As for the economic phase—Hitler’s recent moves do look rather bad. We shall see before long how they operate in actual practice.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Robert Bloch, 2 Feb 1934

In January of 1934, Nazi Germany had passed the Law Regulating National Labour. Lovecraft had been carefully optimistic of Hitler's rise to power in Germany - although he disagreed with the Nazis on many aspects, including the extent of their antisemiticism, he empathized with the desire to create a strong ethno-nationalist German state, and favored a strong centralized government under a single leader - fascism, basically - although he thought Hitler was inferior to Mussolini in this regard. Although Lovecraft strongly disapproved of Bolshevism, the Great Depression and the attendant expansion of social programs in the United States had convinced him of the benefits of state-sponsored socialism in directing the economic activity at a national level - hence his ambivalence regarding the Nazi's economic moves in January, which struck down the right for workers to strike.

So, this might be of interest to /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov and any other people interested in duels or dueling. I am not sure though, might not be the right fit.

On the Croatian - Ottoman Frontier in the 16th century there seems to have existed a form of ritual duel or a staged fight of some sort, called "mejdan" or "megdan" (it was probably a wider regional thing not limited to just the Frontier).

These duels are kind of atypical form, as they weren't between members of the same society and state, but between enemies on the opposite side of the border, namely Ottomans and Christians. This article in English goes into some depth about it (pages 74-78) and gives some examples (even though most seem to be failures).

First example is the battle of Konjsko (?) in 1545, where Croatian forces caught up with a large Ottoman raid. Instead of fighting, the Croatian leader suggested a "mejdan" where small selected forces (of a hundred warriors) would duel. The Ottomans accepted and honorable contest ensued, however at one point the Ottomans changed their mind, broke the ceasefire, attacked and won the day. Or that is at least what the story say. To me it seems it might be one of those too good to be true oral traditions but I do not know much to judge one way or another.

What we do know with more certainty, is the details of arranging of a duel (which ultimately fell through) between croatian-slavonian Ban Nikola IV. Zrinski and Bosnian sancak-bey Mehmed-Pasha Sokollu in 1554 because of some personal grudge. There are a number of letters kept in the archives in Vienna talking about preparation for this duel, which seems to be even officially sanctioned by the King Ferdinand himself. In the end, after various delays, Nikola Zrinski appeared at the proposed place and time, and Mehmed-Pasha didn't, so the duel never happened.

There are some additional letters preserved asking for permission for other "mejdans". I am guessing some must have had occurred, and in any case, the existence of the people simply considering, and asking for them means they were real.

I've been picking my way through Jeffrey R. Watt's bibliography of sources on Early Modern suicide and boy, to the surprise of nobody... Early Modern child suicide is extremely depressing. I really liked Terence Murphy's "'Woeful Childe of Parents' Rage': Suicide of Children and Adolescents in Early Modern England, 1507-1710" but I'm not sure where else to get started besides the sources he himself cites so I'm still on the hunt.

From Murphy:

The motives conventionally ascribed to childhood suicide were fear of, and the impulsive attempt to escape from, parental or magisterial correction. Sir William Denny published in 1653 a tedious polemic in execrable verse intended both to refute John Donne's Biathanatos and to dissuade English people from self-murder. Denny apostrophized various suicide-prone types, and this is how he addressed "The Frighted Childe."

Who's there? The woful Childe of Parents Rage.

Whither art going to prevent thine Age?

What Stepmother has frighted thee to do

That, when thou com'st at, thou wilt tremble too?

Beware of Haste! Thy Steps do lead to Hell;

Where Rage, where Horrour do for ever dwell.

Storms last not Alwayes. Have a Care, mad Childe!

Thou thinkst to scape the Worst, and art beguil'd.

Thy Parents Wrath may sooner be appeas'd,

Than everlasting Torments can be eas'd.

The suicidal child or young servant or apprentice had misbehaved, according to this view, and to escape the consequences of his misbehavior he rashly killed himself.

Coroners' inquisitions echo this explanation of childhood suicide. In 1519 fifteen-year-old William Smyth alias Helyer, servant of a cobbler of Soke next Winchester in Hampshire, ate a leg of mutton while his master was away and fearing punishment when the cobbler should return hanged himself. At Wevelingham in Cambridgeshire in 1565 twelve-year-old Agnes Addam went horseback riding with her girlfriend and accidentally got her clothes dirty. She came toward home, but fearing that her father would punish her, she rushed to a pond in her father's close and drowned herself. In 1605 twenty-year-old John Asheley was brought before the mayor of Gloucester on suspicion of having stolen 30s. from his master. Asheley escaped, eluded the hue and cry, but drowned in the Severn. In 1695 twelve-year-old Daniel Rose, an apprentice weaver of Strowd in Gloucestershire, was upset about his employment and complained to friends. He left his friends' house that evening, and on the following morning it was found that he had hanged himself in his master's garden.

