My jaw really fucking hurts right now, and this can not be an exclusively modern phenomenon.

Also, why is electoral college a thing? What about hypotheticals of 95% of the US population moves to Jacksonville, FL (I use this as an example due to the overall area the city encompasses) and how that effects not being able accurately represent the nation by population?

Would a farmer have ever complained about the "scurry of squirrels" messing with his crops? Or were the terms invented entirely by the monastic classes?

Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848, 13 years before the outbreak of the Civil War and 17 before the full abolition of slavery in the United States. Obviously American slaves weren't the kind of industrial worker Marx was writing about, but did his or any Communist rhetoric have any discernable affect on slavery? Is there any record of American slaves knowing about Communism, or of slave owners being afraid of the new ideology, or of any sect of abolitionists being influenced by Communism?

The question is admittedly broad but I feel there must be some kind of documented intersection of communism and American slavery given the overlapping time period, if only tangentially related.

I am a history student and I am currently working on a project about slavery and its presence throughout history and during my process of choosing sources I did come accross some mentions in the bible and was wondering if , in general, scholars in the wider academic world utilize the bible in a historical capacity.

in all the short films we were shown in school, cannons were shown shooting into large densely packed groups of infantry. while this seems like it would be useful at carving out large sections of said densely packed ground, i doubt that no military tactician would come up with the idea of scattering the troops to prevent this. i also feel like cannonballs would be far too expensive to be used for anything but siege

I'm particularly interested in anything that might survive from the 15th to the late 18th centuries.

When I think of traditional American music, I think of bluegrass, blues, old-time; basically southern and western styles. But what was the traditional music of the north/northeast? What style of music would you hear in, say an 1870s New York tavern? An 1820s New Jersey living room?

Hello r/AskHistorians,

I'm doing some independent research/writing on a portion of African history and have run into some ambiguities. This will probably be a more specialized and specific question than what's usually posted here, but after combing through various sources and digging on what little scholarship is available without university enrollment, I figured this might be a good place to at least get pointed in the right direction if not get a specific answer.

First of all I should clarify that the question is not "what was african slavery?" "how was african slavery different from european slavery?", etc etc. Good questions and I know they've been asked and answered here before, I'm familiar with the basics regarding the topic and am not asking about/making those kind of equivocations.

The issue I'm running into is with regards to the specific structure of the matrilineal kinship system in pre-colonial, non-Islamic Africa, and how it relates to indigenous African slavery in the same places and time period. What I'm looking for is an in-depth explanation of the way that lineage is determined in matrilineal pre-colonial African societies, and the obligations of that lineage, the exceptions to it, etc., and especially for my purposes, the way that lineage is effected by the input of slaves and/or pawns.

The main sources I have been using are Paul Lovejoy's "Indigenous African Slavery", which has been a fantastic resource, as well as the collection of essays "Pawnship, Slavery, and Colonialism in Africa" edited by Lovejoy and Toyin Folola, similarly excellent. I've also read and referenced work by scholars Yaw Bredwa-Mensah, Andrew Hubbell, and K.Y. Dakuu, to try not to cling too closely to only Lovejoy and his people. Lovejoy seems to be a prolific authority on the subject of slavery in general, though if there are serious objections to him I would very much like to know.

I should say I am mostly just dealing with these secondary (tertiary?) sources and giving them the benefit of the doubt as they seem to be respected scholars with good research and bibliographic methodology, and though I'm sure there are plenty of places to dispute their discrete conclusions (i.e. Lovejoy's insistence that indigenous African slavery constituted chattel-slavery, which is more a terminological dispute since he in no way denies or obscures its unique characteristics), slavery is not the main topic of my project and I only want to ensure that the section I am dedicating to such a rightfully contested topic at least has a basis in respectable scholarship.

In Lovejoy and Falola's writing on pawnship, they seem mostly concerned with distinguishing it from slavery, describing its function as a socioeconomic institution (see the essay "Pawnship in Historical Context" for these two), and describing the way that pawnship played into actual slave trade and slavery both prior to and especially after the trans-Atlantic European slave trade began (see "The Business Of Slaving: Pawnship In Western Africa."

In Lovejoy's writing on pre-colonial African slavery (mostly from "Indigenous African Slavery" but also some other texts), he mentions in passing the relation between slavery and kinship, and how this particularly tied into issues of men wishing to secure influence in a matrilineal system by acquiring women and children as slaves to strengthen their own lineage, since the children they have with their wife(s) would belong to those wives lineages. This makes sense, though there is also some reference to the fact that men would use both slavery and pawnship to avoid dealing with the obligations and rights associated with the children of his sisters (who would become the next generation of his own family, unlike the children of his own wives).

This is the most notable passage in question:

"Along the coastal basin of the South Atlantic, whether in West Africa or Bantu Africa, slavery was perceived more in terms of kinship structures. Interpretations varied between matrilineal and patrilineal societies. The former were more common in central Africa, including Kongo, Tio, Mbundu, and other inland people, while the patrilineal patterns predominated in West Africa. The exception to this was the Akan, including the Asante state. Matrilineal patterns influenced the course of slavery in that men sought to establish control over women and their children through slavery and pawnage in order to circumvent customs that tied rights and obligations to the children of sisters. In both cases, however, there was a tendency for wealthy men to marry as many women as possible."

