Is there a strong case for Molière, Hugo, Zola, Proust, someone else?
I understand that the bodies of slaves were treated as resources to be exploited, but how were young children cared for before they could start doing simple work tasks? Who cared for them? And what if someone was infirm in some way? How would they be cared for to recover to go back to work? What about when someone was too elderly to be productive? Where they still living on the plantation and cared for by other slaves (how did they even have time or resources for that)? Did they still receive rations or housing?
This is paraphrased from Margaret Macmillan’s lecture series on the treaty of Versailles:
“There was a famous joke that was being told at the end of the 1920s, about the man who worked in a factory that made baby carriages. And his wife was expecting a baby. He worked on one bit of the assembly line just dealing with one small bit of the baby carriage. So he said to his wife I'll smuggle out some pieces and I'll get the people on the other bits of the assembly line to smuggle out some pieces. And so they all smuggled the pieces out and he put them together and he kept on putting them together and he kept on getting a machine gun.”
I *assume* this is hyperbole, but is there any truth to it? Were there factories in Germany that claimed to make innocuous items (ie baby carriages) but were (secretly) making weaponry?
This probably sounds silly, but I have only a very vague idea about what the diet of enslaved persons was; I imagined a large part of plantation food produce would go to feeding the workforce, but I'm not sure whether that extended to alcohol (beer, rum, wine, etc.). I know in the Caribbean, enslaved persons were involved in molasses and rum production, but I'm less clear at the availability of alcohol in the continental colonies and United States.
I know modernly the word “dude” basically just means a person, but I’ve read the word originally had negative connotations.
How would people have generally understood the meaning of the word “dude” when David Bowie used it in 1972?
How much anti-german sentiment did the early year Israeli leadership and citizens have ?
I’m here to talk about my new book War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers.
Here’s my blurb: "War Fought and Felt advances our grasp of the links between masculinity, emotion, and relationships during the American Civil War. It is the first broadly researched, multidisciplinary, and statistically supported approach to understanding the pivotal role of emotions in the everyday lives of Confederate soldiers. Using a source base of more than 1,790 letters and diaries from two hundred Confederate soldiers from North Carolina and Alabama, it builds upon traditional sociocultural and ideological arguments for why Confederate soldiers fought. Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it underscores the necessity of examining primal emotions when looking to understand soldiers’ motivations. It argues that the heightened emotions felt by these soldiers drove them to suffer, fight, desert, and willingly die.
I examine the vital role of emotions within the context of soldiers’ relationships with their parents, children, wives, sweethearts, and comrades. These relationships and the emotions they engendered defined Confederate soldiers’ firsthand experiences of war and ultimately redefined the Confederate cause itself. A war that began steeped in ideology ended, for the soldiers, as one fought for the protection and future of one’s loved ones. I argue that the emotionally overwhelming nature of the war forced a tectonic shift in American masculinity in which the prewar emphasis on stoic individualism gave way to an outpouring of emotional expression and mutual interdependence. As a result, Confederate soldiers pragmatically embraced emotional and relational norms that were previously considered taboo.
By placing emotion alongside traditional explanations for motivation, I hope to shed new light on a new area of research that promises to promote a deeper understanding of why the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest, most emotionally influential, and world-changing events of the last two centuries."
I am open to other questions about the war and its connection to human emotions.
So, ask me anything. I’ll be here to start replying around 10AM Eastern/9AM Central.
I was challenged to duel in an april fool's thread, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1s9hk2m/aita_for_defending_the_sacred_honor_of_my_dear/ , by a Mr. Jackson (alias u/MajGenJackson). I might have called him a murderer and bad husband, and now it's public and written down.
I'm now wondering what legal or social recourse a man had after a women insulted his honor, in a way that would lead to a duel if she was a man?
Why didn't the Ku Klux Klan accept Catholics? And did they ever change and accept Catholics?
I'm was curious about a figure I came across in Vera Candiani's Dreaming of Dry Land, about the massive drainage project, or Desagüe, that took place in colonial-era Mexico. She writes:
>In 1848, Francisco de Garay wrote that during Enrico Martínez’s time Desagüe deaths were noted in the parish records of Huehuetoca, but that with the open trench conversion the death toll mounted, so a note was inserted in the parish books stating that henceforth a separate book would be kept for Desagüe deaths. Garay claimed to have examined these separate books, where each line listed the name, the township of provenance, and the cause of death—“from the drainage.” There were about fifty names to a page, “just how they must have lain on the hill, all tightly lined up.” His final tally was two hundred thousand Desagüe deaths over the colonial era, but this cannot be verified.
I'm wondering if this is a plausible estimate, or if anyone has more recently attempted an estimate.