On a... uh... more light-hearted note, I finished Carlos Eire's Reformations and appreciated the inclusion of woodcuts of Luther and Calvin in a beard-yanking, book-bashing brawl. as well as of Luther carrying his beer belly around in a wheelbarrow with a crate of other reformers (personified as disembodied heads) strapped to his back. While his wife carries the beer and a Bible while leading their weirdly lion-like dog. I can find the latter online, but it all looks like later retools of the same art.

EDIT: Oh, and I'm finally reading Shogun after my answer in a thread referencing it and it makes me want to go back and edit my original reply mercilessly! I'll hold off but I feel like from both a Jesuit studies/Early Modern Europe direction and an Early Modern Japanese history direction there's a lot to talk about in that book. (Even if the question floating around at the top of my head is whether the depiction of full-time-tonsured priests is accurate to the various mandates on clothing and lifestyle for Jesuits in Asia.)

Want to hear me ramble on about Civil Defense while some interesting graphics flash by? Now you can!

This isn't really a question so much as a META comment I wanted to make. It's really only been a few days (I think? Maybe a week?) since the FAQ Flair has been announced/created and I wanted to say so far it seems to have led to some real good links. I've seen lots of people putting in lots of work finding the best older links for question. There's been a real uptick in links being posted for question, and the best part is people are finding real gems. Some of which have been buried for a long time.

So I really just wanted to cheer that on. Good job for the FAQ Flair hopefuls and great idea on the mods part offering it.

Templar Knights wore white surcoats while Sergeants wore black, Teutonic Knights wore white surcoats while Sergeants wore grey.

Did novices wear a specific color in these Orders to distinguish themselves as novices and not yet oath sworn Brothers?

Why do all history books that have maps covering the entire topic being discussed, mention in the text places that aren't on any of their map(s)? Isn't that a pretty simple proofreading task?

Most recently frustrated by Charles J. Esdaile, The Peninsular War. Given the number of times that actions were described as being in La Mancha, might have been nice to show it on the map of the Iberian peninsula that had all the other regions.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I am currently studying psychology at the University of Edinburgh and am part of an international collaborative project that has been developed due to the replication crisis in the social sciences as reported by Science magazine.

This particular replication study examines elements in how people think and how their social world is organized. It takes approximately 15 minutes to complete. The online questionnaire includes a more detailed description and can be found at

https://edinburgh.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_50aSGBaSfQOplbf

Please consider taking 15 minutes out of your day to complete this study to improve the quality of psychological research, and please pass it on!

I have no idea where to post this so here goes. Hope I'm not breaking any rules.

I am looking for the precise (English) expression to describe a document that is written by the author's own hand. Would something like 'the original letters of Beethoven' express that 1) they are handwritten 2) there is a 100% certainty that they were written by the author's own hand, as opposed to a copy or a summary? How would a historian describe such a document?

The greater picture is that I'm helping someone with the grammar of their paper as my English is better, but I'm just a lowly lit student so don't know much about the correct terminology of historiography. They insist 'autograph document' is the term, but I'm not sure it's not a mirror translation from our source language. The document in question is the primary source of their paper.

Any pointers are appreciated!

Week 14 – January 26^th 1918

On January 26^th “The Economist” published a brief summary of an article (already in the Italian “Corriere della Sera” of January 8^th) by economist Luigi Einaudi, discussing the issue of war debts. The intended purpose of the piece was to explain how, given the composition of the Italian public debt (despite the fact that – and this was a positive – it had been absorbed in a significant fraction by internal market), there was no realistic choice of evading the war obligations – i.e. that by late 1917 Italy was de facto tied to its allies and would have remained so, for a few years at least, after the war.

This followed the trend of the internal political debate with Finance Ministry F.S. Nitti observing in his summary, in the last Parliament session of 1917, how (if) Italy had been unprepared for war, it was then faced with the necessity to avoid a similar mistake and therefore needed to make ready for the post-war years.

