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Why was Makedon able to conquer the entirety of the Achaemenid Empire at all?

u/OldPersonName provided great information and links to lots of other great information. I just want to jump in and provide some input on a few things they did not mention. One thing that just does not get enough discussion in traditional accounts of Alexander's conquest is the relatively recent political changes in the Achaemenid Empire that greatly assisted his initial invasion and conquest of western Anatolia and the Levant. The first half of the 4th Century BCE was marked by a series of rebellions in the western edge of the Persian Empire. Most famously this included the so-called "Great Satraps' Revolt" in the reign of Artaxerxes II, but that was followed by a series of other local revolts including two in Cyprus, one in Phoenicia, and another handful in western Anatolia early in the reign of Artaxerxes III. These were also aided in no small part by the precedent of Cyrus the Younger and support from newly independent Egypt in 401 BCE. Since Xerxes retreat from Greece 80 years earlier, the western satraps had been given significant leeway to recruit and maintain their own armies as a defense against Greek raids. This policy also proved to be a useful tool when the Great King could deploy loyal satraps against rebels without having to go through the effort and expense of organizing a full royal army. By Artaxerxes III, the policy had outlived its usefulness. Greece was settled into a more-or-less peaceful entente after the Corinthian War, including the King's Peace that made them all swear to stay out of Persian affairs, and the rebellions early Artaxerxes III's reign prompted him to strip those military privilege's from the western satraps. This was compounded by defeating revolts in Cyprus and Phoenicia, traditional bastions of the Achaemenid fleet, and spending most of the late 450s and early 440s redirecting resources toward campaigns in Egypt under royal supervision. This was a massive endeavor that leaned heavily on the resources of the Empire's western coast. Before putting this drain on the region and directing military attention to the south, Artaxerxes made sure that Greece was still in check. Sure Macedon was on the rise, but that wasn't seen as a pressing concern, and Artaxerxes concluded new treaties of friendship with all of the major players in Greece including Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Macedon. Artaxerxes III completed the reconquest in 339 and was assassinated within the year. As the last year of Artaxerxes reign played out, he may even have realized his error in leaving the Greeks unsupervised because Phillip II took Artaxerxes' distraction in Egypt to conquer most of southern Thrace, including an aborted invasion of the area around Byzantium, which was sort of Persian territory. Exactly how much control Persia had over the far side of the Sea of Marmara fluctuated, but they always tried to maintain some level of soft power there. The next few years saw a flurry of activity where Phillip invaded the western coast of Anatolia to "liberate" the Greek cities, only to be assassinated in 336, just a few months after the Persian King Artaxerxes IV was assassinated as well. One of Darius III's first actions after securing his throne was to send an army to repel the Macedonians that were still sitting in his territory. The Macedonian army was disorganized and demoralized immediately after Phillip's death and was soundly defeated. Darius's forces were also occupied in Egypt at the same time. An new rebel Pharaoh had taken power there during the chaotic reign of Artaxerxes IV and was only defeated in 335, once again draining the military resources of Phoenicia and Syria. There is some speculation among Achaemenid historians that this gave Darius III a false impression of Macedon's capabilities, and when Alexander launched his initial invasion, Darius didn't think much of it. He left it to the local satraps, who were soundly defeated at the Battle of the Granicus, giving the Macedonians a head start to work though western Anatolia while Darius scrambled to get an army together. Of course that army was defeated at the Battle of Issus, which forced Darius to retreat and once again go through the time consuming, expensive, and often unpopular process of gathering another royal army while Alexander tore through the Levant which was just coming down from almost 30 continuous years of war either against the Persians and Egyptians. As OldPersonName pointed out, Egypt just welcomed Alexander with open arms, essentially gambling that a this shift would be better than continued Persian rule after Artaxerxes III and Darius had imposed harsh penalties for their recent independence movements. So Alexander made it all the way to the Battle of Gaugamela with one battle against the full force of the empire (at Issus) and picking his way through the exhausted western territories at an extreme low point in their military capacity. The Macedonian victory at Gaugamela shifted the dynamic. Darius III retreated to the northeast while Alexander pushed to the southeast. Babylon and Susa put up no fight at all, essentially looking at Alexander's successes and deciding it wasn't worth a siege. Once he was in the heartland, the region with all of the royal palaces that identified capitals, there was once again and issue of resources and preparedness on the Persian side. These just weren't places that planned for major hostile armies. Since the time of Darius I almost 200 years earlier, you could count the number of rebellions or invasions that had affected the imperial core on one hand. They just weren't ready for something like this. By the time Alexander was leaving Persepolis in flames, he had defacto control of half the empire including almost all of the regions that would normally be used to draw up heavy infantry in the Persian army. Based on the route he took in his flight after Gaugamela, it seems like Darius III was trying to put distance between himself and Alexander to regroup and bring the fight into a region where the Persians could take advantage of light skirmishers in the mountains and cavalry in the valleys, but he was killed by Bessus/Artaxerxes V and it just never materialized. Alexander's progress through northern and central Iran was a slog. He faced far more organized and constant resistance from the various Iranian peoples and satraps than he had seen in the west, but by then Alexander controlled the treasuries and resources of the wealthiest and most fertile parts of the Persian Empire. There may also have been a false expectation that Alexander would pause to consolidate his gains after taking the imperial core, as he had in Egypt. Somewhere on this subreddit, I have a very long answer that goes through the Iranian phase of Alexander's conquest in detail, but I can't find it to link off. Essentially, the Alexandrian sources repeatedly mention that Darius and then Bessus tried to gather a large army from these eastern provinces, but Alexander marched in before they could all gather in one place and was able to fight individual Satraps and local forces individually all the way to Bactria, where Bessus was just handed over to Alexander once it was clear that there simply wasn't an empire to support him any more. In addition to everything I've discussed about the various resource and preparedness deficiencies, it should also be noted that Alexander only directly conquered and occupied the important parts of the Empire. He secured the western coast in a slow and methodical crawl through all of the major cities, but once he started moving east, it was a question of seizing the centers of power and controlling the administration and large treasuries rather than trying to occupy every city and acre of land. So long as loyalist pockets remained pockets cut off from Darius III's support, they could be suppressed with little effort. The most extreme example of this is eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus. Alexander never dealt with those areas at all, which is why local Persian/Iranian dynasties held power there throughout the Hellenistic Period. So long as they weren't a serious threat to his rear they could be ignored entirely.

There are numerous good discussions on this sub about this and I'll refer you to a couple, but first I'll ramble on summarizing the idea a bit. There are a few things to keep in mind. First "The" Persian Empire wasn't a cohesive, centralized state practicing complete fealty to a Persian king. To quote u/iphikrates in an answer I'll link in a second, empires of the time, particularly the geographically vast Persian empire, were "patchworks of smaller, semi-autonomous communities". These communities in some cases had been around for thousands of years. There was no way to make, for example, the Babylonians "be" Persians, much less the Greek colonists in Anatolia. You shouldn't overcorrect and imagine the Persians as figurehead rulers of various states - they appointed satraps, they did intervene in local affairs as needed, and they did put down rebellions. The Persians were king and for a couple of hundred years they held the empire together more or less successfully. But it was no trivial matter to collect together a great "Persian" army and project force somewhere, even within their own borders (Xerxes for example seems to have done so in his invasion of Greece, though we don't really know how large a force it was and the logistics and planning were years in the making). Still, Darius was able to meet Alexander with large armies several times, but never with the overwhelming force you'd imagine the world's largest empire to be able to muster. He did frequently outnumber Alexander but never decisively. The other problem for the Persians is that the various satrapies (the Persian method of organization of their territories) weren't necessarily all that loyal to the Persian king. A lot of places were content to let Alexander take over, especially since Alexander often kept the existing organisational structure in place, even the original satraps in some cases. A couple of hundred years earlier Babylon had been the most powerful, largest city in the world. They had great regional importance under the Achaemenids but it was still a demotion of sorts and the prospect of Alexander making them a world capital again must have been enticing. You mentioned Egypt, Egypt proper in fact appears to have surrendered without a fight. This was right after the leader of Gaza had led a fierce resistance (one story has him refusing to accept Alexander and getting dragged behind his chariot, a clear reference to Achilles). Why the satrap of Egypt surrendered is not exactly clear. He may simply had realized it wasn't a winnable situation (Alexander having conquered Phoenicia, Syria, etc by then) and Egypt may simply not have had much love for the Persians. They had only recently been reconquered by them after a period of independence. What about Alexander's army itself? It was well organized, well trained, experienced (Macedon had conquered/united all of Greece before beginning the Persian campaign), and yes, well-lead. Also, I don't believe Macedon was still a client kingdom of Persia by then. The fact that it had been in the past isn't terribly meaningful I think. Many (most?) of the Greek city states submitted to the Persians during Xerxes' invasion and Macedon was no exception, except that it was a kingdom instead of a city state. Anyways, that's my rambling done, here are some quality answers for reference! The answer I quoted above about the political nature of the empire (the question is deleted but you can infer the context): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/e8nkcz/deleted_by_user/ And an answer from u/XenophontheAthenian about Alexander's military prowess. The asker here interestingly takes the opposite stance of you; that Alexander actually deserves less credit for his success because he was inheriting a skilled army and tactics from his father (that Xenophon disagrees with). https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2vbq54/comment/cogeuvi/ Here's another answer from iphikrates about the lead up to the invasion, hopefully illustrating this whole affair wasn't quite as simple as march in and kill everyone in the way: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/v1by5o/as_phillip_ii_of_macedon_was_preparing_and/

AFTER amassing a group of followers, was Joseph Smith ever confronted with challenges to the authenticity of his golden plates, seer stones, angelic visitation, etc.?

The biggest and most direct challenge to Joseph Smith in print during his lifetime is E.D. Howe's *Mormonism Unvailed* published in 1834. The background to this book's origin, I think addresses your question in part. In the 1830 census, Kirtland, Ohio, had a population of a little over 1,000. Within three years the area's population was practically doubled by Mormons moving in who were popularly considered to be poor, ignorant, delusional, etc. And throw into the mix the fact that, back then, towns took care of their own poor. You can imagine that the old, long-term locals likely believed that their new neighbors were fanatics and that they could anticipate high taxes in the near future in order to provide financial relief to their indigent neighbors. (In actuality, the Mormons tended to care financially for their own--I haven't seen evidence that taxes were indeed assessed at a higher rate because of the Mormons.) Meanwhile, a Mormon Elder named Doctor Philastus Hurlbut was excommunicated in 1833 for unchristian conduct. (FYI, he wasn't an actual doctor--"Doctor" was his given name; and he wasn't elderly--only 24--"Elder" was the title of his priesthood office.) Pretty much right away he started on the local lecture circuit speaking against Mormonism. After hearing Hurlbut lecture, a small group of local non-Mormon citizens commissioned him to go to upstate New York (where Joseph Smith grew up) in order to gather affidavits and statements against Smith's character. Hurlbut went to New York, returned to Ohio, and gave the material to a local printer named E.D. Howe. (Interestingly, Hurlbut shortly afterwards declared in public that he intended to kill Smith. Smith then swore a complaint against Hurlbut to a local Justice of the Peace. Although Hurlbut tried to argue that his statement was just hyperbole, the judge didn't buy it. He ordered Hurlbut to give a bond that he would stay away from Smith and keep the peace for six months--I suppose you can consider it the equivalent of a restraining order.) The printer who had Hurlbut's affidavits, E.D. Howe, was not a Mormon himself, but a couple of his close family members had joined the church. Howe wrote the bulk of *Mormonism Unvailed* and he appended Hurlbut's affidavits to the last couple of chapters of the book with some commentary. The affidavits are largely ad hominem attacks against Smith. Hurlbut was certainly not an unbiased interviewer, and it's unknown how much he influenced those who gave him statements. But there's no reason to believe that his interviewees didn't stand by their statements--a few, including one by Smith's own father-in-law--were printed in their local paper some months before Howe published his book. The statements directly challenge Smith's claims of possessing gold plates or being a prophet. *Mormonism Unvailed* also popularized the theory that Smith didn't translate or write the Book of Mormon at all, but instead plagiarized a novel written by a fellow named Solomon Spaulding--who by 1834 had died and his novel manuscript likely in Howe's possession. *Mormonism Unvailed* is still often quoted by those challenging Smith's prophetic claims. I'm afraid I can't speak to how contemporary Mormons reacted to the publication of *Mormonism Unvailed* or how they specifically dealt with it (that'd make an interesting article topic, I think). I tend to think that they were more bothered by Hurlbut's lecturing based on how often it's mentioned in journals and letters and such. I do know that Smith had access to a copy of *Mormonism Unvailed* because it's listed in an inventory of his office books and papers ten years later in the 1840s. I suspect that missionaries (even back then Mormons had lots and lots of missionaries who traveled all over the United States and Canada) likely spoke against Hurlbut's lectures and Howe's book as they traveled and preached seeking converts among non-Mormons and as they visited "branches," or small congregations, of believing Mormons. I suspect this is the case because the traveling Elders, or missionaries, were very often used to communicate new doctrine or revelations or instructions from church leadership to the church membership at large.

Lucy Harris, the wife of Martin Harris, was an early skeptic. Her husband was helping Joseph Smith transcribe the Book of Mormon. At one point Lucy took the transcription and threw it away, I think burned it but can't remember. She said, if it's a translation then Joseph Smith should be able to translate it a second time. Christopher Hitchens tells the story in his book God Is Not Great. Slate has an excerpt that contains this story: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/features/2007/god_is_not_great/mormonism_a_racket_becomes_a_religion.html

What happened to the KGB during the events of the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Russia's intelligence/security apparatuses have a long history of being reshuffled and reorganized while maintaining many of the more ruthless policies associated with them. The Czars' Okhrana became the Soviet Cheka, then OGPU, then NKVD, then MGB, and finally the KGB. Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, and Lavrenty Beria and their executioner Vasili Blokhin (most prolific personal killer of all time) have some morbidly fascinating careers and are worth a wikipedia look. Oh right, the question. As DeletedByMods said, KGB leaders conspired with Vice-President Gennady Yanayev and other military and political leaders as the "Gang of Eight" in the "August Coup" of 1991 to force Gorbachev to effectively step down and allow them to undo the effects of perestroika and glasnost which they believed were killing the Soviet Union. The opening of archives from glasnost in particular revealed the tremendous scale of Stalin's atrocities, first revealed in Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" in 1956. A lot of the taint from the NKVD's actions during the "Great Terror" was then associated with the KGB and helped further undermine the state. The big issue in the August Coup was the New Union Treaty, which would have established the former Soviet Union as the Union of Sovereign States, a confederation without the Soviet Union's de facto RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) hegemony. They surrounded Gorbachev at his dacha and cut his lines of communication. Yeltsin got wind of the conspiracy and raced to the "White House" where the Supreme Soviet met. He famously rallied a crowd while standing on a tank. The "Gang of Eight" conspirators appeared on TV saying Gorbachev's "illness" meant Yanayev would replace him, but they were shaking and terrified and people were less than impressed. The troops they dispatched to the Red Square refused to fire on the crowd, much like the Czar's troops refused to fire in the February Revolution of 1917. The actual end to the Soviet Union came in a Belarussian hunting lodge, where Russian President Yeltsin met with Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislav Shushkevich, the Ukrainian President and Belarussian Prime Minister. The latter two just saw a chance to achieve independence, while Yeltsin simply wanted to ouster his politically moribund rival, (General Secretary) Gorbachev. The final nail in the USSR came from a simple political rivalry :). The KGB wasn't quite the terror by 1991 that it had been in earlier decades. East Germany's Stasi, for example, were a good deal harsher. As it had been many times, the KGB was disbanded and reorganized into an alphabet soup of agencies. Its direct successor was the Federal Counterintelligence Service (FSK), which eventually became the Federal Security Service (FSB). The GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) is also a huge intelligence agency, foreign intelligence, which the Spetsnaz belong to. These agencies have done some interesting things, but 1994+ breaks the 20 year rule so I'll cut it off. If you have access to jstor, there are quite a few articles on the KGB around 1991, like Was the Soviet System Reformable? by Stephen F. Cohen and [Beyond Perestroika: Soviet-Area Archives after the August Coup, by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted] (http://www.jstor.org.proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/stable/10.2307/40293629?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoAdvancedSearch%3Fc5%3DAND%26amp%3Bc4%3DAND%26amp%3Bc6%3DAND%26amp%3Bc1%3DAND%26amp%3Bc3%3DAND%26amp%3Bc2%3DAND%26amp%3Bed%3D%26amp%3Bf0%3Dall%26amp%3Bpt%3D%26amp%3Bq2%3D%26amp%3Bf2%3Dall%26amp%3Bf3%3Dall%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bf1%3Dall%26amp%3Bf6%3Dall%26amp%3Bisbn%3D%26amp%3Bf4%3Dall%26amp%3Bf5%3Dall%26amp%3Bsd%3D%26amp%3Bacc%3Don%26amp%3Bq3%3D%26amp%3Bla%3D%26amp%3Bq1%3D%26amp%3Bq0%3Daugust%2Bcoup%2Bkgb%26amp%3Bq6%3D%26amp%3Bq5%3D%26amp%3Bq4%3D).