I was chatting with a German high school teacher recently about Vienna during the Holocaust. He mentioned, as if it were obvious (which maybe it is but not to me) that by the time the Nazis took power *concentration camps* were quite common in Europe and not particularly a Nazi innovation, unlike extermination camps.
However, my understanding was that concentration camps weren't even common in Germany at the time the Nazis took power. For instance, IIRC Dachau was used early on to intern SPD members and other political opponents and only evolved into a real killing machine requiring gas chambers incinerators and so forth as the Holocaust picked up speed (and even then never became a pure extermination camp like Auschwitz or Sobibor). So I would have thought that what we think of when we think of a classic Nazi concentration camp--labor, starvation, disease, dehumanization, extreme violence, maybe medical experimentation, and possibly but not necessarily frequent and widespread prisoner deaths and summary executions--would not have been a familiar sight across Europe in non-Nazi contexts. I would even venture to say the same about much less extreme versions of what I just described--internment camps concentrating undesirables or other prisoners in large numbers and very poor conditions, maybe akin to a gulag. Not that these kinds of institutions didn't exist in some form elsewhere, but that it is reasonable to associate them with the Nazis.
Was my friend right? Were concentration camps not a particularly Nazi innovation and just a standard part of governance in Europe prior to, and throughout the early years of, the. Nazi period?
The Land of Punt appears in ancient Egyptian records, where Egyptians traded for goods like myrrh, gold, ivory, ebony, and exotic animals.
Historians seem to debate where Punt was located, with theories placing it somewhere around the Horn of Africa or the southern Red Sea, such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, or Sudan.
Personally, I think Punt may have been located in modern-day Eritrea, possibly around the ancient Red Sea port of Adulis, which later became an important trading center during the Kingdom of Aksum.
Emperor Zoskales was a ruler mentioned in the Greek trading text Periplus of the Erythraean Sea from around the 1st century AD. He ruled the important Red Sea trading port of Adulis, which connected Africa with trade routes to Arabia, India, and the Roman world. The text describes him as a powerful local ruler who understood Greek culture and controlled the trade in goods like ivory, tortoise shell, and incense. Many historians consider Zoskales an early ruler connected to the emerging Kingdom of Aksum, before it became a major empire.
What do historians currently think is the most likely location of Punt, and what evidence supports that idea?
Hey, guys! How are you doing? I was doing some research about this topic and I came across a thread here on reddit posted a few years ago that had a similar title, but the only answer was something like "people never stopped believing in the supernatural". And although I kind of agree (some people still worship various gods, and religion is well and thriving, others have a lot of superstition and etc), you don't see many people making vampire hunting kits anymore, or parents alerting their kids against fairy danger, or women being hunted down for being witches, so like, when did the majority of people stopped treating creatures like vampires, werewolves, fairies, witches and etc as real beings? And does this have anything to do with the Age of Enlightenment?
It's difficult to understand why any soldier was willing to accept fighting with firearms in lines this way, when he can only shoot at his enemies once before reloading for a minute, and when he can get shoot by his enemies at any moment without warning.
I'm not exactly sure how to phrase this question, but it comes about from asking how the "average" member of pro-slavery society thought of slaves.
From spectacular answers such as this one to How badly did the "average" slaveowner treat their slaves? by u/Georgy_K_Zhukov (who I hope answers this question too) I was interested in one aspect, specifically
>The most obvious, and cutting response I would make is that I consider my dogs to be family, but that doesn't mean I consider them to be my equals, let alone human, no matter how lovable they are
Which makes sense, enslavers considered the slaves property similar to horses or dogs. However, we also see that enslavers could have understood that slaves were humans in the same way they were, because they utilized threats of harm to or separation from family in order to get obedience and effort. If my dog was misbehaving, I wouldn't expect that they would understand me threatening them by driving them to the pound and pointing.
Did this mean that enslavers understood "these are humans, so what I wouldn't want to happen to me would work on them" or was it more direct like "slaves care about family, so threats to them work and pain to their bodies also works"
I am co-creating a story / world with a friend that's based in Baroque era Europe, mostly France. The main characters are aristocrats who live off their land, and as I want to get into detail in regards to the settings, I've been thinking of developing a floor plan of their home, but I am unsure of just how many and what type of bedrooms would exist in a wealthy family's home during this period aside from the typical bedrooms, dining room, etc.
Additionally, the female main character's husband has three sisters and a widowed mother. Would it be realistic that his mother continue to live with him and his wife? If so, would she remain in the same house as the wife, or did aristocratic estates have "compounds" for different family members?
Would staff live inside the family's home as well, or have their own smaller houses within the estate?