Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
It's boasting time! So, this year has been very fruitful for me. Got my first article published on paper (a long and systematic debunking of the Katyn denial) in a volume about the humanitarian dimensions of war. My second article, a point by point rebuttal of one specific Russian Katyn denier, got published by a peer-reviewed journal. And my overview and debunking of Treblinka denial was published in a documentary collection I co-edited (in which the Soviet investigative files about Treblinka from 1944 were published for the first time). (All in Russian, of course.)
Just got back from the post office with my brand spanking new copy of "Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans", /u/Toldinstone 's new book! Looking forward to the AMA on the 9th.
I don't want to complain since this is my most favourite subreddit by far but I wanted to check if it's just 'me' thing or not so here we go:
Am I the only one that feels there's a frequent trend when someone asks a question, the person gets a very long detailed and almost always interesting answer... which however completely detours and does not answer the actual question at all? Sometimes it's slightly annoying since the answer rate is fairly low due to high standards and then the Q is unanswered anyway.
Soooo...I've been watching a lot of videos on the Maya lately. If you're a Mayanist, you're possibly already wincing. It gets worse. If I had a dollar for every video I've seen that treats the Maya Collapse as some sort of mass extinction "oh no where did they GO they just VANISHED" event instead of "well these cities kinda died out but they moved up north...then around a bit...and oh yeah, they're actually still around you can go talk to them, they have cell phones," I would probably have enough to move out. Also, quite frankly, I don't care how well-known and experienced a Mayanist you are, if your answer to being asked on camera why the Maya didn't use roads for large projects in a documentary on Maya engineering is "maybe in their worldview human labor was more symbolically valuable" instead of say, concrete logistical answers (floods, general unfriendly terrain, etc), I am judging you. Like yes, that is very possibly true! However, this documentary on how they built things would have been better served by an explanation as to why they did not build this specific thing. Anyone have any fun-to-read sources on Classic/Post-Classic Maya culture?
In broader Mesoamerican history, I've been interested lately in tracing a) the history of pre-Hispanic religions' syncretization with Catholicism, and b) what that actually looks like in practice, and I have absolutely no idea where to start. I don't speak Spanish, which is something of a barrier here! (Further things I would love to learn about and have no idea where to start/find the main primary sources inaccessible (WHY is it so hard to find ebooks of this shit?): surviving pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican folktales/mythology, reconstructed recipes, how they dealt with cold weather. Like, were there boots?)
...which, actually, brings me to a question. Has anyone else stumbled upon topics that seem like there MUST be an answer--history of the kimono (surely there had to have been fashion eras in Japan too)! slavery in Medieval Europe (I know it had to have been a thing, okay)!--only to realize that you have absolutely no idea where to start finding one? Google is remarkably unhelpful.
Something i found quite interesting
This newspaper is from Oetoesan Hindia, a newspaper under the organization Sarekat Islam, the biggest and most influential Islamic political party in the Dutch East Indies at the time, and as expected, staunchly pro-Ottoman and to this example, pro-Central Powers. This particular article I've marked is a critique against accusations put against the German government. Rough Translation:
German Critique on French Geelboek
On December 18, the newspaper Norddeutsch Alg.Zeit has talked about the French geelboek (lit. "yellow book", it's a book regarding foreign policy), it is said:
"The French geelboek that we had received contained 150 documents that has been meticulously selected and arranged so that Russia is not to blame for starting this war and to put the responsibility to Germany.
If it has been closely examined in the near future, we will talk about it once again. For now it is safe to say that the information about how a German secret document regarding the German army has came to the hands of the French Ministry of War is a foolish one.
We do not know - said the newspaper - from what kind of "trusted source" this information comes from, but we know that this information regarding German secret document has been spread wide.