This thread has generated a lot of poor answers that we mods have had to delete. I would like to ask people to keep in mind the expectations for a quality answer.

When did holocaust denial first started to appear?

I have removed several comments in this thread, and I want to make our rules clear before anyone writes any further posts: **Holocaust denial will not be tolerated on this sub and will result in an instant ban, with no warning**. If you come to question the veracity of the Holocaust, don't expect a discussion, don't expect a debate because you will be banned on sight. AskHistorians will not offer any Holocaust denier with a platform to spread their disinformation. Speculation is also against our rules, as are top-level, low-effort posts. Do not write a response if you aren't able to provide sources for your claims, if you aren't sure of your capacity to answer the question or if you have not done research about the topic.

To tack onto this, what kind of evidence do these people use? I don't know how or why you could make up something that huge.

Why and when did people start shaving?

u/voyeur324 has already recommended some earlier answers, focusing on women's body hair especially. For some more, you can read here about hygiene, including facial and body shaving in Ancient Egypt (the earliest example I found in previous threads) written by u/Bentresh. In this thread u/Celebreth has written about body hair removal in Ancient Rome, and here u/toldinstone focuses on facial hair in Rome and Greece (though he might have made a minor error, Pliny actually says (N.H. book 7, 59/211) that barbers first came to Rome in 300 BC and that "Africanus sequens" (probably Scipio Aemilianus) was the first Roman to shave daily). As for non-European women, the Crusader period Arab writer Usama ibn Munqidh mentions shaving pubic hairs as common among Arabs (possibly both men and women) but uncommon among "Franks", as discussed by u/AbouBenAdhem here and u/WelfOnTheShelf here.

/u/sunagainstgold has previously answered Were medieval women as hairless as the movies show it? When did women start to shave? /u/mimicofmodes alias chocolatepot has previously answered When did it become the social norm/standard for women to shave their legs completely? More answers remain to be written, especially about women outside of Europe. See below for more answers about the 20th century

How likely is it that Tibetan shirpas could have climbed Mount Everest centuries ago and it just didn't get recorded?

It’s impossible. Or perhaps a better way to say that is: It's technically extremely unlikely, not to mention there is no primary source evidence to even hint at pre-european ascents of any 7000m+ Himalayan peaks, let alone Everest. Wade Davis’ excellent book Into the Silence does an excellent job of addressing this question, but I will lean on some personal knowledge here as an active mountaineer as well. It’s worth noting at the outset the Sherpa are one of several ethnic groups based near Everest and are famed for being effective exporters and more recently guides and alpinists. The strongest evidence for the lack of ascent is interactions with locals on the first attempts at just reaching Everest's base. The local population just couldn’t wrap their heads around what the first expeditions were trying to accomplish. There is no oral tradition of pursuing peaks for any reason. Climbing high into terrible weather, avalanches and seemingly certain death for not tangible result did make any sense. There were traditions locally in which monks will go higher to caves to meditate. These aesthetic monks though were far from the norm, and rarely ventured higher than 6000m. The initial assumptions was the Europeans were prospectors or spies. The idea of doing any thing like this for scientific or recreational purposes was not relevant to their practices. This in itself suggests no communal level interest or understanding. Today we take it for granted, but even backpacking was not at all popular or socially understood well in the late 1930s even in the West. The main challenge for the early expeditions is that it was exceedingly difficult to find the base of the mountain. There was no known route to even reach the base of the mountain. Guides hired to assist didn’t actually know the area, though some pretended to know hoping to earn some income. The reason appears to be that there was no hunting or grazing in either or the two areas used to establish base camps. Exploring these areas required ascending treacherous moraines, and wandering along glaciers, with only the prospect of more ice. Without any utility these spaces served no purpose. Life at these altitudes is harsh, growing seasons short, and there was not time to build skills for recreation when his subsisting was so taxing. Meanwhile the British expedition had trained for decades in the alps with specialty equipped and were well fed, motivated and fit. In other words they had reason and ability. But let’s dive into the climbs from practical terms. On a physiological level there is very little likelihood that a Sherpa,or other Nepalese persons could have ascended the peak. The second and third reconnaissance’s in 1922 and 1924 demonstrated that oxygen assistance was necessary. They failed to push past 7600 until oxygen was used, allowing for the first climb past 8000m. And this was for teams of the most experienced climbers, using the lightest and most effective equipment of the era. One of the second ascentionists (with oxygen) was a Sherpa, but guided by a Kiwi. While the Nepalese were more acclimatized, they had diets and a general lack of nutrition that evened things out. They also lacked the technical climbing skill required to bypass the challenges of the mountain. The south col route that is the easiest first requires passing through the Khumbu icefall. It's a jumbled maze of seracs ( towering chunks of detached glacial ice). Today ladders are used to cross most of these sections. Crampons are also necessary to keep purchase in the ice and snow. The 1921 expedition used hobnailed boots as crampons had not been fully realized. They would chop steps with ice axes to ascend. There are examples of stone age crampons so this at least is feasible, but the technique required to actually use these tools was not recorded in any peoples of these areas. ( See above on motivation to climb) The early expeditions struggled immensely to keep the porters going as they had no mountain craft skills or abilities, and lacked the physical fitness to do much of the work (unlike today where the opposite is true). There were a few exceptions but all were deeply inexperienced and thrived once shown techniques perfected in the alps. These early expeditions launched the career of porters for many Nepalese and Sherpa and as more Europeans flocked the valley changed dramatically. But these changes are post European arrival, as the Europeans created a lucrative career than enabled healthier lifestyles and communities built around this burgeoning industry. It also built traditions that made later expeditions possible. The First ascent of Everest was with a Sherpa for good reason. Lastly there is a logistical challenge that pre-european mountaineers would have had to overcome. Mountaineering if this type requires setting up and stocking numerous camps over a period of a month.Even today with all our hyper light gear most ascents share more in common with siege warfare than alpine style climbing. These camps require specialty stoves to melt snow into water as it’s too cold for carried water to relief upon. High calorie food is required to counteract the appetite suppression of high altitude. Tents need to be brought for shelter to rest. These have to be light but strong enough to last through intense storms. It’s takes almost a full month to acclimatize and stage gear to make this all possible today with folks in incredible shape, with athleticism on possible due to modern living and diets. This kind of logistical complexity was seldom observed in this area. When it was, it generally revolved around religious festivals or moving officials through complex terrain of the Himalayas. For a slightly malnourished person, with no equipment or supply train to support and provision them to have made it to the summit, with no ice axe, crampons, or high altitude clothing is impossible. If there was a shred of oral history or archeological evidence it might be worth pursuing. But there is not. Edit: A second source I’m using for this is the superb Mountaineers: Great Tales of Bravery and Conquest published by the Smithsonian. It’s one of the more complete texts covering the entirety of mountaineering history from Otzi to today.

While more can always be said, you may find this answer from /u/caitrona useful: How was it that Edmund Hillary, a foreigner, was supposedly the first man to climb Mt. Everest when his local guide Tenzing Norgay's people had presumably lived near the mountain for thousands of years?

Floating Feature | What is your favorite historical story or anecdote?

This story is already famous, but like other old men, I will indulge myself in repeating myself. My father started by backing King Stephen, but then betrayed him to join Matilda the Empress. Stephen besieged Newbury Castle. My father handed over me, his son, maybe six years old, as a gage and hostage for his new oath for a truce and surrender of the castle. But my father used the time to warn the Empress. Stephen then threatened to have me killed, as was his right. Did my father repent? Did my father plead? Did my father, moved by love of his son and fearing for the slightest harm to my head, move all the arguments he could to soften the heart of my captor? "Go ahead! I still have the hammer and the anvil with which to forge still more and better sons!" King Stephen's heart was already soft as a rotting tree-trunk (Shrewsbury Castle excepted). He kept me safe by his side and raised me nobly. They have marveled that I was unstintingly loyal to king after king. Believe me, even King John looked like a saint after that treacherous bag of dicks I had to call "Dad".

This anecdote regards the North Korean Famine that occurred from 1994-1998. North Korea's agricultural minister So Kwan-hui was executed in September 1997 after being accused of intentionally sabotaging the country's crops and acting as an agent for the United States. This is altogether not very surprising. However, North Korea went one step further. So's mentor and previous agriculture minister, Kim Man-kum, had died a few years prior and was buried in the Patriot's Cementary. His body was subsequently exhumed and subjected to a ritual execution by firing squad. They were then held out as examples in public to show what the government will do to 'traitors'. Source: Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty By Bradley K. Martin, pg 575.

I'm a Soviet citizen in the 1930s, the NKVD search my home and find forbidden western literature, what happens to me?

I'm currently reading Anne Applebaum's book, Gulag, and she goes over many similar scenarios in it. In short you would be arrested, sent to a holding cell and interrogated, sent to trial, then sentenced to either a remote camp or prison. From there you would either die a slow death of disease and malnutrition or survive. Up until 1939 Russian secret police had immense pressure from the government, sometimes even Stalin, to not make mistakes. This often led to innocent people being arrested under mere speculation. There are even accounts of the NKVD admitting they arrested innocent people but were not allowed to free them. If you were actually found with contraband it was a guarantee that you would be arrested. In your scenario it sounds as though the NKVD were already in your home prior to finding the literature. Since they were already present it would be assumed they were there to arrest you anyway. Following your arrest you would be transported to a temporary holding cell and interrogated. Since they had hard evidence against you the interrogation process may be skipped. Next would come your trial, this could be up to years after your arrest. Despite all the chaos during the 1930s the legal system was still a vital part of society. Unlike Nazi concentration camps where people were not tried before exhile Soviet citizens received trials prior to being sent to concentration camps. These court cases were often less than 5 minutes in length however. In addition the person sentencing you was often a panel of 3 government representatives rather than a judge. These representatives were being pressured to sentence massive amounts prisoners as well. The reason for needing prisoners was due to the massive use of prison labor, yet prisoners were dying too quick for any efficient use of this labor force. So due to the fact you were already assumed guilty paired with the need for labor you would be sent to a remote concentration camp. The journey to the camp would most likely be in an unheated train cart and last for months. You would only be allowed to use the restroom once a day if you were lucky and begged the guards. You would not receive water for up to a week during this trip and food would be about 2 kilos of bread for the entire voyage. There would be no warm clothes supplied either and at the end of the voyage many people would already be dead. Also if you are a woman there is a good chance you would be gang raped by prisoners as the guards observed not intervening. Inside the camp itself you would be sorted as either fit for work, fit for light work, or not fit for work. If you were not fit to work you were almost guaranteed dead. The camps ran on a system where the harder you worked the more you ate. If you could not work you were only given 200 grams of food a day. The strong workers were given upwards of 700 grams of bread and around 100 grams of meat. In the 1930s there were many reforms taking place as well. If you were present in the early 1930s the guards could still kill you for no reason and report it as an accident. Towards the end of the decade Stalin implimented many new rules making prison life easier. Examples of these reforms are the introduction of no more executions (unless sentenced to death), better toilets, and mandatory exercise. Despite the attempts to make life in the camp easier you would still undoubtedly get lice and there was a good possibility of dysentery or typhus. If you somehow survived the camps there was also not a guarantee you would be set free once your sentence was completed. Often times poor record keeping meant prisoners were not released when they should have been. I hope that answered your question. I'm on the road right now and don't have the book on me. When I get home I can find it and better cite some of these scenarios too.

Some questions to clarify OP's premise: Did the NKVD do regular searches of civilian homes or would there have had to be suspicion of a crime? Would that suspicion need to be based on anything substantial? And what qualifies as "forbidden Western literature"?

Has there ever been a successful "false flag" military operation used as a casus belli?

The USSR shelled a Soviet border town of Mainila prior to the Winter War with Finland, claiming it was Finland who started hostilities. Stalin used this incident as a pretext for war. Google Books source Edit: If anyone has a more in depth source, please post it. This one is kinda embarrassing and I couldn't find anything better. Edit2: I found a *slightly* better one here

Gulf of Tonkin incident is probably the most famous *claimed* false flag in recent history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident#Second_alleged_attack >Within thirty minutes of the 4 August incident, President Johnson had decided on retaliatory attacks. That same day he used the 'hot line' to Moscow, and assured the Soviets he had no intent in opening a broader war in Vietnam. Early on the 5 August Johnson publicly ordered retaliatory measures stating, "The determination of all Americans to carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Vietnam will be redoubled by this outrage." One hour and forty minutes after his speech, US aircraft reached North Vietnamese targets. On the 5 August at 10:40am these planes flying from US aircraft carriers, bombed four torpedo boat bases, and an oil-storage facility in Vinh. The second incident was a false incident two days after an actual incident, but not a false *flag*. It was an non-incident which the administration took advantage of.

When horses were used for transportation in the US, were they treated affectionately like pets or as interchangeable tools?

