I did an illustration of a teenage girl in the Chachapoya city of Kuélap 1000 years ago!

Hello all-

I recently posted a new video about how the Greeks and Romans built their largest temples. If nothing else, it has some fun footage from the time I scrambled through ruins of the colossal Temple of Zeus at Selinunte in Sicily.

Since this is a free-for-all, I'm gonna go for it here, because I enjoy /r/AskHistorians content tremendously.

In the Does "Why Nations Fail" contradict "Guns, Germs and Steel" thread, as one would expect in a history sub, most answers are highly critical of GGS. I've actually read GGS and I've probably read most of the GGS critiques on places like Reddit, and I will say that historians and anthropologists are right about GGS getting many details about history and anthropology wrong. So, eviscerate it and extract out whatever is wrong from the contents of GGS.

But I think GGS still has something that remains to its argument even after that. When the critics try to roll their arguments up to discredit GGS's main thesis, I think they are not being fair. GGS's main thesis is about Eurasia and continental axes, not local histories, not even at the subcontinent level. So in the thread, I made a point that OP's question, which used examples about North and South Korea and intra-African geography, was not applying GGS correctly. I made comments in a few locations in the thread, all of them non-top-level comments and all of them relevant to whom I was replying to, making this point. But my comments were removed and I was shadowbanned. To be fair, the moderation didn't remove every single comment that was against the tide - there were 2 other commenters who were questioning the points that were criticizing GGS. But I suppose mine was the most "annoying" to deal with because I was making a sweeping point about GGS and OP's question whereas the other two were asking about specific points that could be specifically answered.

People can judge for themselves because OP asked the same question in /r/AskHistorians and /r/AskEconomics and you can find my comments in the /r/AskEconomics thread unremoved where I state my points. Here is the AskHistorians thread and here is the AskEconomics thread.

The cherry on top for me is that OP's question was about GGS and Acemoglu's Why Nations Fail and someone in AskEconomics directly cited text by Acemoglu that answered OP's question completely head on, straight from the horse's mouth; that's Acemoglu himself talking about Diamond's theories. That citing doesn't exist in the /r/AskHistorians thread. Meanwhile, you have a really long-winded answer involving chaos theory and strange attractors, which gets called out by someone who actually knows something about soil science (i.e. geography/earth science, which a lot of GGS is about). The reply/replies to that is basically "Yeah, but other stuff," which gets more upvotes than the call-out. The call-out was making a basic point, which is: "Soil matters." Is "soil matters" not a good enough point for readers? (I say all this out of love and respect for /r/AskHistorians.)

When people talk about GGS, even people who like GGS, they tend to use the biggest example that is used in the book, which is the European invasion of the Americas. However, I disagree with that choice of example. The final thesis of GGS (at its most parsimonious and IMO defensible) is that ceteris paribus, continental axes make a Eurasian society (not a European one) dominating a non-Eurasian society more likely than the other way around should such societies ever meet and end up in conflict. And obviously, this should say nothing about North and South Korea or regions within Africa (what OP's question asked about). GGS is not about societies and how people live in societies, it's about continents and how societies live on those continents (or rather, continental axes and how societies live on those continental axes).

And that's why Diamond emphasizes something more macro than human agency, because he's trying to answer his Papua New Guinean colleague's question that can be boiled down to: "Why does your society dominate ours? Why aren't we the ones dominating you?" I use the word "dominate" because it is a more abstract term than something like "conquer", IIRC is the term that Diamond tends to use as well, and IMO its abstractness or flexibility works best. GGS is not about whether a society can or can't develop and flourish in a vertically-aligned continent or different soil conditions. It's about which society is more likely to dominate another if two societies end up in conflict or competition. And dominate doesn't have to be military. It can be cultural, political, etc. whatever that people can agree on is a form of domination between societies.

GGS (at its most parsimonious) fails when it talks about anything on the subcontinental scale or smaller. So it fails when it even talks about Europe vs China - those scales are too micro for GGS. I'm not sure how much Diamond himself even realizes that this is a pitfall because he does let himself talk about things on that sort of micro scale. But I will say that GGS is over 400 pages and in pages 1-401, he does not make any direct Europe vs China comparisons. It's only in the epilogue of the book between pages 409 and 417 that he riffs on Europe vs China (and fails because GGS is indefensible when it comes to that micro scale). But in the main body of the text, pages 1-401, it's about Eurasia vs non-Eurasia. GGS is overwhelmingly not about Europe vs non-Europe, it's about Eurasia vs non-Eurasia.

Just to show that I'm not some crazy pseudo-history believer lol, I've made comments in /r/AskHistorians before that even got positive mentions by a mod in the Sunday Digest (here, here). And I've also made comments in the past where the entire comment chain that my comment was in got deleted by a mod later and I personally agreed with that deletion because the discussion there tended to be unsourced and not really academically authoritative enough.

If you're still up for reading about GGS stuff, I implore people to read the rebuttals that people have made against the criticisms of GGS. IMHO, the annoying (to historians and anthropologists) resilience(?) of GGS among laymen is partially because historians and anthropologists have created an echochamber of anti-GGS among themselves. I understand that because GGS makes predictions about history, it's inherently unpalatable to historians and could even legitimately be labeled as non-history if the discipline of history is best when it does not make predictions. We know GGS talks a lot about geography, biology, and agriculture. And I feel like it's almost a pattern where a historian's criticism of GGS (which usually gets only praise in a history subreddit) gets called out by a specialist in one of the above three disciplines, which makes sense to me. Historians and anthropologists should feel a bit out of their comfort zone when criticizing GGS because GGS deals in so much that is not history! Because predictions are not history and neither are the abovementioned three disciplines, which are heavily earth science and biology. (Economics is regularly called upon to try to make predictions, which is probably why defending GGS in /r/AskEconomics isn't an underdog move there.) I think the echochamber, for a while already, has reached too much of a level that it's missing what GGS can still say, and my being shadowbanned was the last straw that has made me decide to write this all out here.

I just wanted to note that I have a new Victorian sewing pattern in my Etsy shop! It's a lovely bodice dating to the early 1870s.

Does anyone have questions for a ww2 paratrooper?? Seeing my grandpa and was goin to an AMA with him, figured I would give others the chance to participate. He was 11th division Airborne paratrooper in Pacific Asia- Japan, Philippines, New Guinea

I have read quite a bit of WW2 history and even biographies of Hitler and the Nazi party ideology etc but I have a question I have never seen seriously addressed.

Why did no one ever notice the Aryan ubermensch archetype applied to NONE of the higher Nazi leadership including Hitler himself? And honestly most of the Caucasian population of Germany didn't fit this silly archetype either.

You even see this in Soviet era propaganda and artwork, it will feature blonde blue eyed body builders while your average Russian doesn't look anything like that. Its just weird, especially since Russia fought an existential war against an enemy that considered slavs sub human, only to almost turn around and adopt their imagery and mythos.

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Quick question that popped up between friends today. How long did the Roman Empire control France?

I'm somewhat curious about Rhodesia from the UDI period (1965) until about 1979. Are there any books about what life was like during that time?

I've heard of the Serbian Chetniks and was wondering about good resources on them. Are there any books or anything to consider regarding this subject?