(Indigenous African Slavery, Paul Lovejoy, page 37)

That is what I'm confused about, and there is no further explanation in the text. Maybe it's just a matter of the children of a man and a slave woman, or a purchased slave child, inheriting the man's name and also being under his direct influence, whereas his nephews and nieces would be the next generation of his lineage but be under the influence of his sisters and their husbands. But I haven't found any information that explicitly says that slaves and their children would take on the lineage of their owner, or otherwise any explicit information on the specific benefit of slaves within the matrilineal kinship institution that led to possession of slaves being beneficial to the man.

I followed Lovejoy's sources for the above passage, and the text that he notes is "the best introduction to slavery within the context of kinship structures" is called "African Slavery" by Kopytof and Miers. Unfortunately, I can't find it anywhere on the internet, and don't have access to interlibrary loans or scholarly databases or anything like that. I did find the second source he gives, "Matriliny and Pawnship" by Mary Douglas, but this only confused me further: Douglas provides a much more in depth account of the matrilineal system, but describes pawnship the indigenous form of slavery and goes on to describe a system that sounds like Lovejoy's description of pawnship, except it details with the benefits of pawnship for men in a matrilineal Central African culture, which seems to be what Lovejoy is referencing, but he makes a strong distinguishment between pawnship and slavery (while recognizing their overlap) so I'm not sure what to make of seeming to find what I'm looking for but it being seemingly in contradiction with the text that I followed to this source.

Now Douglas' "Matriliny and Pawnship" is a much older text than Lovejoy's, from 1964, and since Lovejoy devotes significant time to distinguishing pawnship from slavery, I can assume that the scholarship had conflated them for a long time to make this necessary. But the issue is not that Douglas describes pawnship as slavery, it's that her description of what she calls pawnship sounds much more like what Lovejoy himself calls pawnship than what he calls slavery, so much so that providing this as a source for his claim regarding matriliny and slave customs is very confusing.

My best guess here is that the text he emphasizes as the best resource, "African Slavery" by Kopytof and Miers, is his primary reference point, and he included Douglas' text as an additional reference point since it does deal with matriliny and slavery/pawnship, so is very relevant to the topic regardless of whether or not Lovejoy significantly diverges from Douglas' conflation of the terminology. However, that doesn't help me much, because I don't have access to the Kopytoff and Miers text.

​

Sorry for the immense post, hopefully this isn't inappropriate here. I'll boil down my two questions to:

1. How did matrilineal descent in West and Central African societies specifically function? What were its normal mechanisms, exceptions, loopholes? Where can I find this information?
2. Within this system of matrilineal descent, why was the acquisition of slaves beneficial to a man hoping to increase his influence by avoiding the obligations/limitations of this matrilineal system? Where can I find this information?

Thank you in advance, and I apologize again for the wall of text. I just wanted to explain my specific dilemma and the process through which I arrived at it, to avoid well-intentioned contributors providing a likely good and lengthy answer that might unfortunately be unhelpful for my particular question, and so that posing such a specific question was not mistaken for a homework assignment or something like that.

Thank you!

My great-great-grandfather, Wilhelm Beicht, was a Freemason living in what is now Poland. I was told that he refused to flee Poland like the rest of my German family at the end of WWII because he believed there would be Masons in the Red Army who would recognise him and spare him from harm. This did not happen, and he was taken to the gulags.

However, I'm wondering whether it was common during WWII for Freemasons on opposing sides to believe that the bond of being a Mason would transcend the Axis/Ally boundary. Was there a lot of internationalist rhetoric among Masons during this period, whether German or otherwise? And if so, was this just an empty ideal (as it was for my g-g-grandfather), or did it ever actually happen that being a Mason protected people during the war or led to bonding between people on opposing sides? Or was it the case that most Masons were so patriotic as to value their allegiances in the war over any potential links with Masons from other countries?

I didnt really specify a time or region because i really want to know during which period of time were profanities commonly used and in what regions? Sorry if this is a stupid question. If u couldnt tell i dont know much about world history.

I recently discovered that there are actually two languages spoken in Scotland (aside from English, of course), which are Scots, classified as a Germanic language, and Scottish Gaelic, classified as a Celtic language.

This begs the question for me, what are the origins of these languages? And also, what was the relationship between the speakers of these languages historically? Did they consider each other to be of the same (Scotch) nationality? Strangers?

Reposted because all the answers were deleted.

i have been searching for almost a week now but can't seem to find any. a people group dont magically just disappear, did they all die?get assimilitad?? wth happened?!

The depiction of Harems in “Marco Polo” and “300” seems more like a porno than a historical reality. Do we know what life was like for any of these women? What was the point of, in the case of Montezuma II for example, of keeping literally thousands of women in a harem? In cases with so many women would the ruler in question actually have had sex with all of them? Would the women be kept around for a long time or just slept with once and then tossed out? Why would Genghis Khan keep a harem while at the same time making adultery punishable by death?

I am from Austria and I couldn't find any good sources in german or english on the participation of Japan