> Here I mett Capt. John Richards of Boston who was going home, So being very glad of his Company we Rode something harder than hitherto, and missing my way in going up a very steep Hill, my horse dropt down under me as Dead; this new surprize no little hurt me meeting it Just at the Entrance into Dedham from whence we intended to reach home that night. But was now obliged to gett another Hors there and leave my own, resolving for Boston that night if possible. As Massachusetts teacher Sarah Kemble Knight presents it in her 1705 diary, the exhaustion of her never-named horse was something more than a mere inconvenience, but less than a tragedy. The surprise still "no little hurt me" despite her being in just about the best possible place to have to swap out horses. But she--and whichever Dedham stable owner she encountered--saw no drama in swapping out horses. Some people absolutely did develop stronger bonds with their horse. Right around the time of Knight's journey, a horse owner from Appomac in Virginia named their mare "Noby." Contemporary journals from the same area indicate that naming an animal was a sign of affection, not just utility--f.ex. cases where only one cow is noted as having a name, and is described with extra tenderness. But in general, Knight's matter-of-factness about the horses that enabled her Boston-New York trip reflects the evolution of advice prescribed in horse-training and related manuals. Karen Raber and Treva Tucker sum up the general arc in their introduction to *The Culture of the Horse: Status, Discipline, and Identity in the Early Modern World.* In the 16th and early 17th century, different types of texts recommend force, even abuse, for training horses--the idea being very much a rational man versus irrational nature combat. "Bit-Books" are just that: descriptions and illustrations of bits, concentrating on how the human can gain forceful control over the horse. Pia Cunco describes the early modern attitude towards bits: > The longer the shank, the greater the leverage when the rein is activated, and the greater the pressure that is exerted on the horse’s sensitive oral tissues. The greater the pressure, the greater the pain, and that was what solved the practical problem of regulating a horse’s pace. > As the brief texts of the bit-books make clear, different bits were implemented according to different training and behavioral problems. But Traber traces a gradual evolution moving further into the seventeenth century. Richard, earl of Newcastle, wrote in 1658: >Great pains then must be taken to make a horse fear his rider, that so he may obey out of self-love, that he may avoid punishment. A horse’s love is not so safe to be trusted to, because it depends on his own will; whereas his fear depends on the will of the rider, and that is being a dressed horse. But when the rider depends on the will of the horse, it is the horse that manages the rider. Love then is of no use; fear does all. Obviously this sounds rather horrific, but there is something to be said about Newcastle's emphasis on *fear*. He's thinking about the horse's spirit, temperment, and (as is evident elsewhere in the treatise) thoughts: > [The horse] is wise and subtile: for which reason man ought carefully to preserve his empire over him, knowing how nearly that wisdom and subtilty approaches his own. The methods of training are still abusive, but there's more of a sense of a possible relationship--even if it's one of pure domination. It's in the 18th century--the decades after Knight rode and wrote--that Traber sees training manuals advocating a more cooperative relationship. But there is still, she notes, absolutely no sense anywhere of a pet-type relationship. This prescriptive advice is borne out in later diaries. Caroline Barnes Crosby's fascinating diary/memoirs of New York to Utah, and Utah to California, from the mid-19th century moves a step beyond Knight in terms of her willingness to portray affection for horses. But there is still a profoundly utilitarian sense. In the middle of a rough New York winter, she writes: > We waited one day for the snow to settle a little, and then set forth towards Lake Erie, found the snow very deep, in some places. Mr Crosby walked nearly all the way; our pretty black horse began to get thin, and look sober. Crosby's horse doesn't have a name, but she mentions it affectionately. And her description of its struggles goes a smidge beyond Knight's "and it almost died." It's not a fluke. In 1836, she wrote: > We found the roads almost impassable, the mud was up to the horses knees. We had a hard time, was nearly a week going 100 miles. Our horse's breast became very sore. It gave me very unpleasant feelings to see him work in such misery. She portrays herself empathizing with the horse! But at the same time, horses were still a utilitarian possession. In 1848, her family encountered a group of Sioux riders "dressed in very spendid indian style" (...you think?). She writes that they traded a little bit and "swaped horses" [sic]. No detail, no description, no drama. There still isn't a sense of "horses as pets." And in fact, even in 1976, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins could remark that while the human-dog relationship resembled one of *family*, horses were traditionally treated more as servants or "nonkin" (friends?) even when they had personal names and " we are in the habit of conversing with them as we do not talk to pigs and cattle." But even before horses ceased to be a primary mode of transportation, we can trace a long evolution *towards* a relationship closer to pets or friends than servants or beasts.

So I can’t answer this question for all periods. However, I can shed light into this from the perspective of the 18th century. Horses for much of Americans during this period were seen as living tools that were needed in order for agrarian survival. Until 1790, at least 95% of Americans lived on farms or small villages, not in cities. Agriculture, whether it was cash crops (like tobacco) or food, horses played an intricate part of life for farmers who needed to transport their goods from their farms/ranches/plantations and to ports. Horses and other animals like oxen and mules helped play important roles during this period, especially in the middle colonies, like Maryland. In Maryland, the number 1 animal used for crop transport were horses. This was especially true for small scale farms (farmers who owned less than 50 acres of land), which actually made up more than 50% of the occupations in the colony by 1775. In Maryland specifically, it was common for farmers to lend or rent their horses to their neighbors. Sources show that religious communities like Quakers, Methodist, and even Catholics (who made up about 11% of the states population) were more likely to let those in their own communities borrow their horses than outsiders. Instances of this can be found all over the place, with people borrowing horses to transport livestock or even lending them to someone to make longer distance journies. Confiscation of animals like horses also became a weaponized tool by the Patriot government in Maryland in 1777 when groups, like Quakers, refused to participate in militia musters or pay war related taxes. As punishment, the Maryland General Assembky authorized its agents to seize horses and hold them for ransom against Quakers, which happened over 100 of times between 1777 — 1881. Horses at this time were incredibly expensive, often costing over £20, but if you adjust for wartime inflation, would be worth somewhere between $4000 to $6000 today. I don’t have sources to show one way or another if people treated their animals the way 20th century folks treated their pets, however, I can say that farmers spent a lot of money and care taking care of their horses throughout this period. Sources for most of this can be found in: Aglietti, Jason B. *The Friends They Loathed: The Persecution of Maryland Quakers During the Revolutionary War* University of Maryland Baltimore County & Proquest LLC. 2018

It's gonna be negative -30 (factoring windchill) in Boston the next couple of days...how did our ancestors survive this?

I see many great answers but I think some people are forgetting the number one way our ancestors survived extreme cold. Historically people tended to live in places that didn't have extreme cold or at least not often. Check out this swell map of population by latitude in 2000 AD The worldwide average is somewhere around 27 degrees north. Now I know what you're thinking that's 2000 AD what about 2000 BC. Well the population numbers are harder to come up with but a listing of the places that are located at 27 degrees latitude gives a pretty good indication that it has been a nice place to live for quite awhile. Wikipedia 27th parallel north lots of nice places like Modern India, Iraq, Iran, Florida, Southern China, Algeria. Of course climate has varied over time but the same general trends are in most cases applicable. Bostons average January high temperature is 37 degrees Fahrenheit. Orlando Florida's average high temperature is 71 degrees Fahrenheit. But Rome and Boston are at the same latitude. Yes, but Rome's average high is 54 degrees Fahrenheit because of the warmer waters of the Mediterranean. Visit The Weather Channel to have fun looking up cities of your own. I know that there are thousands of examples of people living in cold places or of cold snaps passing through usually warmer places. However, that doesn't change the fact that the majority of people live in areas where extreme cold is not a common occurrence.

Anything that blocks the wind will cancel the effect of wind chill. If it is very cold then your insulated clothing will cover every part but the face. One Inuit (the masters of this sort of technology) approach is to make an extended hood with lots of fur on the edge to break up the wind. Some pics: http://www.johntyman.com/arctic/inuit201.html http://angelasancartier.net/inuit-and-arctic-dress-materials-technology Edit: will -> wind, grammar

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, did slavery persist?

It absolutely did, at least for a while, and at least in some parts. While the Catholic Church had *views* on slavery, its opprobrium only really extended as far as owning fellow Christians. Apocrypha has it that Pope Gregory was inspired to order the conversion of England after witnessing the plight of Pagan English slaves in a Roman slave market, which at the very least posits the existance of a pan-European slave trade in the mid-late sixth century. The conversion of England may have begun in 597, but slavery remains prominent in England well into the 11th Century, and possibly into the early 12th. The slave trade is a major economic impetus for the English and slaves form a significant proportion of the population. By the time of *Domesday Book* in the 1080s, approximately some 10% of households listed are slaves, and most settlements have at least one slave household. Usually when reading *Domesday*, a "household" is assumed to be around four people, although there is debate as to whether a slave "household" represents just a single slave, or indeed a whole family. Therefore we can estimate that slaves comprised anywhere from 2.5% to 10% of the population, and this two decades after the Norman Conquest, since when slavery had fallen strongly out of fashion and been in steep decline. The precise nature of Anglo-Saxon slavery is unclear, but it seems to be the case that slaves basically formed a social caste used predominantly for agricultural labour. Slavery was covered fairly extensively in contemporary law, and slaves even had some protections. The majority of slaves would have been Welsh, and by the tenth century, these slaves were also being exported to the Hiberno-Norse in Ireland from the ports of Bristol and Chester. In sixth-century Kentish law, thieves caught in the act and killers who could not pay their *weregild* were liable to be sold into slavery, but this had to be overseas. By the seventh century in Wessex, however, the laws of Ine of Wessex strictly forbade the selling of any Englishman out of the country. By the reign of Alfred in the late ninth century, the law was more explicit on the Welsh nature of slaves. Slaves were protected under the law as any other person, although their *weregild* was lower than freemen and liable to their master rather than their relatives. Slaves were often emancipated in wills, but could also be transferred as property. The tenth century will of a Wynflæd, for example, emancipates one of her slaves and leaves her a small package of land, but also leaves other slaves including 'a spinning woman and her wheel' to her daughter. Under the laws of Alfred's *Doomboc*, any slave that was forced to work on a Sunday would be freed, even if they themselves weren't Christian. In a similar vein, any child born of a liaison between a master and his slave was freeborn, and had to be provided for, unless the father disowned the child, in which case he forfeited all rights to the child or their *weregild*, and had to provide a relatively substantial stipend to the mother.

More of course can be said, but this older chain from /u/gunlord500 and /u/textandtrowel might be of interest for you!

Why did the Romani leave India and travel to Europe?

Before we begin, a clarification of terminology is in order. The Romani call themselves the “Romani”. The common English word, however—especially in America—is “Gypsy”. The word “Gypsy” is in fact a corruption of the Renaissance English word *‘gypcian*, which means “Egyptian”, because some mistakenly believed that the Romani came from Egypt.^(1, 2) “Gypsy” isn’t even the only exonym applied to the Romani—other exonyms include “Kaale”, “Manouche”, “Romanichal”, “Tattare”, “Gitano”, “Bashalde”, and “Sinti.”^(3, 4) European nations applied some of these exonyms not to Romani-speaking communities per se, but rather to the descendants of Romani-speaking communities who were forced to give up their language due to historical circumstances, and therefore adopted the languages of their adoptive homelands. These people, however, found it impossible to also give up their semi-nomadic lifestyle, partially due to the marginalization they experienced and continue to experience in Europe; they therefore came to be known as “Travellers.”^(5) For the sake of simplicity, however, both the people and their language shall heretofore be referred to as “Romani”. **Indian Origins** The ancestors of the Romani people left Northern India over one thousand years ago—possibly as far back as fifteen hundred years ago.^(6, 7) Researchers can reliably trace their Indian descent not only through genetic testing^(8), but also through linguistics. How do linguists know that the Romani came specifically from India? Romani is an Indo-Aryan language.^(9) This means that Romani and Hindi—along with myriad other languages, including both Sindhi and Sinhalese—all have a common ancestor, i.e. a language that was spoken before it evolved into Hindi, Romani, Sindhi, Sinhalese, and so on (compare how both English and German have a common ancestor, and how both are now separate, mutually unintelligible languages). Given their common descent, it can be inferred that Romani and Hindi were at one time both spoken in roughly the same geographic area, i.e. Northern India. Given the widespread dispersal of the Romani people, the Romani language unsurprisingly has many dialectical differences. Whether or not these dialectical differences are sufficient to constitute several distinct Romani languages is a controversial question, specifically because the border between “dialect” and “language” has always been incredibly fuzzy.^(10) Many of the languages spoken by Travellers are admixtures of their adopted languages and extensive Romani-language lexica. These languages are therefore categorized as “Para-Romani.”^(11) The diasporic Jewish languages are a useful analogue to these Para-Romani languages. Languages like Yiddish (i.e. Judeo-German), Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Malayalam—among many other languages—are all distinctly Jewish dialects of various national languages. As such, they retain extensive in-group lexica, which in many cases are derived mostly from Hebrew. The Para-Romani languages follow a similar pattern. Why did the Romani leave India? No one is able to answer this question with any degree of certainty. Some researchers have argued that the Romani first formed as a military collective opposed to the Islamic invasions of India.^(12) Other researchers argue that the bulk of the Romani constituted “migrants who appear to have been members of service-providing castes”.^(13) More recent research—such as that proposed by Lev Tcherenkov and Stephane Laederich—suggests that the Romani are descended from the Indian *Dom*, a group of “musicians, dancers, smiths, basket weavers, sieve makers, \[and\] woodworkers” who either originated as members of one caste or as members of several.^(14) A synthesis of such findings can be found in the work of Józef Vekerdi, who asserts the following: >The Gypsies’ ancestors began leaving northwest India probably about the seventh century AD. They are characterized as robbers, murderers, hangmen and entertainers. These professions were prescribed for them by the rules of the Hindu caste system. Thus they belonged to the so-called ‘wandering criminal tribes’ of India and were obliged to lead a parasitic way of life. Among the numerous outcast groups, they occupied the lowest rung on the social scale.^(15) In any case, it seems that the ancestors of the Romani constituted a composite population defined occupationally rather than ethnically, and may have therefore initially included several different Indian ethnicities. This composite population migrated westward from Northern India in several waves comprising three main groups—the Romani, Domari, and Lomavren—before settling and shortly thereafter dispersing within the Byzantine Empire, where their language differentiated them from other peoples. This linguistic differentiation forced these diverse Indian peoples to coalesce, thereby solidifying themselves as an ethnicity separate from others that existed in their adoptive homelands. The initial migration process may have taken as long as two centuries, so it may definitely be characterized as a “slow” process.^(16) >If it was a slow process, why didn’t they leave Romani groups behind in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, etc? They did. In fact, to this day there are substantial Romani, Domari, and Lomavren populations in all of these countries, especially in Turkey and Egypt.^(17) A veritable constellation of terms for both the Romani and Domari arose in the Levant and Egypt, where they were known as “Nawar”, “Ghajar”, “Ghorbat”, “Jat”, “Halab”, and “Qurbat”. Like in Europe, Middle Easterners perceived them as “itinerants, beggars, and thieves, who sometimes play musical instruments, their women thought to be prostitutes and fortunetellers.”^(18) Given the similar stereotypes and resultant antiziganism, Middle Eastern Romani and Domari communities face many of the same challenges as their European counterparts.^(19) P.S. There’s a good question in this thread posited by u/ntbananas: >Additionally, what changed upon arrival in Europe to cause the Romani to splinter into different sub-groups The answer is chiefly geographic dispersion. The Romani are known for their semi-nomadic lifestyle, so they have over the years dispersed all across the continent. Today, the approximately ten million Romani who live in Europe are scattered all the way from Spain to Russia, and form substantial minorities in several Central and Eastern European countries, particularly Romania.^(20) Given their geographic remoteness from each other, the European Romani and Traveller populations have naturally broken up into numerous subgroups. P.P.S. While there certainly might be some truth to the above quote by Vekerdi, I am personally tempted to think that the work from which this passage was taken may be tainted with some toxic bias. The title of Vekerdi’s work—“The Gypsies and the Gypsy Problem in Hungary”—casually mentions a “Gypsy Problem.” Moreover, Vekerdi himself was born in Hungary, a country that historically had a large Romani population and concomitantly developed widespread antiziganism, a sentiment which the tone of the above passage does nothing to distance itself from. I’ve nevertheless included Vekerdi’s text given my suspicion is thus far unconfirmed, and because he was a researcher and published this work in an academic journal, which is (ideally) supposed to be an arbiter of scholarly discourse. If anything, my suspicion only goes to show how important it is to critically engage with source material. (Continued below)

A follow-on for any linguists out there: Ive heard it said that Romani bears a striking resemblance to Sinhala. How, and how did this arise?

Why was "Kingdom" chosen as the term for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia?

The Arabic term translated as "kingdom" is "Al Mamlakah" ~~which could also be called "principality" (like, ruled by a prince) or chiefdom~~ (see /u/seswatha below). Saudi Arabia is also a pretty new state, established in 1932. It was recognized officially by the UK. The Saudi part comes from the family Al Saud, who had gained power starting in the mid-to-late 1700s as an opposition power to the Ottoman Empire (but only in Arabia). A sultanate is a ~~much more elevated~~ separate term, claimed by the leaders of the Ottoman Empire--it literally means something like "authority." On the other hand, "caliph" literally mean "successor," as in successor to the messenger of God (that would be Muhammad). Early Caliphs were often also political leaders, but by the Ottoman era, Caliphs were sort of a ~~government spokesperson~~ title used by sultans for religious matters. Edit: see /u/Labrydian 's comments below; this covers the titles at play and the reasons they were claimed much more fully. Edit: /u/i_like_jam corrects me below. I'd add that I'm curious as to whether Arab states began to style themselves as kingdoms out of a post-ottoman opposition to terms like sultan and/or an affinity for their European allies against the Ottomans.

I have a follow-up question. The word Kingdom in Arabic appears to be "Mamlakah." Is it related to the word Mamluk?

During the Middle Ages, what kind of dishes did Europeans cook with the spices they imported from Asia?