This "secret document" might be planted by a French agent and documents in this geelboek is to spark a division between Germany and its allies, and to provoke neutral countries, particularly The Netherlands and Denmark to fight against Germany
The most rotten part of this document is the part that stated German politics intended to expand German authority to the entire world, opress the lower classes and conquer their country, which has been theirs ever since prehistory
There is no a single noble German citizen that has thoughts like that, - said S.H
Last week I got a surprising amount of people arguing with me (on a leftist forum) when I said that the whole Lebensraum idea was not, actually, necessary for Germany to be a powerful country in the early 20th Century. Everyone insisted it was an evil but completely rational goal, and said after all every nation tries to exterminate every other nation to take their land for agriculture and increase their population that way, that's what history is, a competition of nations for land. Also that industrialization changed nothing about the calculations of war and peace. These were nominally Marxists saying this! When I pushed back on this idea they would act as though I was denying war ever happened, or something.
It really makes me think that Civilzation and suchlike games have made people completely misunderstand how empires worked and sort of normalized a genocidal expansionist worldview. Maybe that's not where they get it, but that is my best guess.
I know it's trite and tacky to talk about Nazis on this forum but the pushback was so surprising, I wanted to sort of double-check I'm not the wrong one here...
‘The Real Frank Zappa Book’ great book that is so insightful on many levels - could be in a Anthropology curriculum recommended reading list for sure! Great read online & offline too!
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, August 27 - Thursday, September 02
###Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 5,716 | 600 comments | [Meta] Happy 10th Birthday AskHistorians! Thank you everyone for a wonderful first decade, and for more to come. Now as is tradition, you may be lightly irreverent in this thread. |
| 2,982 | 58 comments | Where did the Asians sit on the bus during the US segregation? |
| 2,944 | 197 comments | Why didn’t the United States “manifest destiny” including going north and taking Canada? |
| 2,902 | 120 comments | John Wayne called High Noon (1952) the most "un-American" thing he had ever seen. What was the cultural significance of this movie that prompted him to say this? |
| 2,836 | 60 comments | How much money actually was the 30 pieces of silver that Judas was paid for betraying Jesus? Was this the price of a new pair of sandals or are we talking a nice house in downtown Jerusalem? |
| 2,352 | 19 comments | Why are Catholic saints patrons of such specific and seemingly random things? For instance, Philip is patron saint of pastry chefs. Maximilian Kolbe is patron of Esperanto speakers. Stephen is patron of headaches and Rwanda, a country which didn't exist at the time of his canonization. |
| 2,150 | 85 comments | When did drinking at the office and in business meetings stop being a thing? In a lot of movies and series, for example Mad Men, if someone came to your office for a meeting you offered them a drink. Was that really something that people did or is it just in the movies? |
| 1,808 | 83 comments | Before the invention of the toothpaste/mints did people's breath just smell bad? |
| 1,618 | 50 comments | The Wikipedia article for the G.I. Movement claims that over 600 officers were killed in "fraggings" (American servicemen killing officers) during the Vietnam War, and the linked source doesn't work properly. Is that number correct? |
| 1,502 | 30 comments | How did "First World" and "Third World" come to mean economic development when the original First, Second, and Third Worlds meant political alignments in the early Cold War? |
###Top 10 Comments
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Does any experts here in Chinese history feel that Deng Xiaoping is really underrated amongst the pantheon of the greatest Chinese leaders? What he did to modernize China was an incredible feat.
Also a related question, but which 4 Chinese rulers would you put in your Mount Rushmore? Qin Shi Huang? Han Wu Di? Tang Tai Zong? Kang Xi? How does Deng Xiaoping stack up against the historical greats? Really curious about the answers.
My brother argues that slavery didn't start the Civil War. Pretty every explanation he makes leads to him saying it was all about economics/states' rights -to which I say the root issues of those reasons were all regarding slavery.
His next step is to say that Lincoln made the war about slavery, but the war was not altruistically about slavery.
I know that these are particularly sensitive statements, but can y'all shine some light on this?
I can see how the war was may not have been about the altruistic nature of ending slavery, but every explanation other than "slavery" just has ties right back to slavery. Am I oversimplifying things?
The most famous coin in the world the Eid Mar, on the back it features two daggers. 2 questions about these daggers:
Some websites say that two daggers were used to show that multiple people have killed him (I think 20+ people stabbed him?) While other websites say thay those two daggers belonged to the 2 leaders of the brigade that killed him
if it's the ladder, which dagger belonged to which person?
Thank you so much!