Internal debt was thus subdivided (in millions lire):

    -     | July 14 - June 15 | July 15 – June 16 | July 16 – June 17 | June 17 – Oct. 17 | Total

-----------|----------------------|----------------------|-----------------------|----------------------|------- War loans | 1,000 | 3,628.8 | 3,985.5 | 2.3 | 8,616.6 5 years 4% bonds | 130.9 | 19.0 | - | - | 149.9 Obligations 5% | - | 365.9 | 1,141.6 | 497.4 | 2,004.9 Obligations 3 years 5% | - | 102.2 | 270.0 | 236.3 | 608.5 Exchequer bills 3-12 months 3-5% | 21.2 | 384.1 | 3,439.4 | 1,779.9 | 5,604.4

The total amount was of 16,965.5 million lire (for reference the whole expenses for 1913-14 amounted to roughly 3,260 million lire and average GDP for 1910-14 is estimated around 25,000 million lire). To those it was necessary to add 7,531.6 million (gold) lire of debt towards foreign country, equivalent to 9,791.9 million lire (by the end of the war the amount of foreign debt would reach 20,600 million gold lire).

Italy had also expanded monetary circulation by issuing 1,141.5 million lire worth of notes directly through the treasury and 2,665.9 million lire through issue banks (there was no one single bank of emission at the time – debt was handled through a trust of the major banks, led by the Bank of Italy).

Overall this amounted – according to Einaudi's computations – to 30,574.8 million lire of actual new debt created during the war.

Not to paint an excessively dire picture, one of the reasons why Italy had been able to absorb most of the debt within its interior market was its large network of small saving banks, that had actually manged to increase their liquid currency capital after the first year of war. Einaudi provided a breakdown of the Italian credit system:

•      | 1910    | 1914     | 1915    | 1916    | 1917
  

---------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------------- Banks of issue | 99.3 | 100.0 | 649.6 | 504.7 | 412.7 Banks (ordinary) | 869.7 | 1,044.6 | 664.8 | 907.7 | 1,355.4 Popular banks | 699.7 | 703.5 | 583.4 | 707.9 | 880.4 Cooperative banks | 444.3 | 507.8 | 427.4 | 531.7 | 669.2 Savings banks | 2,460.1 | 2,800.0 | 2,552.4 | 2,905.1 | 2,432.7 Postal savings fund | 1,657.1 | 3,121.3 | 1,861.7 | 1,987.6 | 2,352.9 Savings foundations | 187.9 | 214.5 | 220.0 | 245.4 | 284.6 Rural banks | 72.6 | 103.7 | 96.8 | 112.3 | 150.9 Total | 6,490.7 | 7,595.4 | 7,056.1 | 7,902.4 | 9,538.8

The issue of how to handle war debts would remain central for the political establishment in the aftermath of the conflict, with an explicit choice in favor of consolidating debt (emitting long term bonds to replace short and mid-term ones – covering around 40% of the previously not long term). A choice that was intended to prevent possible inflation processes (wholesale price index had risen 4.65 times during 1914-19 versus 3.93 for Germany, 3.41 for France and 2.51 for GB). In parallel, starting in December 1917 the newly founded Committee for Foreign Exchanges (a trust of the emission banks and larger credit institutes led by Bonaldo Stringher) continued a policy of piloted gradual devaluation of the Lira (25 to 1 in 1914 – 31 to 1 in 1915-16 – 35 to 1 in 1917 and 41 to 1 after Caporetto – back to 31 to 1 by the end of 1918), in order to avoid an abrupt transition to the post war scenario, taking into account the reduction of reserves and the artificial nature of exchange ratios between Italian Lira and British Pound Sterling during the war period.

And Einaudi would continue his extensive research activity through the following years, resulting in works such as La guerra e il sistema tributario italiano (The war and the Italian tax system, published in 1927) and La condotta economica e le conseguenze sociali della guerra (The economical conduction and the social consequences of the war, published in 1933) – to name what is probably his most “historical” work of the time. This was only one of the many works published under the Fascist Regime that still hold a – deserved – place among the historiography of the Great War.

Yet, that those many works were the result of research conducted not under conditions of intellectual liberty, is an issue in itself worth discussing. One that affected significantly the state of Italian – and overall general – historiography of the War.

This is not to say that these works were “spoiled” by the Regime influence in a way that would make them unusable. They have been after all a consistent starting point for many that could not, or would not go back through the various Italian archives to essentially redo research that's already well established: no the works in themselves are fine.