Allow me to strongly recommend "The Taste of Conquest," by Michael Krondl. It's a culinarian's point of view on the history of the spice trade through the eras of control by Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam, with a look at the recipes and other uses for the spices back home; it also critically examines the fact that much of the spice trade never went near Europe. Krondl also challenges some of the old adages like "spices were used to preserve food" (they don't, and those who could afford them could afford fresh meat) and "medieval food was overspiced" (fine feasts might have ridiculous amounts of spice per person, but they also had ridiculous amounts of food per person). Some examples include the use of black pepper, sugar, saffron, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves to flavour meat dishes. I strongly recommend you pick the book up.

To add to his original question what spices would have been considered common to western Europe?

Is it possible that the Bible is nothing other than a Fictional story that was misinterpreted and later rebranded as a religious book?

There are a variety of directions one could go in response to this question, but clarifying in a very general sense how the canon of biblical literature developed historically might be a helpful place to start. Although the Bible is often popularly thought of as essentially one big book, the original Greek word for the bible, τὰ βιβλία, literally meant 'the books.' This translation, which stresses book**s** in the plural rather than book in the singular, conveys a much more accurate sense of what the Bible actually is- namely, a collection of various writings consisting of different literary genres, written by different authors for different audiences, in very different time periods and socio-cultural settings. As the theologian and Catholic bishop Robert Barron has helpfully put it, the bible is less like "a book" and more like a "library of books" (in fact, I believe the Spanish and French words for library (biblioteca and bibliothèque, respectively) both have roots in the previously mentioned Greek word tà biblía). This conception of the Bible obviously implies the need for a more complicated response to the original question than its formulation may have originally implied was necessary. Trying to describe the bible simply as a "fictional story" or a "true story" or a "collection of folktales" or any number of other single-lens interpretive descriptions doesn't really work. Though some biblical books (look at Genesis or Job, for example) take on a sort of folklore, moralizing myth-like tone, others, like the books of Psalms or the Song of Solomon, are quite obviously books of poetry. Can poetry, in principal, be considered "folktale"? Its doesn't even seem clear what assigning true or false descriptors to poetic books like those would entail- if they weren't intended to be read as history by the authors who wrote them, why would we try and evaluate their content solely by means of historical analysis anyway? Further complications arise when considering New Testament books like the Gospel of Luke. Numerous historical problems present themselves in elements of Luke's telling of the birth of Christ, particularly with regard to the supposed census that may or may not have actually occurred as claimed. But later, when introducing the figure of John the Baptist, the author at least appears to try and meticulously ground the narrative in literal history, referencing just about every major political and religious leader in office at the time as a way of dating events: (Luke 3:1-3) "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiphas..." Or take some of the New Testament letters. Some of Paul's letters seem to be quite clearly interpersonal, intercommunal letters. Are they "true" or "false" or "fictional"? Again, it doesn't seem clear what that would even mean from a historical sense. Whether they are considered to be of actual theological significance goes beyond the scope of historical analysis, but they are undoubtedly "real" letters in that they were actually written and shared among early Christian communities. This doesn't mean that the beliefs expressed in them were true, but it also doesn't really make sense to call them "fictional" or "folktale" because they are well... real letters. This is not my area of academic specialty, so I don't want to continue too much past what I have already said for fear of straying too far past my bounds of competence, but hopefully this response helps bring some clarity to your question. I'm hopeful that others more well versed in the academic literature will be able to more thoroughly contribute, but in concluding I'll plug Raymond Brown's somewhat dated but nonetheless scholarly *and* accessible (too rare a combination) *An* *Introduction to the New Testament* as an excellent source for checking out to see a good overview of these sort of debates, at least as they pertain to the New Testament.

There is a great post by /u/kookingpot which discusses the relationship between the Bible and history, which is complex - the Bible is not a modern history textbook, but it mostly wasn't originally intended as fiction either - and you might also enjoy an old but reliable post by /u/talondearg on the evidence for a historical Jesus. For more discussion of the topic, see also our FAQ page on the topic of religion.

How did Japan survive without many natural resources?

You have to remember having ''just'' iron, silver, gold, fish and AMAZING farmland is quite a lot in most eras.

I don't know the total answer, but part of the reason is that the Japanese government started implementing strict anti-deforestation techniques around the 17th century. There was a strict limit to the amount of trees that could be cut, and building methods were changed to use less wood. This led to a sustainable amount of forestry, so that the Japanese were able to a constant supply of wood without too much environmental degradation. Today, the country is still 70% forested. Source: Jared Diamond's Collapse

Why were the uniforms of the American Revolutionary War (and other older wars) so colorful?

Camouflage, depending on the tactical situation, wasn't really important. The relative inaccuracy of weapons at the time, and their limited range, meant that an effective use of a large body of men was to keep them together to deliver volleys. To use an over simplified example: if one man has a slim chance of hitting a given target at a given range, you could group thirty men together, have them all aim at the same target, and greatly improve your chances of hitting said target. The popular myth surrounding the war is that this was a stupid way to fight, and that Americans won the war by hiding in the woods. Irregular warfare was very, very well known at the time. The British experienced it in many conflicts, including the fairly recent Jacobite Rebellion, and the French and Indian War. The British army had already well adapted to these situations through the use of flankers and light infantry, combining irregular warfare with linear tactics. The Americans also used this combination of tactics. The soldiers operating in irregular warfare often wore colors that were much more fit for it. Using British irregular warfare units alone as an example: The Queen's Rangers, King's Royal Regiment of New York, Jaegers, and British Legion all wore green uniforms. Bearing in mind that the nature of warfare largely required the maneuvering of large bodies of troops, identification was of chief importance. Red coats were cheap to manufacture and easy to see. Adding to this, flags designating each regiment could be held above the powdersmoke for the general to see and make tactical decisions based on their locations. Hiding your troops away would completely strip command of the ability to visually confirm the location of their troops in the field. In operations where this was not important (the Battle of Oriskany, for example) there were few regular soldiers employed anyway. **TL;DR:** The technology of combat at the time predicated tactics that made it unnecessary to use camo, where irregular troops were employed they did wear something closer to camo, and hiding troops could not be seen nor controlled by high command.

Uniforms were a huge process for the armies. Since these battles were fought with black-powder weapons it was difficult to see more than a couple yards in front of you. This made it incredibly important to be able to easily distinguish friend from foe in the white smoke. Since the smoke was white often bright colors were worn. You can imagine that the British red/scarlet uniforms were easy to see; the French wore white and blue and the Americans dark blues/browns. The official colors were chosen as brown in 1775 but since there was a shortage of brown cloth some regiments chose blue and gray. Over time, the soldiers shifted to favor blue. I think it wasn't until 1778 or 79 that there was a recognized uniform and colors. They got the typical hat, shirt, leather stock, coats (waistcoat and/or vest as well), leather shoes, socks and trousers too for the uniform but many had to purchase their own; further varying the color scheme TL;DR: It was most convenient. Supplying the army was hard.

How often did soldiers loot other soldiers for weapons in WW2?

Weapon looting actually created an interesting tension in Vietnam. Soldiers were often so fed up with the problems plaguing their M16s that they would loot enemy AKs and use those instead. However, using an AK was highly discouraged by Army brass and came with significant draw backs. The major one being that it has such a distinct report. Often soldiers could tell friend from foe simply by the sound of their fire. So while picking up an AK meant you had a fully functional weapon, it also meant you were far more likely to incur friendly fire. (This is from AK 47: The Weapon that changed the face of war by Larry Kahaner)

Looting was very common. Most soldiers were equipped with a bolt-action rifle, and increasing your firepower by looting an SMG or an LMG was highly popular. The usual order of business was to pass looted weapons and ammunition down to the supply services, who would collect weapons and ammunition and re-issue them if they felt a decent supply of captured ammunition was available. The 28. Maori battalion of the 2. New Zealand Division was notorious for looing small arms - and after having them taken away by the supply services, hiding them to retain them afterwards. Maoris with a German mauser rifle >The battalion had increased its mobility and firepower by retaining captured weapons, transport and ammunition. I was about to proceed to Baelbeck when Lt-Col Humphrey Dyer called me into his office and said, "I have been ordered to return all captured weapons etc. The Coy OC's and I agree we should retain them". What do you think? I said "Sir, General Sherman said that the force that gets there fastest with the most firepower will win the battle and if we are to fight in silly brigade groups in the desert, we need all the transport, and the firepower we can get." The Col refused to return the weapons etc, and the result was gallant Officer had sacrificed his career for, as he saw it, the welfare of his troops.

Was suicide among "commoners" normal during time periods like the renaissance?

It is *also* impossible to calculate a suicide rate for early modern western Europe. The difficulties with identifying modern victims of suicide come into play--people who try to cover up their own actions, families who don't report it. For the early modern era, the usual problem with surviving sources compounds these problems exponentially. But it's also harder because of much darker cultural beliefs about suicide. It was a matter of deep social shame for the survivors and the memory of the victim. It was a legal crime that punished survivors through state seizure of the victim's property. And in Christianity, it was a sin that sent one's soul straight to hell. This was true on all sides of the Reformation. In Catholicism, suicide offered no time for repentance between act and death. According to Protestant beliefs, suicide was an act of the reprobate. So with so much societal push against suicide, combined with the usual narratives of the early modern era as the "rise of social discipline," who would get to the point of actively trying to kill themselves? Through the difficulties in the sources, one thing has stood out in multiple studies. Suicide was often, though obviously not always, a sin and a crime of social and economic outcasts. People who perceived they had nowhere to turn or would have nowhere to turn in the future; people who faced a really awful future. Legal records are where most of our data on suicide in early modern Europe comes from--actual court cases, records of deaths in a city, investigations of violent death and accidents in general. But studies of England and northern Germany show some of the problems with using these records straightforwardly. First, it's generally considered fact that people sought desperately to cover up the suicidal death of a family member for three reasons: their own social shame, refusal of Christian burial rites, and seizure of property. In England, laws mandating almoners and coroners investigate *all* suspicious deaths were codified around 1500, which you would think would eliminate some of the chances of a cover-up. But as R. A. Houston showed for 16th century England, cases taken to the courts often ended up more as a mediation in how to divide a deceased person's assets than outright forfeiture. And they might not end up in court until *decades* after a death. At the same time, there's plenty of evidence of families indeed trying to cover up someone's suicide. And people who committed suicide themselves might also have taken care. So we're definitely still dealing with very selective reporting and recording. In northern Germany and Scandinavia, so-called "suicidal murder" became a major problem in the 16th-18th centuries. This involved a person who despaired to the point of suicide actually murdering someone else, a victim and in a manner that made capital punishment inevitable (usually a child not related to them). Arne Jansson traced this horror to a local folk belief that a violent death of any kind--including execution--sent one to heaven. This would presumably constitute a small number of cases of suicide overall. But it's a useful, if tragic, reminder that suicide doesn't always look like "suicide." And of course, a major difficulty is that sources don't always agree--and that they disagree in really significant ways. Through 1646, Laura Cruz observed 38 suicides recorded in court records for Leiden; Jeffrey Watts observed 41 in Geneva through 1650. This seems quite ordinary until you realize that Leiden was about twice the size of Geneva. However, Cruz and Watts found agreement in their sources on a crucial point: suicide was overwhelmingly an act of the socially marginalized. Cruz observes a strong link between economic difficulties and suicide. Even as Leiden prospered dramatically, not everyone came along. Those excluded from guild membership as temporary workers (the adjunct professors of early modern trades, if you will) or those still trying to earn their way in as apprentices (the grad students) constituted 20% of the people "convicted" of committing suicide in court records. Feeling a full sense of belonging and community in a church was also insulation from actually committing suicide, although there is no information on attempts. Cruz found only 2 cases out of 38 who were full members of a Calvinist or Anabaptist church (about 40% of the population overall). For Geneva, on the other hand, Watt identified surprisingly specific groups as those most likely to commit suicide: suspected witches, prisoners, and people previously considered violently insane. 9 out of the 41 pre-1650 victims of suicide had been accused or suspected of witchcraft. Studying England, Houston cautions that the predominance of social outcasts in statistics about people who committed suicide, likely reflects source bias to some extent. MacDonald and Murphy in *Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England* highlight the presence of nobles and wealthier burghers among the registers of suicide victims. But they still point out that based on assets uncovered for forfeiture, more than half of victims of suicide would qualify as poor or destitute. Sharon Strocchia, meanwhile, studied suicides and suicide attempts among nuns in early modern Italy--what more tight-knit community than a convent? It's impossible to reconstruct the complex social, medical, and personal reasons that any one person committed suicide. But looking at the circumstances of these nuns, she detected two patterns at work in many (not all) cases. First, some of the nuns were noted as suffering horrible verbal and even physical abuse. (And this does not seem to have been an exaggeration--one nun, who reported the suicide of her sister to local authorities, also sought permission to transfer to another convent because of the terrible environment.) Second, many nuns who attempted suicide, or had sisters desperately concerned that they would, were among those forced into monastic life by relatives. In both those cases, there was sharp displacement from these women's desired community, whether that was within the convent or outside. And Houston offers a poignant reminder that "social outcast" could come in many forms. From 17th century Shropshire (the year isn't clear), a man named John Gossage committed suicide by taking arsenic. He had spent time in jail for counterfeiting money and was accounted an alcoholic by survivors. When his body was found, the only person the town could find to deal with his burial was his landlord. And the nameless woman who threw herself into the Nor Loch in Edinburgh in 1665? She was buried right next to where she drowned herself--she had no family or friends to claim, move, or take care of her body. We only know her from a brief reference in the city treasurers' records of the need to supply a coffin.

