didn’t like this, I'm unsure of which group attacked which first. Some person told me that the Jewish would attack first, in guerrilla warfare. And since there was already a large amount of Jewish people in the region to ignore, the UN apparently just cut up the land? But was Israel/the idea of it already existing around this time? Did the Jewish believe they had a right to be there because it was previously promised to them in the past? Was Palestine also promised full independence, and the two promises collided? Did the Jewish people also attempt to be peaceful with the Palestinians, or were they the aggressors to them at the start? Did the Palestinians try to be peaceful? And could the UN have carved the region better to help avoid the conflict?

Also, regarding the 6-day war despite being given back the Gaza Strip and West Bank, why did the fighting still continue? Did the region really not want Israel to exist at all? Couldn't they just have allowed Israel to live on a smaller piece of the land and co-exist? Why has Israel expanded their land over time as well, did they want to keep conquering the whole region (referring to the iconic "shrinking Palestine map" meme)?

An abundance of questions, but I would really appreciate an explanation of the events!

I am very confused about this.

So, my understanding is that germ theory posited person-to-person transmission of disease, that it was in fact contagious; whereas miasma theory posited that diseases were not in fact contagious, that they spread via the external influence of miasmas. What appeared to be contagion was in fact just correlation, not causation.

OK, but -- this was all a 19th century debate. What preceded that?

I'd assumed that what precded that was just naive contagionism -- yes, diseases are contagious, but we don't know why. Miasma theory, in asserting that diseases aren't actually contagious, is the sort of too-clever-by-half theory you only come up with after you have such sophisticated ideas as "correlation is not causation" to base it off of, you know? Obviously pre-modern people knew disease is contagious, right?

What's confusing is I keep seeing all these assertions that no, pre-modern people in Europe believed in miasma theory, or how Girolamo Fracastoro first introduced the idea of contagion, etc.

This is very confusing because, well, this doesn't appear to make any sense, given how old such practices as quarantines are. Much older than Fracastoro, let alone germ theory. So clearly contagion was known in some form. Was contagion some low-status folk belief, with miasma theory the high-status intellectual belief? Or what?

In short, to what extent did people in the Western world believe or not believe in the contagiousness of diseases, prior to the miasma-vs-germ theory debate of the 19th century and germ theory's eventual acceptance, and how did this change over time?

Also, I gather that some early versions of miasma theory did make some allowance for the existence of contagion, means by which sick people could further spread the miasma; to what extent was this version of miasma theory believed as opposed the stricter no-contagion version, and how did that change over time? (I suppose this is a subset of the main question, but I think it's worth also noting explicitly.)

Thank you all!

Hello redditors, I am currently looking into the Iranian Revolution for a history class and have been tasked to create a podcast evaluating Khomeini's short and long term impacts on the Iranian revolution of 1978-9. If anyone knows of any relevant articles or journals by historians, could you please let me know in the comments.

Thanks so much!

I was speaking with a friend recently about how difficult it is to have a nuanced understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its causes, and his (tongue-in-cheek) advice was "When in doubt, blame the Brits and run". To what extent is that approach valid when understanding the conflict?