There are of course plenty of other works that had been disqualified for their blatant “officiant” nature – or are at least “handled with care”, due to their author's compromission with some of the most questionable initiatives of the Regime, and therefore mostly referenced within the context of contemporary “fascist historiography”. But as is a fact that fascism enforced a degree of intellectual obligation, it is also true that this limitation was not absolute, that this lack of intellectual liberty did not affect every direction of inquiry equally. There were those whose personal reputation and academical stature allowed them to pursue their chosen research independently of apparent constrictions (think of Benedetto Croce and Luigi Einaudi himself), if at the price of earning very little recognition for it – the reviews for the aforementioned La condotta economica were fairly negative. But there were areas where the Regime not only allowed but actually promoted a sound historical research: those of the criticism of the social and technological problems of unitary Italy, those that highlighted shortcomings that the Regime could claim to be actively fixing, those that discussed the economical foundations of pre-fascist society. Here we find the works of men who held government duties within the early Fascist Governments: Alberto de Stefani (La legislazione economica della guerra, 1926) and Arrigo Serpieri (La guerra e le classi rurali italiane, 1929) – as well as others who worked within the context of the state administration, such as Riccardo Bachi (L'alimentazione e la politica annonaria in Italia, 1926; L'economia e la finanza delle prime guerre per l'indipendenza dell'Italia, 1930), Giorgio Mortara (La salute pubblica in Italia durante e dopo la guerra, 1925), Umberto Ricci (La politica annonaria dell'Italia durante la grande guerra, 1939) – that incidentally all had to leave the administration and the Country by the late 1930s, being of Jewish origin the first two and having been removed from his academic position the third.

What these works have in common though, is their technical nature – their abstinence from political criticism – their explicit intent to tackle one specific issue, not attempting to draw any general picture or frame their research in the larger context of contemporary history. It's not that they had to: economics, social indicators, industrial and agricultural production are often better served by abstracting from the political debate. And even ignoring reasons of opportunity, there is a reasonable argument to be made for any researcher to be able to focus on the points that matter most to them. But the fact that all of them did – even those by men who did not in fact identify with or offer a support to the Regime that went beyond form – especially in a context, such as the Italian one, where economical and societal debate had always been tightly bound to political debate, is telling of the academic atmosphere created by the Regime – an atmosphere that in fact promoted “self-censorship” and an a-political approach to research. And achieved this result not by forbidding certain directions of inquiry but rather by creating an environment where a certain “fascist” political narrative was praised, celebrated, repeated – where the general historical context was a monolith that stood above the ground of discussion.

A narrative that tied the Risorgimento years to the Fascist “Revolution” through the bridge of the Great War, when in the glorious months after the shameful defeat of Caporetto the Italian people had banded together under one common ideal, to vanquish the enemy. And then had brought these energies to the civil society, to dissolve the old inadequate liberal system and create a new one that was at the same time culmination of the Italian Risorgimento and beginning of a new age of prosperity and progress. Thus fascism was both heir to the new “aristocracy of the trenches” and protector of the traditional national and military institutions.

I scoured the Book List and was unable to come up with anything, and was hoping to see if anyone who researches this field of history could help me.

Are there any good books on Philip II of Macedon, specifically? I have some books on Alexander, but I'd like to learn about his father before him as I feel his father's life and political career is tied into Alexander.

I'm sorry if this isn't the place for this question, but I can't think of a better place. What is the origin of the word midget and bantam in relation to sporting age groups?

Are there any theories/hypotheses about cultural and institutional features of Scandinavian countries that make them not only materially rich but also 'spiritually' if you say (high rankings on quality of life, happiness, excellent social welfare)? For me personally especially interesting is a case of Finland which was somewhat semi-dependent from Russia until 1905, yet still maintained close ties to the rest of Scandinavia?

Something along the lines of 'Law of Jante' but more relevant to history and economics rather than psycology/sociology?

Historical sociology is extremely difficult to read. I'm currently working my way through a book about Safavid Muharram rituals written by a historical sociologist (Babak Rahimi's Theater State and the Formation of Early Modern Public Sphere in Iran), and between my attempts to decode the dense jargon used, I can't help but think there's a more straightforward way to convey all of this. I remember thinking the same when reading Arjomand's The Shadow of God; is this particular to all historical sociology, or is it just a quirk of the study of Iran?

How do historians decide what to record? For example, has anyone chronicled the rise and fall of pop up ads or the different forms of social media and their impact?