I have an earlier answer on suicide in the Middle Ages in western Europe. If you don't mind, I'll copy-paste it here for now so people have something to read while I work on one that extends into the Reformation/later Renaissance era. (Normally I'd just wait, but the topic seems to demand it.) (Now posted!) ~~ 1/2] *I'm borrowing some pieces from earlier answers [here and here, but it's mostly new.* It's impossible to calculate the rate at which medieval people in the Latin West killed themselves or tried to. First, for the usual reasons--lack of records, bias of records that do survive in favor of focus on specific groups, the sketchily-drawn nature of calculating medieval demographics in general. Equally important, however, are the immense social, legal, and Christian religious consequences not just for the ones who killed themselves, but for those staring numbly at their loved one's body. While we can't say "how commonly did medieval people kill themselves," it is evident that suicide was not only a common problem for survivors, but became an even bigger emotional burden over the course of the Middle Ages. The central drumbeat of any examination of suicide in the Christian Middle Ages must be: suicide was a sin. And not just any sin, but an absolutely, fundamentally unforgiveable one. It was understood that the act of self-murder was the last thing that a person would do; there was no time for confession and absolution. No cleansing purgatorial fire awaited those who killed themselves: they were eternally bound to hell. As early as 570, Gregory of Tours writes that the body of a nobleman who had killed himself was taken to a monastery by his survivors, but the monks could "not put [him] among the Christian dead, and no Mass was sung for him." The refusal of burial with the Christian community in consecrated ground is an earthly symbol of the theological belief that the count was separated from the Christian community in the afterlife. This story shows us two further things. First, the intimate relationship of suicide and death means the theology of suicide was doctrine that wrapped itself around every level of Christian society. Even if not every single person over a thousand year span was excited to hear every last sermon or could recite the Paternoster (prayer) without prompting at their goddaughter's baptism, everyone dealt with death, whose aftermath was the domain of God and the Church. Second, it shows the desperation of the count's family. They still took his body to the monastery even knowing he had killed himself, holding out some shard of hope for his soul, that the holy men might still be able to help. Already in the earliest years of the Middle Ages, we witness the desperation of the survivors. The fallout of this desperation--even a generalized sadness of pious writers upset at the consignment of *any* soul to hell--permeates the medieval source record on suicide. As with Gregory, it's not that suicide isn't mentioned. We hear about it in monastic chronicles: a 12th century monk and prior of Le Dale monastery named Henry fell in love with a local woman and, officially absent from his house to earn money for it, moved in with her. When his affair was discovered and he was forced to return to the convent, "Taking guidance from the Devil he got into a hot bath and opened veins in both arms; and by way of spontaneous, or rather foolish, death he put an end to life." From late medieval England, we have cases mentioned in coroners' rolls: A man sentenced to sit in the stocks overnight is found dead in the morning, having stabbed himself. Miracle stories attached to saints and shrines describe people who attempted suicide, maybe even appeared to have killed themselves, but were (literally) miraculously revived: a young woman was raped repeatedly by her uncle, who forced her to have an abortion each time she became pregnant. The third time, she did so directly, by ripping open her stomach with a knife. But when she cried to the Virgin Mary--here as both mother and *mediatrix*--Mary healed her external as well as internal wounds, and the woman took vows in a Cistercian convent to spend the rest of her days in praise of Mary/out of sight of mainstream society. And fictional literary sources talk of suicide, too: Boccaccio's *Elegy of Lady Fiammetta* describes a woman who decides to kill herself by jumping from a tower, because the people who find her body won't be able to tell whether it was suicide or an accident. But in these stories, a clear pattern emerges: an emphasis on secrecy, privacy, and shame. A traveler who drops back from the group; a nun who barricades herself into a room for "private prayer" but slips out the window. Fiammetta (who is ultimately rescued) wanted to camouflage her death as an accident; the noblewoman in Gerard of Frachet's miracle tale hid herself away in the aftermath. This only increases as one moves up the social scale in considering cases. Although typically we'd say the source record is *radically* denser for religious and the upper class than the small but growing middle class and peasants, with suicide this is not so. Alexander Murray, who composed the most important study of suicide in the Middle Ages (and to give you an idea of the weight of this project: he only ever made it through two volumes of a planned three before it was too much), instead says we must look to "whispers". The sources ideologically and personally closest to a named noble or royal will shy away from mentioning suicide or suicidal ideation; those further removed in time and alliance will be less reticent. One example of this in operation is the possible attempted suicide of Henry IV, 11th (mostly) century Holy Roman Emperor. A lot of chronicles discuss his wars with the pope and his own son. But it is only one account, by known opponent Bernold of Constance, who includes this detail: > He betook himself to a castle and there remained without any regal trappings. He was in a state of extreme dejection and, as they say, he tried to give himself over to death, but was prevented by his men and could not bring his wish to effect. *(trans. Murray)* While the modern reader will recongize circumstances of deep depression and suicidal desire that feel all too familiar, there is an even darker angle in play. A given "mental illness" is of course a name attached of a web of symptoms that frequently travel together, manifesting slightly differently in all cases; but even the concept of *illness* is a cultural-scientific attachment. *Tristitia*, *acedia*, *melancholia*, and their fellows in medieval writings appear to aligns with different manifestations of what we call major depressive disorder today. But in the Middle Ages, they were sins. Even before one stepped onto the tower window ledge or threw the rope over the rafters, sorrow over worldly matters like *your own son leading an armed rebellion against you, nbd* was a sin that divorced you from other people and from God. It's not an accident that so many accounts of suicide attribute the act to possession by the devil or the influence of demons, and describe the victim's diabolical fear or behavior in the days or years beforehand. It's no wonder, then, that even an anti-Henry partisan like Bernold can only bring himself to write "As they say" (*aiunt*). It's a common pattern. Dante Alighieri refused to identify thirteenth-century king Henry Hohenstaufen as one of the inmates of the seventh circle of hell in *Inferno*, despite rumors to the effect he was among those violent against themselves. It's not agreement or disagreement with this decision that is picked up by commentators, it's the *debate*: "but others write," hedges Bevenuto da Imola, and "if this is true." There was good reason for those left behind to be cautious. As laws and legal systems coalesced over the course of the Middle Ages, death by suicide came to have extensive legal consequences for one's heirs (and whatever a grudge against the dead, might not be good to antagonize the living). Laws permitted or mandated the "ravage" of the property of someone who committed suicide: that its, its seizure by the lord or city rather than passing down to one's heirs. This could extend all the way to the home that a house-owner's family was *still living in*, throwing them onto the street. A 1280 case from England illustrates these laws in action. Upon the death of one of his tenants, a lord had claimed it was suicide and thus her property reverted to him. Her heirs had sued to get the property back, claiming his "presumptions" were (a) wrong and (b) even if they were right, presumptions weren't strong enough to be evidence of suicide. Notably, the judge ruled in the lord's favor because one of the 'presumptions' was the dead woman's threat to do something to shame her friends. Suicide was shameful for the immediate victim, but it also smade victims of the survivors who had to deal with public shame and material loss in the midst of private grief.

Why did the Lorica Segmentata become the foremost armor both before and after the use of chain mail?

Dan Howard tells us that the main reason for adopting the Lorica Segmentata was that it was far cheaper to produce than Hamata. Furthermore, because of the wide coverage provided by a scutum, the most common area of injury for a legionnaire would be the shoulders. Lorica Segmentatas' reinforced shoulder plates make it seem as if it was developed with that in mind. Vegetius tells us that the main reason for dropping the Lorica Segmentata was because it was too heavy. Supposedly, the legionnaires got soft and couldn't bear to wear it anymore. Vegetius lamented this slothful attitude, because of the Lorica Segmentata's greater protection in comparison to the armor of Late-Antiquity. However, this is probably not the only reason, nor the main reason for the abandoning of such armor. This comment by u/bitparity tells us that the later emperors required a lighter, more mobile army attached to the emperor(s) that could more quickly respond to internal and external foes throughout the empire and its borders. Lorica Segmentata also required much more effort to maintain compared to the Lorica Hamata. Rust was a very big problem for the plates. The use of leather under metal in high mobility situations would also lead to quick degradation of the leather, as it would constantly rub up against it during any sort of movement. As the empire's logistics collapsed, it is reasonable to believe that the legions could no longer adequately maintain their platemails and went with the sturdier alternative. Returning to Dan Howard, he claims that chainmail was actually the preferable alternative in most aspects aside from blunt trauma. It allegedly provided better coveragewith greater mobility, while not requiring the legionnaire to wear additional inner lining. It also was far easier to repair, as you could use a wire of metal.

Lorica segmentata was designed largely as a form of scale/plate hybrid armor that had overlapping strips of metal that allowed a wide range of protection. Its initial advantages, namely being more sturdy and resilient as a form of armor, were outweighed by its cost, and the technical proficiency necessary to create it. By no means was the Lorica segmentata standard-issue for all Roman legions. Only a handful at a time possessed them, and largely based on seniority. By contrast, lorica hamata, or chainmail, was tried and true, and had been used since antiquity. Everyone knew how to create and use it, and it was relatively cheap and effective. The period in which it was created and implemented was also the high-watermark period of the Roman Empire, when the Empire possessed a technological proficiency, with economies of scale, and labor markets that would not be rivaled until the industrial revolution. What ended it largely was the period of instability known as the Crisis of the Third Century, in which the Roman Empire was torn apart by civil war and strife that lasted several decades and nearly ended it. The resulting reconstituted Empire stabilized in the Fourth Century under the reign of Constantine and his sons. Constantine reformed the military away from a legionary model towards a rapid response model, firstly to eliminate the political threat the army posed, but also to posture the Empire towards defending its borderlands. However, by the end of the Fourth Century and the beginning of the fifth century, Rome was confronted with a new stream of problems: barbarian incursions. While barbarians had been encountered quite frequently, and many even made deep incursions in the Empire, only to be drawn back, this was the first time in which Barbarians had scored several crushing victories over the Romans, notably at Adrianople, where the Eastern Roman Emperor was slain by roving Goths.

If people drank beer all day in the Middle Ages in Europe, why wasn't everyone born with fetal alcohol syndrome?

Other replies have pointed out that people did not get quite that much alcohol. I'd also like to point out that the incidence of FAS is not super high. Some sources estimate that it happens 30-33% of the time with a daily consumption of 144g alcohol. This works out to TEN modern-strength drinks a day. Anyone who drinks this much is going to have numerous problems. There have been other studies that did not detect FAS occurrence when the exposure was two drinks per day. The recommendation to avoid alcohol totally is extrapolation from the heavy drinkers that a small risk remains.

http://i.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14fvf8/if_beer_was_the_standard_drink_in_northern_europe/ This thread might answer your question in part. I don't think the beer people drank was so refined or alcoholic as it is today. The earliest beers were actually more like a fermented porridge than the lager you might buy today.

What were the most important factors contributing to Japan's victory over Russia in 1905?

The main reason why the Japanese won the war was because they had sea supremacy, pretty much from the start. When the war began the Russian 1st Pacific Squadron was at Port Arthur when the Japanese carried out an early-dawn pre-emptive attack on the harbor using torpedoes [which were not nearly as effective as the Japanese had hoped]. Port Arthur was a heavily fortified harbor, that had been continuously armed & fortified for decades before the war broke out. Because of these coastal defenses the Japanese navy could not get too close to the harbor to engage the Russians without exposing themselves. So the Russians used the harbor to protect the squadron, occasionally coming out to fight the Japanese in a handful of stalemated naval skirmishes. The rest of the Russian navy was either interned under neutrality laws, or far enough away that they could not offer the Pacific Squadron assistance. This meant that at the beginning, the Japanese had near unchecked use of the sea, and they took advantage of this by landing their army just outside Port Arthur with numerous heavy siege artillery. The Japanese land forces then fought a long & hard siege of the harbor using trench warfare. The Russians were able to send in reinforcements & supplies by a railway spur that linked up with the Trans-Siberian Railway, but they knew Port Arthur was at risk of falling. So the Russians gathered up virtually every armed ship they had at home that were still floating & sent them 18,000 miles around the globe to try to save Port Arthur before it fell. While this fleet was underway the Japanese got threw enough of the harbor's fortifications to start shelling the Russian ships inside, so they had to try to evacuate. The ships tried to leave, were intercepted by the Japanese, and were decisively defeated. Port Arthur then fell. The rest of the Russian Navy that had been underway were now tasked with trying to save the next-closest Russian port of Vladivostok. When entering the Sea of Japan the Japanese intercepted them, setting off the Battle of Tsushima which is one of the most decisive victories in naval history. So now that you know briefly what happened, allow me to go into more detail with specifics on *why* it happened. Most commonly, people are told that the Russian warships were obsolete, and the crews poorly trained, and that this is why they performed so badly at Tsushima. This is an absurd myth that will not die. The Japanese navy consisted of a small core of British-made capital ships, and the Russians had a few of these exact same ships themselves [having bought them from the British like the Japanese had]. The Russians had even taken their British-made ships & built Russian clones of them at home using their own shipyards. At the Battle of Round Island [10 AUG 1904], when the 1st Pacific Squadron & the Japanese Navy fought each other outside Port Arthur, both sides at one point had to give up fighting because their shells were incapable of inflicting enough damage on their targets. The Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute explained in a 1909 report that the Russian warship *Tsesarevich* had survived despite being hit by 15 Japanese shots of high caliber, 13 of these shots were 12-inch shells. The fighting even stopped once it got to a range of 12,000 yards because both sides found “…it was a useless expenditure of ammunition.”[1] The Japanese had already been so disappointed with the performance of their British armor-piercing rounds [the same shells used by both sides], that ahead of this battle they had dumped their explosive payloads out of their bigger shells & replaced them with a highly experimental explosive known as Shimosa. Shimosa is a high explosive that is very volatile, so if used in a shell not designed property there is a risk of premature detonation. With Shimosa in the British A.P. [Armor Piercing] shells the Japanese in battle blew up a huge swath of their 12-inch guns. According to US Admiral Ballard roughly a third of the 12-inch guns in the Japanese fleet were destroyed.[2] This is a really, really big problem because these guns now needed to be refitted which involved taking the ships out of service, something that if done would cost the Japanese their sea supremacy. A few of the guns were still capable of being fired, but were so damaged that the shells would tumble in flight. An armor piercing shell that tumbles in flight cannot damage any target whatsoever because it needs to hit the target at a very specific orientation & momentum in order for that piercing-action to happen. So in total desperation the Japanese abandoned the 12" British armor piercing shell & replaced them with torpedo shells. A torpedo shell is, as the name implies, a torpedo that has been designed to be fired out of a gun. It carries an extremely high payload, and the idea is that the force of the explosion damages the target without even needing to make direct contact. This is, in fact, the basis behind torpedos & mines, but those things explode in the water. Water does not compress, so the full force of the explosion travels a distance through the water & if within range will destroy the bottom of the ship [which back then was the least protected part]. The ship would then crack open under the waterline, and sink quickly. The big problem is that a torpedo shell if you hit the target explodes in the air, unless it falls short & hits below the water. Air does compress. So the size of the payload has to be increased exponentially to destroy a target. This is why up until now no country used torpedo shells. The Americans had done 20+ years of experiments that they claimed showed the idea had no merit, and back then these types of studies were not secretive so the whole world believed them. But the Japanese really had no other choice. Either fire armor piercing shells out of their damaged 12-inch guns, knowing they will not work, or use a torpedo shell where it can tumble the whole way to the target without causing a decrease in effectiveness. So fast forward to the Battle of Tsushima. By now the Japanese were able to locate a fuse that stabilize the Shimosa filled shells, but it was not a perfect design and as consequence would only explode a portion of the shells' payloads. But as fate would have it, this ended up helping in battle. At Tsushima these shimosa filled torpedo shells blew away whole sections of the hulls on Russian ships, on some ships destroyed entire superstructures [that's all the stuff you see above the deckline], and each shell that exploded left behind this residue of unconsumed shimosa everywhere which then would catch fire and act as an incendiary. Allow me to give you a few quotes from an eyewitness, Capt. Semenoff of the Russian flagship at Tsushima: “incessantly… it seemed as if these were mines, not shells… they burst as soon as they touched anything…” and “…liquid flame of the explosion, which seemed to spread over everything. I actually watched a steel plate catch fire from a burst.”[3] Now a lot of people in the west have criticized Semenoff's account, and for decades it was the ONLY Russian eyewitness account of the battle translated into English, because of the content he added purely for political reasons to help his career [i.e. claiming at one point to try to kill himself when defeat was inevitable, only to have the gun jam]. But, in terms of his descriptions of the Japanese shells & their effectiveness, all of his observations are collaborated by other primary documents. In the 70s one of the leading authorities on the battle, J. N. Westwood translated dozens of Russian sailors' first hand accounts and put them in a book called Witness of Tsushima [sidenote: I have been told it had to be printed in Japan because of its implications insofar as making the West's technology seem blatantly defective]. In the book he includes an except from an officer who had been aboard the Russian ship Orel who wrote “At this moment not far from the ship a shell fell onto the sea, skimmed over its surface amid a shower of spray, and then ricocheted into the air again, like a long black dolphin. Its 20-pood weight cracked down on the deck. Flame burst out and spread like liquid, encircled by crawling brown smoke…”[4] Also please note that Semenoff went out of his way in multiple times in his account to specifically point out that "Port Arthur was different", because on August 10th 1904 the two sides found their shells inflicted no meaningful damage in combat, yet at Tsushima the Japanese surprised them with this highly effective Vesuvium [this is exactly the word the Russian Capt. used, it refers to an experimental warship the US Navy used in the Spanish American War to throw heavy charges of explosive material using pneumatic guns]. The Japanese themselves after the war admit they won because of Shimosa filled high explosive shells, yet the only country that believed them was Germany. No one else- not the French, British, or Americans were willing to believe the state of the art Russian fleet could be destroyed with in-air explosions! This would have huge far-reaching implications later in World War One. [1] United States House of Representatives, House Committee on Naval Affairs, Government Printing Office, Washington DC, Mar. 20, 1912, 1014 [Miles Poindexter Papers, Special Collections, University of Washington] [2] Admiral G. A. Ballard, The Influence of the Sea on the Political History of Japan, E. P. Dutton & Company (New York: 1921) 240 [3] Capt. Vladimir Semenoff, The Battle of Tsushima, E. P. Dutton & Company (New York: 1917) [4] J. N. Westwood, Witnesses of Tsushima, Sophia University & Diplomatic Press (Tokyo: 1970) 208

1. Most Russian soldiers were over in European Russia, not Manchuria. The only way that the Russian soldiers had of getting over there was the newly-constructed Trans-Siberian Railroad, which obviously took Russian soldiers quite a while - not to mention that the long train rides invariably broke down unit cohesion and morale. 2. Russia never really had a credible plan of victory - Nicholas declared at the beginning of the war that he would dictate peace terms in Tokyo, but with the initial Japanese naval strikes, Russia never had a way of well, invading Japan. Japan was able to ferry far more men and supplies with their boats than the Russian could with the Trans Siberian Railroad, which proved decisive in the earlier stages of the war. 3. Despite all of this, and the fact that Russia lost every single battle in the Russo-Japanese War, Russia very well could have won if the war had managed to drag on, which precisely is why the treaty terms at Portsmouth were far more favorable towards Russia than one would expect of a side which had lost every battle. Japan had exhausted itself in manpower ( one of my sources stated that the Russo-Japanese war is one of, if not the only war in Russian history where Russia lost less men then their opponent), their credit was in dire straits even though they were backed by Jewish bankers who were PISSED at the tsar due to the pogroms, and Russia had begun to finally assemble a decent force which could have very well pushed Japan back. But then Bloody Sunday happened, and that all well went down the drain. My history capstone was on Russian military reforms in the aftermath of said war, which is how I know this.

Are there any indications of combat PTSD in societies like the Spartans, Khan's or Alexander's armies?

First off, let me say thank you for your service. PTSD in the Roman army is actually the topic of my Master's thesis, so I can at least give a fairly well-researched answer in that department. In short, the answer is very likely yes- though perhaps not in the way you might expect. Anyone looking for the presence of a modern psychological disorder in the ancient world must tread the path carefully. After all there are around 2,000 years worth of differences in culture and medicine separating the traumatized Vietnam veteran from the traumatized Roman legionary. One has to take into account the fact that a Roman soldier's entire worldview and manner of thought was informed by the world in which he lived. It is not enough to simply create a list of symptoms and check off each instance resembling them in the ancient primary sources as evidence for PTSD. For instance, a woman who is seen at a funeral wailing at the top of her lungs, tearing her dress, scratching her face, and ripping out her hair would almost certainly be thought of as traumatized today. However these reactions were so normative in Roman culture that such scenes were even professionalized. Essentially this is what the most notable works on this topic have done so far. In comparing ancient Greeks or Romans side by side with Vietnam veterans, they run the risk of wholly decontextualizing historical actors from the stage on which they belong. That being said, *Achilles in Vietnam* by Johnathan Shay and *From Melos to My Lai* by Lawrence Tritle are both excellent works of scholarship which delve into the topic of PTSD in ancient Greece far more than this young history grad can do in a single Reddit post. They also do quite a bit to drive home the terrible toll that combat can take on soldiers and the difficulty of returning home to life as a civilian. So, instead of simply looking for parallels, I think it is better to look towards the way psychologists themselves approach the problem of applying Western diagnoses to people from a foreign or non-Western background. One of the biggest criticisms psychologists have towards the "official" definition of PTSD found in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, sporadically re-published and updated by the American Psychiatric Association) is that it is almost entirely based on the observation of American trauma victims and their attendant symptoms. Only recently have researchers conducted enough studies of trauma reactions in foreign cultures to begin a meta-analysis of data that can bring us closer to understanding PTSD from a universal, rather than Ameri-centric, point of view. So with that thrown out there, let's get back to the Romans. As any cross-cultural psychologist might tell you, the same disorders can have wholly different origins and be expressed in a wholly different way based on an individual's personal and cultural experience. When it comes to Roman soldiers, the violence of warfare was not such a problem as it might be to an American soldier. This was due to many reasons, not the least of which were desensitization (death was not uncommon nor unseen in the ancient world), the reward system of the Roman military (which encouraged excessive, even suicidal, violence), and the lack of any inherent moral contradiction in warfare. A modern soldier going to war must, to more or less of an extent, overcome the strictures society has put on him/her saying "it is wrong to kill." A Roman soldier had much fewer scruples. This is not to say that they were not afraid of death in battle (this is well-attested to), but rather that personal guilt or shame generated by the act of killing another human being was highly dependent on the circumstance of the kill. As a Roman soldier, your duty was to kill and route the enemy- no ifs, ands, or buts. As a result, we usually only see instances in which Roman soldiers end up killing their own comrades, or even family members, as having a particularly traumatic aura about them. For this very reason almost all the literature which appears to describe PTSD in the Roman military occurs in the context of civil war or mutiny. So then, what *was* traumatic to a Roman soldier, and how did that trauma manifest itself? There is a lot more work to be done, but sources from the 1st cent. BCE to the 2nd cent. CE overwhelmingly point to public shame, as opposed to personal guilt, as the most likely catalyst for posttraumatic behavior. Roman soldiers would go to great lengths to obtain esteem in the eyes of their peers. In the ambition for glory he might even commit acts of shame as a kind of gamble which, when lost, came at the price of psychological stability. The kicker was not the acts themselves, but how those acts affected his social standing. Troops leading a successful mutiny were not so ashamed if the ordeal were a success. But if they mutinied and failed, their public shame would mentally torture them (that is, until they were executed by their superiors). As the Republic became the Principate and the Principate became the Dominate, the legions found their own fates intimately bound to matters of state and politics. This rose the stakes ever higher. When the short-lived emperor Otho had the previous emperor, Galba, murdered and just 3 months later failed to beat back yet another contender to the throne, he chose to commit suicide. Many of the ordinary soldiers who had betrayed Galba to back Otho followed suit. None of the anguish above necessarily indicates the presence of PTSD, so I'll return here to the psychology. Cross-cultural psychologists have observed that, regardless of cultural background, people who suffer persistent emotional disturbances in the wake of a traumatic event exhibit intrusive memory symptoms in some form. Here in the US, these are closely related to what we commonly call "flashbacks." For the Romans, people experiencing intrusive memories were said to be haunted by ghosts. These individuals show up in historical, philosophical, and even medical texts. Josephus, who was an outsider to Roman culture, also describes this phenomenon in his history of The Great Revolt. Those haunted by ghosts are constantly depicted showing many symptoms which would be familiar to the modern PTSD sufferer. Insomnia, depression, mood swings, being easily startled, frequent eye movement, alertness all day and night, paranoia, avoidance of crowds, suicidal thoughts/attempts, loss of appetite, shaking/shivering, self-hatred, and impulsive violence have all turned up in association with these individuals. Since in almost every case the person experiencing these things had made himself an object of public shame, the "ghosts" in question often came in the form of those he had killed or wronged in the past. These would either appear spontaneously to the sufferer, or would come in the form of vivid, frightening nightmares. The key component to these experiences, as with modern cases of PTSD, was that the sufferer had no control over his own symptoms. Thoughts or vivid memories would occur unexpectedly and uncontrollably. It is easy to see why the Romans, who were religiously superstitious to begin with, would attribute such things to the foul play of malicious spirits. You were asking specifically about the experience of close-quarters combat for ancient soldiers, and there are some interesting tidbits there too. Like I said before, all evidence points to the fact that, unlike modern combatants, Roman soldiers were neither repulsed nor disturbed by the violence of combat. Contrary to what we might expect today, violence against others appears to have had a *healing* effect on soldiers suffering from the impact of shame. After a mutiny under Germanicus had died down, his soldiers violently hacked to death their own ringleaders. Tacitus writes, “The troops reveled in the butchery, which they took as an act of purification.” (Ann, 1.44) Tacitus later continues, > Even yet the temper of the soldiers remained savage and a sudden desire came over them to advance against the enemy: it would be the expiation of their madness; nor could the ghosts of their companions be appeased till their own impious breasts had been marked with honorable wounds. (Ann, 1.49) Violence was not simply a way to regain honor, but to the Roman soldier was a rite of absolution, which could bring peace to those suffering from intrusive memories. Killing or death in battle allowed for the redemption of public shame and the healing of trauma. Even suicide, also viewed as an honorable, redemptive reaction to public shame, might be thought of as a sort of healing method for the traumatized Roman soldier- if only the medicine were not so strong. Anyhow, I hope that this answered some of your questions. If you would like links to my sources for the above claims I'll be happy to give them, but since it is late and I'm sleepy I decided to leave most of it for later, pending interest/objection. :)

FYI, there are a few (of the many) previous posts on PTSD in this section of the "popular questions" wiki: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder before the modern era

Are the saloon doors in Western movies accurate?

This question is addressed in the saloon chapter of James, Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past (U of Nebraska, 2012) http://www.amazon.com/Virginia-City-Historical-Archaeology-American/dp/0803238487. In northern climates, batwing doors would never have worked; saloons in the Intermountain West generally had full-length doors. And as one person hinted at by asking if saloons operated 24 hours - that would have been unknown. Few towns had twenty-four hour shifts for workers and saloons would not have found it practical to remain open into the early morning. Although Virginia City and the Comstock Mining District did operate three eight-hour shifts, primary sources including diaries and newspapers clearly indicate the saloons closed in the early-morning hours. Another thing that Hollywood gives us is a different orientation: doors open in films on the longest wall. Saloons, in fact, were orientated to have the least front footage since that was the expensive real estate, so doors opened to long narrow saloons with the saloon leading back to the back wall. But that doesn't work cinemagaphically, so Hollywood turned the saloon so the doors opened to the broad bar on the opposite wall. Batwing doors were used occasionally in the Southwest, but they were always backed up with talls doors that could seal the saloon for security or against the wind (and occasionally cold winter nights).

Unfortunately I have no particular books at hand about saloon doors, but I can say this - the batwing doors did exist in *some* saloons, but not all; I suppose they are accurate in the sense that they aren't fictional, but it's not true to say that all saloons are like that. In fact, if you travel around, you'll find most, if not all in certain areas, saloons had real front doors and only batwing doors to separate the inside areas. However, I can recall a I heard that says saloon doors would allow for ventilation and ease of access for anyone who had to haul more than what could fit on their person. It functioned as a pseudo-door so that there was a semblance of privacy but also kept the place from becoming insufferably stuffy and allowed people to haul their possessions around and keep them from being stolen. That theory seems to be backed up by this site and the one linked by /u/DonMasta, but unfortunately I don't think either of those sites really link to conclusive evidence to back up their theories.

Is it true that there were no shields in Japan during the Samurai and in that case why?

Hey, I asked this question about half a year ago if you'd like to get a look at some of the answers. It was also asked before me. This one is much more informative. **EDIT:** Found another one if you're still interested.

I can't comment on the specific *disuse* of shields but I can give you some examples of popular weapons that would not allow the use of a shield. Like most western infantry in the days before gunpowder, the commom japanese soldier likely would have wielded a long spear, called a yari. These spears could vary in length but any spear over eight feet in length is going to be difficult to hold when you have a sheild and would have been held with two. A popular polearm weapon used in Japan was a naginata, similar to a European glaive. Essentially a sword blade stuck in a spear shaft, it was obviously not used to simply present a point to the enemy, and would also need two hands to wield to its full potential. Although popular fiction may teach us otherwise, the katana was not a common weapon for a samurai to charge into battle with, but if he were to chose to do so, it is a two-handed weapon and would simply be too heavy to use properly while holding a shield. Although people don't expect archers to wear shields anyway, I'd like to give some credit to the favoured weapon of the samurai for centuries, the yumi. It is possible for an archer to wear a shield on his weak arm, but the samurai were keen horse-archers. This was called yabasume. Horse archery requires the rider to ride his horse without using his arms, and a shield would not be good for balance. Sorry for only using wikipedia as a source, but I'm doing this on my phone.

Was there any concern in the US government that the Enola Gay could have been shot down before bombing Hiroshima, and that the atomic bomb could fall into the hands of the Japanese?

Yes, as with all flight missions, mechanical failure or being shot down is a completely real and valid concern. For years, pilots of all nations were equipped with evasion kits. Parts of these kits included cloth maps, such as this one]( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Silk_Escape_Map_of_Milan_area_issued_to_Major_Oliver_Churchill.JPG), which would allow for the pilots to be able to navigate on the ground to evade capture. They were also issues something called ["blood chits", which included instructions in several languages that basically said, "I'm an American, help me escape and you'll be rewarded." These were most often issued in case the pilots were shot down or had to ditch in places that were occupied by enemy forces or in isolated areas. They were also often issued survival kits that would include things such as fishing and hunting supplies, gold coins, lengths of rope, and other various items that would aid in their survival. These are a examples of such.. Here are some other types of kits from the period, that would include such items as knives, basic first aid supplies, water purification tablets, "iron rations", miniature compasses, flare guns, etc. Pilots and crew were also known to hide such items, such as these examples were compasses were hidden in buttons or the soles of boots. However, in the specific case of the Enola Gay and the secrecy and highly technical nature of the mission, as well as the fact they would be flying over Japan, which meant they would have been shot down over Japan or had to ditch there if they could not make it back out to sea, they had been given specific instructions. According to an interview with Theodore Van Kirk, the navigator for the Enola Gay, they were given instructions on the locations of the search and rescue teams which would be in the area. Additionally, they were told that if they landed in Japan, they were "on their own." Also, there were given cyanide tablets in case they were captured. The search and rescue operations in those days, were conducted not by helicopters mostly, which were still in their infancy, as demonstrated by the most common American craft the Sikorsky R-4, which did see limited use in areas such as the Indo-China-Burma theater. They were heavily limited by range. Instead, most S&R in that period were conducted by float planes such as the Grumman Goose. These planes were able to land in the water near the downed pilots who would then load up and be flown back to land or a nearby ship. Also during this period, it was common for ships to rescue crewmen, including submarines. In fact, President George Bush, a WWII aviator, was rescued by the USS Finback, in 1944. As for the actual bomb. The "Little Boy" bomb was a "gun" style bomb, where an explosion would force a Tungsten-Carbide projectile into the fissile material causing the explosion. The cordite used to detonate the device was loaded in flight and the bomb featured four different electrical safety switches. This was common among all air dropped ordinance during the period. Bombs even to this day are equipped with safeties that prevent accidental detonation. During this period, it was part of the bombardiers duties to remove these safeties and arm the bombs during flight. Here you can see a cross section of an ANM-64 500 lb. bomb. At the front you can see where the safety was located. They were designed so that the bombs would not activate unless the safety was removed, so even if the arming cable was pulled due to shifting in flight, it would not be activated (hopefully). In the case of the atomic bomb, had the plane been shot down or crashed, the bomb at most would not have likely detonated in the full capacity, but have resulted in what we call today a "dirty bomb." In the case of the Enola Gay, the most probable concern for the crew was mechanical failure. By August of 1945, most of the Japanese Air Force and Naval Aviation branches had been drained of their best pilots, and supplies were quite low. Most bombing runs by Allied crews went unopposed during this period as they were holding the few remaining pilots and supplies for the anticipated invasion. Additionally, the B-29 could fly well above most Japanese fighters, and the shortage of AA ammunition would have been wasted on a singular plane. By this period Japan did not concern itself with singular flights of high altitude bombers as they were considered to be merely reconnaissance flights.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ld0q9/did_the_americans_have_a_contingency_plan_if_the/

Did Britain entertain retaking the U.S. and if so, for how long did such sentiment endure?

Britain never considered retaking all of the United States, and the most they ever entertained was dividing it (supporting the Confederacy, a plan which never happened) and blocking its growth (forts along the Ohio River Valley, using Canada to block northern growth, and fighting over areas like Oregon). Even if animosity continued between Britain and America until the 20th century, the biggest escalation of it was the War of 1812, which never had the end goal of returning America to the fold. The fact is that immediately after the American Revolution, Britain was still economically controlling the U.S- under the Articles of Confederation, Congress couldn't pass tariff laws, and so British goods flooded the American market. All in all, Britain was still profiting off their old colonies, at least until the Constitution was signed. By that point, the French Revolution was stirring, and Britain's attention had long returned to Europe. Because America had decided on being an isolationist and neutral country, they did nothing to help the French Revolution. Britain could care less about them at this point, besides problems in the Ohio River Valley with old military forts, and Jay's Treaty gave them everything they wanted, so they pretty much just backed away. Of course, the War of 1812 did bring British attention back to America, but it wasn't to retake the US, merely to force them to trade. This was because of Jefferson's embargo on both Britain and France, eventually letting it up on France and only focusing on Britain. After America's respectable showing in the War of 1812, Britain and the rest of Europe understood that the old thirteen colonies were now a respected country, so at this point any talk of taking them back was naught. TLDR: No, they did not consider taking America back, and even if they did they never took actions to implement such a plan besides annoying America in the West.

There is always more that can be said here, but we have had some similar questions in the past. I would point to this answer from /u/partymoses touching on it, while this thread looks at changes to Anglo-American relations, as does this one although it is a bit older.

What happened to the houses and belongings US citizens were forced to leave behind after being herded into Japanese WWII camps in California?

My grandparents were interned by the US Government (they actually met in a camp, so I have the government to thank for my existence today). My Grandmother's family were farmers in the Pacific Northwest. When they were taken away, they were allowed to bring two suitcases each. Everything else was basically left behind; they didn't live in a big city so there weren't a lot of people around they could sell things to. They weren't able to sell their farm or equipment in time, and when they came back after the war, they found squatters had moved in and taken over their property.

Farewell to Manzanar, a memoir(?) about a Japanese family written by someone who was seven at the time, goes into a fair bit of detail about being forced to move from their home. I'm not sure if anything was fictionalized or how accurate/inaccurate the book is compared to what *actually happened*, but from what I can remember from the book: * They could only bring what they could fit in one or two trash bags * The main character's mother was driven to destroy as much of their belongings as she could, such as glasses, plates, etc.; she would rather they be destroyed than looted * When they returned from the camp, the entire house was ransacked and vandalized. Whatever wasn't bolted down was either taken or destroyed.

Would the Eiffel Tower have been built differently if it was originally intended to be permanent?

This seems like a hypothetical question, so unless somebody has the diary of Gustave, don't expect a complete answer. What one could assume is that yes, the design might have been different. Buildings (and by extension ideas) are rarely thought up in thin air, and are usual a product of their environment and what restrictions are given. If Eiffel had known that his tower would have to stand the test of time, then by all means he would try to achieve that goal.

I did some calculations on the cost of the Eiffel tower because I couldn't find good data on it. I obtained an estimated cost during construction of 6.5 million francs in 1887. Given that in 1873, the franc was set to a gold standard, and that historical prices for gold can be obtained in USD (because its very difficult to get data on the franc) I assumed I could convert 1873 francs to 1873 USD (which came out to 56.53 francs = 1 USD in 1873) and then converted 1873 USD to 2014 USD, I came up with "What cost $114973.16 in 1873 would cost $2239791.93 in 2014." I'm not sure that this says much, but if anyone was wondering how much money was put into the tower during construction, that might be a good estimate.

Why did the spread of Christianity never gain a strong foothold east of the Holy Land?

Christianity did spread east, and spawned a whole distinct and interesting set of traditions. Syria was a particularly active location. One particularly instructive community was on the eastern frontier of the Roman empire, bordering the Parthian empire, a city called Edessa. At a busy crossroads between Hellenistic, Jewish and eastern influences, proto-Christian groups prospered and even left behind some fascinating literary remains. The tradition of Christianity that developed here eventually ended up strongly influencing the Eastern Christian denominations like the Syriac Orthodox church, the Armenian church, etc. There is also traditional and historical evidence for Christianity in India as early as the first few centuries CE. Traditional evidence comes in the form of a text called the Acts of Thomas which details how St. Thomas, the very figure called doubting Thomas in Western Christianity, actually travelled east while Peter/Paul went west, evangelizing India. Some historical evidence corroborates parts of the account: coins found in Northern india established that one of the central characters, an Indian king named Gundaphar, actually did reign in Northern India. Likewise, a Christian named Pentaenus (a mentor to Clement and Origen) went to India in about 190 CE to evangelize, but found that there were already christian communities living there, with a text we now know as the Gospel of the Hebrews as their textual source. They may have also beens speaking Syriac. To this day, there are a number of churches in Northern India that claim they were directly founded by Thomas; there are even a few that claim to have his tomb. One major mark against the historicity of the text, it should be noted, is its poor grasp of Indian geography (probably written by a Syrian community ABOUT stuff they heard went on Parthia/India, but also to make theological points). The theology of the work heavily emphasizes sexual asceticism as part of the Christian philosophical/lifestyle program. It diverges from Paul's teaching on this subject in even saying that marriage ideally ought not to be practiced. (Another big part of this theology, and to some degree other eastern Christian traditions, is the 'twin' tradition: that Thomas was Jesus' twin, either biologically or just visually. Funny scenes are present in the work that can only be described as 'twin shenanigans'). Some scholars think the work even may lend an explanation of why christianity didn't take off there like it did in the Roman empire. For one, in the text, wealthy & powerful women tend to be the people targeted for conversion (perhaps very similar to what some scholars say about Paul's ministry, see: Prisca and Aquila). This leads to Thomas gets executed by an Indian king for convincing his daughter, the princess, to convert to Christianity AND become chaste. The conclusion often drawn is that 1) Christianity, in converting important people and prescribing asceticism, was blurring caste distinctions and 2) in doing so disrupting the chain of inheritance and 3) possibly disrupting royal lineages. Nevertheless, Christianity persisted in the Indo-parthian empire in Northern india, often blurring with local hindu traditions. So Christianity did spread east in a big, big way, but it seemed to have a harder time assimilating into the political, economic and social infrastructure (at least in in India) than it did in the Roman empire. Nevertheless, it did assimilate into the local religious traditions, and in a few cases churches even persisted, to survive continuously.

Before the Islamic conquests reshaped the political and religious map of the world, Zoroastrian Persia was the Roman Empire's greatest rival (and indeed the Islamic conquests were made possible by military and economic exhaustion as a direct result of that rivalry). Since Christianity was the state religion of the Roman empire, Persians considered Christians in their lands as Roman agents and persecuted them for it. From their perspective, it was entirely against their interests to allow Christianity to grow east of Rome's borders. After the Islamic conquests, Christians, including the Nestorians, were protected by their Muslim rulers (and it was during this time that they expanded heavily eastwards). But once Islam became firmly established as the religion of the masses in the Middle East it pretty much stopped any opportunity for Christian kingdoms to establish themselves except through conquest (as was the case with the Crusades and Spanish reconquista). Within the Muslim states, Christians were a minority and largely without any hold on power, so they would not have been able to change the state religion from within (although from the Mamluk period on, you have the prevalence of slave soldiers/statesmen who are Christian slaves converted to Islam and indoctrinated to serve the state - so in some Islamic societies there was potential for moving up the social strata, but it was at the cost of losing their Christianity).

Why does Japan continue to hold animosity towards China and Korea over events that transpired in WWII but doesn't still hate the US for bombing them?

The "animosity" towards China and Korea is not because of the war but because of Japan's perception that these peoples will not let it go. Even then, Japanese "animosity" is also very muted compared to say China where racist anti-Japanese propaganda is everywhere. Most Japanese people outside of the far right seem to have no strong feelings about their neighbors but worry about an increasingly militant China and a continually belligerent North Korea. Japan has apologized for the war over the years, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan , and has given extensive aid packages and aid programs over the years to South Korea, the PRC, and Taiwan. Japan is also one of the world's largest givers of humanitarian aid and has always been very generous to China when China has been hit by natural disasters.

China and Korea are the ones angry with Japan. There have been cases of prime ministers visiting graves of accused war crimminals that stirs up both countries. Also Japan never has fully apologized for some of the crimes they committed in these countries. That has more to do with the way the us never held a lot of people responsible due to the rise of China as a communist state.

Monday Mysteries | What are some relatively new ideas or developments in your field that are still trying to find support?

The two most popular veins of research in eighteenth-century studies (yes, it's a thing) at the moment are disability studies and animal studies. Proponents of adopting these approaches to examine 18th century Europe claim that they allow us to examine where the limits of humanity lay in the past and what conception historical actors had of the relationship between human/non-human animals and disabled/non-disabled individuals. Put more simply, it allows us to historicize certain philosophical or epistemological concepts. Scholars can examine what people thought about blindness or how people in early modern Europe treated their livestock. Taken to a bit of an absurd extreme, it aims to reconfigure the very nature of the humanist disciplines that some scholars claim are "anthropocentric" or "ableist." There's been some reverberations about disability studies in literature and historical journals. The _Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies_ just did a special issue on animal studies, as well as many recent books and introductory primers on the subject (Google Books search "disability studies" or "animal studies"). I've heard a lot of criticisms of these ideas. One of the principal ones levied against animal studies is that it's a means to examine concepts of humanity while avoiding discussions of race. The field is also, for better or worse, intertwined with the animal rights movement. A common criticism of both disability and animal studies is that they're merely just another way to discuss "the Other" in history, for which we already have a bunch of other frameworks: race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, nationalism, Orientalism, and probably a dozen more. In other words, it hasn't yet told us anything new, and that compared to the Holy Trinity (race, class, gender) it only has limited application. Nonetheless, more and more books, articles, and conferences are popping up about these subjects - and like any subject, they've produced their share of God-awful research that's merely jumping on the "trendy" bandwagon. **EDIT**: formatting fix.

I do not know if this qualifies but any information on the Hapsburg Art Treasure. My father was a part of this and I have heard one other WW2 veteran mention it. Basically from my father and someone who served in the same area as my father knew about it. But they did not know each other and gave the exact same story about it but only know about it because they were asked to protect it while on the ship and Truman signed for it. Than thanked the people who guarded it. But is never written about or anything that I can find. Any help?

Tuesday Trivia | History's Great Underdogs Last week: interesting historical documents This week: What are some examples of great underdogs in history?

In the Seven Years War the relatively small but highly productive and densely populated Northeast German state of Prussia faced up against the combined military might of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France, and Russia. Fortunately for Prussia (as a political entity, but certainly not for its people), it was led by an absolutist conqueror-king Frederick I "the Great" Hohenzollern (edit: it's Frederick II!), who in addition to being arguably the finest European military leader of his generation was an Enlightenment aficionado and a personal friend of Voltaire. In seven bloody years, his statelet of nearly 6 million sequentially battered the armies of states with a combined population almost ten times the size of Prussia. His kingdom hung on for dear life, but the incredible Prussian "victory" (read=survival) during the Seven Years War paved the road for Prussia to reunite Germany with military-minded leadership inspired by the mythology of generals like Frederick...

The Ten Thousand. 10.000 mercenary Greeks in the middle of hostile empire looking for a way home. Or as it is otherwise known - the story of Xenophon's Anabasis. The premise of the story is that the Greek mercenaries are hired by Cyrus the Younger to fight against his elder brother and claim the throne. At that time (400BC) the Greeks are recognised as the best soldiers in the world and thus the Ten Thousand is the elite core of the Cyrus army. At the battle of Cunaxa against his brother Cyrus is slain and the battle is lost. On their wing the Greeks are victorious as they easily rout the opposing force, but they hear the news of Cyrus death, which leaves them without a cause and a master and as enemies of the legitimate king. So the Anabasis begins. The story of treachery, battles, hardships, getting high (I am not kidding), comradeship and the awe inspiring shout ''the sea!!!''. The time when the Ten Thousand see the sea (which to Ancient Greeks had a special meaning), for me personally, was one of the most inspiring and emotionally charged pieces of history. The Ten Thousand got home, but it wasn't as glorified as Xenophon has hoped. The ending of the story is rather sad, but at the same time it is real as life - like all the things that happened to these 10.000 men. Go have a look: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1170

What was the geographical area of Israel referred to before the formation of the Israeli state?

I assume you mean the interregnum between Ottoman control (1918) and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. If so, the English word would be "Palestine". Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thousand of Jews emigrated to Palestine and started forming an internal micro-national state they called "Israel", but the state of Israel was not proclaimed until 1948.

I'm confused. Was pre-state of Israel not called Palestine for quite a while? Or are we looking at terms like Lavant which is more general and used in a historical way? I'm definitely missing something, maybe a technicality. Edit: There was a comment earlier to mine, and I had written the following response to try to understand the question. I understand that the term Israel is old (in Hebrew sounds more like 'Yisrael") . It must be the phrasing of the question that's confusing me. Is the question similar to what were the popular beliefs of where the ancient/biblical Israel existed and what do we know today?

Although the Waffen-SS had been lauded as an "elite" outfit, did SS units really perform any better than their Heer infantry counterparts?

In the early stages of the war the Waffen SS were police trained crack units which had little actual combat experience, although they had high morale and were incredibly aggressive they weren't particularly effective and consequently suffered from OKW ridicule and high casualty rates. However after the campaigns in Poland, France and the Benelux the training of the recruits switched to a more practical structure, this combining with their,initially, strict recruitment policy and their access to better equipment due to Hitler's favouritism meant that they did indeed become an elite. As Irishfafnir points out it was not until the war began to turn on the Germans when the Waffen SS really gained their reputation. The rear guard actions and counter offensives performed during 1943-45 were pivotal in preventing the complete collapse of the entire German front, which almost happened on several occasions. One of the least known battles which W-SS divisions primarily partook in was the Battle of Narva), which exemplifies the aggressive tactics of the W-SS, even when on the defensive. This aggression became the breeding ground of individual aces such as Michael Wittmann and Ernst Barkmann, however in truth the genius of these men did not represent the W-SS as a whole. One of the primary arguments against the W-SS as an elite was the fact that the majority of divisions were not of leibstandarte, Wiking, Das Reich and Totenkopf quality and some divisions were formed from forced conscripts (although that didn't stop the Estonian divisions matching the much vaunted SS-Pz. divs). Ultimately I'd consider the Waffen-SS Panzer and Panzergrenadiers divisions as elite, although as for the infantry divisions it would have to be a case by case deal. EDIT: also the battle of Battle of Prokhorovka gives a hint of the capacity of the SS. Pz. Divisions, only halted by the Soviets cunning exploitation of their sheer numerical superiority. Another example, one that has been all but forgotten , although this isn't primarily due to the 5th SS. Pz. Div being present, it however does further cement the prowess of these elite divisions against overwhelming odds.

On the whole no, keep in mind that expansion that the Waffen SS didn't really take off until after the Kharov Counter offensive so much of the German manpower had been expended. There were a few "elite" divisions such as Das Reich, Totenkopf, LSSAH, and Wiking that were given preference in equipment and supplies but you also had elite Heer divisions such as Großdeutschland and Panzer Lehr. In fact many of the so called early elite SS divisions performed poorly in Poland and France, and by that I mean they suffered very high casualties. Your average Waffen SS division was probably not particularly different from your average army division since the elite divisions( the most famous being the ones aboves along with Hitlerjungend) were the exception rather then the rule. The Charles Sydnor book is probably the best if you want a divisional history of one of the elite( and most notorious SS divisions) edit: Because I can't spell German words for shit.

Where does the stereotypical white chef's clothing come from?

The traditional chef's uniform the coat and hat - the toque - is generally credited to Marie Antoine Careme who served as the *chef de cuisine* to noted French diplomat and gourmand Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord. Carme is pretty much the founder of the modern notion of the chef and is every bit as foundational to modern French cuisine as Goethe is to the German language. As as aside, Talleyrand was a fairly major player is the French Revolution: he was a coauthor of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and was later a player in events that brought about the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy after the fall of Napoleon. Prior to Careme's innovation chefs dressed in a manner not dissimilar to the priesthood. What began in Careme's kitchens was later spread to London and the Americas by Auguste Escoffier. As other posters have observed, Careme's rational for the coloration was that it denotes cleanliness. The fact that it's easily bleached is just a happy coincidence. This article from the National Culinary Review is a fairly good source on this until someone can drum up a primary source: http://www.cheftalk.com/a/jackets-and-toques-the-history-of-the-chef-uniform

A note to would-be answerers: This is /r/AskHistorians. Answers are expected to be thorough, comprehensive, and *historical*. A full *six* comments have been removed for being one-line notes about how white clothing shows stains and can be bleached. Further comments of that sort will result in temporary bans.

Could people of Classical antiquity ever encounter the art of prehistoric cultures?

The Mycenaean civilization, which flourished in Greece during the late Bronze Age (1600-1050BCE), left behind some very conspicuous pieces of monumental architecture that the people of classical antiquity not only encountered, but interacted with and incorporated into their own understanding of the development of their own civilization. Large sections of Mycenaean citadels such as Mycenae and Tiryns were built with huge, roughly interlocking boulders. This style of stonework is known as "Cyclopean" masonry by modern archaeologists based on the ancient Greek belief that only the giant Cyclopes could have moved such massive rocks and put them into place. Its easy to see how this explanation seemed believable. I mean look at the size of the lintel above the Lion Gate at Mycenae! Pliny the Elder, a Roman natural philosopher who lived in the 1st century AD, writes about the development of the arts in the 7th book of his *Natural History*. He offers the following accounts of the origin of architecture: > Wells were invented by Danaus, who came from Egypt into that part of Greece which had been previously known as Argos Dipsion. The first stone-quarries were opened by Cadmus at Thebes, or else, according to Theophrastus, in Phœnicia. Walls were first built by Thrason; **according to Aristotle, towers were first erected by the Cyclopes, but according to Theophrastus, by the Tirynthii.** - Pliny, *Natural History*, 7.57 So, regarding the second part of your question, to some extent, yes. One of Pliny's explanations is that the "Tirynthii" (ie. Myceneans) were the first to build "towers". Another way in which the people of classical antiquity explained prehistoric architecture that is evident in this passage is myth (ie. The Cyclopes). But even this explanation at least dates the ruins to the distant past. The mythological understanding of the Mycenaean ruins is echoed by Pausanias, a Greek traveler and geographer from the 2nd century AD: > Going on from here and turning to the right, you come to the ruins of Tiryns. The Tirynthians also were removed by the Argives, who wished to make Argos more powerful by adding to the population. The hero Tiryns, from whom the city derived its name, is said to have been a son of Argus, a son of Zeus. **The wall, which is the only part of the ruins still remaining, is a work of the Cyclopes made of unwrought stones, each stone being so big that a pair of mules could not move the smallest from its place to the slightest degree.** Long ago small stones were so inserted that each of them binds the large blocks firmly together. - Pausanias, *Description of Greece* 2.25.8 By the way, Pausanias' *Description of Greece* is a MUST read if you are interested in how the ancient world and its monuments were perceived by a relative contemporary. It's basically the ancient equivalent of a travel blog. A lot of the sites he describes were already centuries old by the time he wrote but were still functional and well-maintained. He is a great source to compare fragmented art and architecture against because his descriptions help fill in the "missing pieces".

There was a post a couple weeks ago in here about museums throughout history that has some good info on this topic https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3lxnyi/did_ancient_societies_like_the_romans_and/

[IN] Is it “wrong” or “unprofessional” to call off of work due to inclement weather?

My life and my vehicle is worth more than a days work so if there's a foot of snow or an ice storm I'm not going to work. If you ever tried to drive down hilly county (not country) roads in a winter/ice storm you would understand. If I wreck I won't be at work anyway. Who will pay the deductible on my auto insurance when I run into something or someone? Who will pay the years of increased insurance because of the accident? My job sure as heck won't. Oh and this isn't even taking into consideration that someone else might hit you first because they slide on ice.

Hr manager for an essential business. If you are an essential workers and need to be on site for your business to run or make it’s money then you need to be there. You can call off and your manager might understand but don’t get upset if you get a point for calling out if that’s how your attendance policy lines up. On the other hand if you have all the ability to work from home then do that and make sure you’re at least available anytime during the workday.

[TX] Can my employer still require I wear one inch heels even if I have hip and knee problems?

This company sounds like it’s stuck in the 1960s.

If trying shoes like u/IhaveN0thingN0thing suggested don't work, then you can request an accommodation under the ADA. I can't see how wearing 1" heels (instead of professional looking flats--I only wear flats and I have many cute/professional ones) would be an essential function of the job.

How often do you check to see if people got a degree from the school they wrote on their resume?

A very good friend of mine lied because they were just a few credits away from their degree but never finished... he worked at the company for years, then got a promotion to VP, and they rechecked his resume. The leadership team was heartbroken to find out he lied and had to be let go, because he was a rockstar employee and very talented. They said once he finished his program they would be open to working with him again but this is a VERY uncommon to be considered again.

Never, unless it’s a legal requirement for the role

Is it mean to HR woman bin your CV in front of you?

It means she doesn't have a job for you now or even later. But she shouldn't have done it in front of you. At least she could have waited until all applicants have left.

A professional person never do this. It is a unprofessional but people do it when they find resume not relevant for their industry or sometimes to do housekeeping of their unorganized desk.

[CO]- Whats the burden of proof for Sexual Harassment when a superior engages in sex with an employee?

This sounds more like rape then simple sexual harrassment

It sounds like you were raped so I would recommend going to go to the police and report it. The next thing I would recommend is finding if your company has an EAP service to help provide you assistance in finding some therapy for it. Or you could look up groups/networks in your town for assistance too.

[CA] Should I tell my boss I’ve been struggling to be productive because of my mental health?

I would definitely look into FMLA. I had it for mental health reasons too and it DID help me stay on track. I'd also wait until they said something. Maybe you feel this way because of your health and perhaps they don't see it. If you did really feel the need to tell them, don't say it's mental. I'm only saying that became there is still a stigma, as you know too. BUT reframe this. This is due to a medical condition. So say that, if anything at all. Get FMLA if you can, pay into STD, and utilize any of your EAP at work. Take care of yourself.

If it's a temporary thing, you can try to let them know that you're having issues at home that have been impacting your performance but you expect things to improve without going into detail and impacting perceptions. Otherwise it's best to keep it to yourself and seek treatment outside of work. While your boss may be sympathetic, at the end of the day your performance is what's important to them and your boss will only tolerate so much before your life starts making their life difficult. Speaking up about it will just bring more scrutiny.

Everything always ends up “Can’t do anything about it.” How do I do something, anything?

1) File charges with the EEOC. 2) Find an employment lawyer. They’ll take you on contingency in a heartbeat. Real change can happen because of you. 3) Find a new job. Your mental health and personal well being is clearly at stake.

Refresh that resume. Start looking.

[UT] Is this discrimination?

I highly, highly, highly recommend reaching out to HR in writing to address this harassment you’ve been receiving, and how you feel it is adversely impacting your career and growth e.g. being passed over for promotions. If you call them or speak in person, follow up with an email to reiterate what you discussed. Start a paper trail if you haven’t already and the next time he makes these comments, talk to him about how you don’t appreciate them/makes you uncomfortable and follow up to that with an email too. “Following our conversation in the office today, I am uncomfortable discussing my religion in the workplace and respectfully ask that you do not continue to make such comments.” This documentation will make it difficult for retaliation or adverse employment action, and also show HR that you are being harassed and the manager is possibly creating a hostile work environment (could make bystanders uncomfortable too).

Hard to prove discrimination here, but you can certainly report his comments about your religion to HR. Which will also make it a lot more dicey to fire you.

[NY] Should I give holidays gifts to my coworkers and manager?

If you are the lowest rung on the ladder, which it sounds like from your post, I wouldn't recommend it. It's usually something when you're in management and you're gifting to your staff that report to you. It's okay to usually bring in shared stuff, like cookies or peppermint bark, etc. That way you are still showing your generosity and kindness but it's not targeted. That will also show the same sentiments that you're trying to get across! Giving out gifts to people who don't know you really well and are on the same wave length about it can cause pressure on others to do the same. Or can cause awkwardness that you want to avoid as someone who is new to the team. Some people are absolutely weird about gifts and you want to avoid uncovering that person in the group and fracturing a new fresh professional relationship!

I use to bake cookies/cakes/etc. for the mail room, reception, my team, etc. and leave in the department because I like to bake. I never, ever recommend gifting up.

[NY] Can I demand to be transferred to a different location?

Just reading your responses it’s incredibly obvious why you aren’t moving up. You also are asking to move from a location that needs staff to one that doesn’t. Why would they grant that? They certainly aren’t going to promote someone who already has the easiest job and complains it’s too much work while trying to finagle a transfer to a location that doesn’t need as much help. You applied for and accepted the job at this location. If it wasn’t to your liking geographically or was busier than you wanted, that’s on you. They don’t control where you chose to live.

Is this a serious question? They hired you to do the job they need you to do, not to do the job you want to do. Maybe look at other pharmacys closer to home?

[NY] Issue with new coworker.. Should I ask HR?

It’s clear to me from reading between the lines that you’re undermining her role. You and “the team” aren’t sure what she’s supposed to be doing, or YOU aren’t? Are you miffed she’s taken over some responsibilities as the company grows? Obviously she was hired for a reason and your manager supports her and knows what her role is. If you’re confused, as for a JD. Seems like your bosses failure to response is likely because there’s something you’re not telling us. Perhaps you’ve been passive aggressive with her in previous interactions. Perhaps she’s already contacted HR about you. Lastly, once you go to HR there is no going back. Do some soul searching to see if you may be partly to blame for any of what has transpired and the current state of the relationship. And maybe talk to Amy?

Lots of ways to deal with a person like Amy. Cant always just up and quit when you run into a jerk employee. Depending on how you feel and how you deal with strife should dicate your handling of her.

[VA] What do you all do with uncashed checks from terminated employees?

Your state has a process - it’s called Escheatment, if you google it for your state you’ll get the state specific rules

Dude you just mail it.

[MA] how do I explain this on my resume?

TMI. Put one line on your resume Full time medical care for family member-1/2019-7/2019 Format it just like you formatted the rest of your experience, but no bullet points on job duties. If asked, you can say that you became your disabled sister's guardian and it took you a while to arrange full time care for her. That's it. Of course you put her and her education first, but when you say that, it makes it sound like you care more about your family than other people care about theirs. I know it's just a reddit post and you might not choose those words in an interview, but you should be very careful. Not everyone has the money and the heart to do what you did, and the person interviewing you might be someone who didn't.

My preference is to keep things high level in the interview process. You could mention it as "a family situation." Either way, you'll want to add on is that the situation is resolved (assuming it is), so the organization doesn't assume that you'll be out a lot.

[CA] what are some creative ways we can support career development or internal mobility to stop losing such great talent and increase engagement?

As a VP of IT, you may think that there is a technical solution to this. There is not. This is a leadership problem. What are you doing for your direct reports to increase their engagement personally? Are they cascading the same behaviors down to theirs? You can't expect your next level managers do do things you aren't modelling. A machine can't make people want to keep working for you.

If you're losing talent, what are they saying in the exit interviews?

Do prescriptivists actually exist?

You mean linguists engaged in standardizing a lamguage? They certainly exist outside the anglosphere, where language regulators exist

Idk about serious linguists, but the attitude to correct any variation in speech as "corrupted language" is quite common in Russia, especially (but not only) among teachers

Is there a difference in how 'I wonder' is interpreted between British and American English?

As an american it's not just the specific phrasing of "I wonder" that makes it sound like a question. It's the pragmatics of introducing a topic and expressing uncertainty that sounds like an indirect question.

I’m an American, an I agree with you that “I wonder” states a curiosity. However, when someone states a curiosity, and I have an explanation on what they’re curious about, I will give that explanation. Do situations like this really occur? Briton: “I wonder what time it is.” American (looking at watch): “It’s 8:00.” Briton is confused why the American told him the time.

Why is the phoneme /p/ dropped in multiple languages?

the situation with Navajo is different from the other languages you mention, and not necessarily part of a broader trend of "p-dropping". for a language to lack /p/ is not especially common, with 86% of languages having the sound. the fact that one of the world's most spoken languages, Arabic, lacks the sound entirely (excluding loanwords for some speakers) may make it seem like more of a phenomenon than it is. for a languages to lack labials altogether is *extremely* rare. this occurs in some North American language families — Iroquoian, Na-Dene, Caddoan, and Salishan — and, as far as i can tell, nowhere else in the world. Proto-Iroquoian appears to have lacked labial consonants entirely (not counting /w/). in general, modern Iroquoian languages still lack labial consonants, although they appear in borrowings in Nottoway, and /m/ appears as a full native phoneme in Cherokee and a marginal phoneme (partially explainable as an allophone of /w/) in Wyandot. Proto-Caddoan appears to have lacked a /m/ phoneme, although Caddo has gained it. it also appears to have *had* a /p/ phoneme, which Caddo, Pawnee, and Arikara have retained, but Wichita and Kitsai have lost, with outcomes like /kʷ/ and /w/, leaving their consonant inventories without labials. Proto-Salishan had labials, and almost all Salish languages still do. the exception is Tillamook, which doesn't even have labialized consonants or rounded vowels (the "rounded" consonants and vowels are actually sulcalized). Proto-Athabaskan had only one labial, /m/ (not counting labialized consonants). i believe the situation is similar with Proto-Na-Dene. Eyak lacks labials (except in loanwords and as allophones), as does Tlingit, except for the Interior dialect which has /m/ from earlier /w/. modern Athabaskan languages have labials, but with gaps and restricted distributions. Navajo, as you mention, has no /pʰ/ or /pʼ/. the labials that Navajo does have, /p/, /m/, and marginally /mˀ/, also have a reduced distribution relative to other consonants. they all appear only as syllable initials (with onomatopoeic exceptions like *biib* /pìːp/ "beep"); in contrast, /t/, /k/, and /n/ can all appear as syllable finals. /p/ appears in a decent number of roots, but /m/ only occurs in only a handful: -MĄʼII "coyote", -MAZ "to be round", -MÁÁŁ "to wolf down food", -MÁÁS "to roll, to be spherical". there is a theory that attempts to explain the lack of labials in these families: the historical speakers of some of these languages wore *labrets*, a type of piercing through the bottom lip, which may have made it difficult for their wearers to produce labial consonants. however, not all of the languages that lack labials are associated with peoples who are known to have used labrets, and there are also peoples that have used labrets but who speak languages *with* labials, so it's not a perfect correlation.

In Japanese at least /p/ shifted to /f/ and then to /h/, not to /m/. I'm not sure what happened to /p/ in those other languages

Is this diagram accurate?

The difference between Spanish and Galician is not correct, there's also "ñ" in Galician language. I'd make the difference with "j"; Spanish has it, Galician doesn't.

Seems pretty accurate. I didn't check every symbol, but they all seem to be in the right place. Interesting they didn't use <j> and <w> as special characters though.

Why are the Americas and Australia/New Guinea so much more linguistically diverse compared to the rest of the world?

It can also be more difficult to prove that languages are genetically related when there is less study of them and no written record of older versions / ancestral languages and, in the case of the Americas, when many of them have died out.

I am sure there are other factors, but one that stands out is long periods of isolation. This happened in the Caucasus as well. In later times there was more movement of populations and language and you get larger geographic distributions of some families such as Algic and Indo-European while others wither into small families, isolates or go extinct such as Hmong, Basque or Etruscan.

Do the names of Goddesses like Ishtar and Astarte have the same origin as the Latin word aster?

I did a little digging. I think I got at least a bit of an answer. Astarte is borrowed from Ancient Greek via Akkadian, and Ishtar is borrowed from Akkadian. They form a doublet pair, meaning they are cognates with the same etymological origin, but entered the modern language through different means. They both are from the Akkadian <𒀭𒅖𒋻> , (diš-tar), which is reconstructed to have come from Proto-Semitic *ʕaṯtar-, which is positied to be a loan from Proto-Indo-European, *h₂stḗr which is ultimately the root for STAR.

Ishtar comes from Proto-Semitic ʕaṯtar-, which is posited as a borrowing from Indo-European \*h₂stḗr (star), whence also the Greek aster. Astarte is the Hellenisation of Phoenician Astoreth, the equivalent of Ishtar. So seemingly yes.

Are there any languages other than English where the pronunciation is not obvious from the spelling?

Which spelling systems count depends on how exactly you define 'not obvious from the spelling', but yes, there are such languages. Here's a few types. * Tibetan is a case much like English but somewhat more extreme (namely 'the spellings made sense when they were codified, we've just never updated them since'); French and Swedish (among others) are in a similar category * Arabic (among others) gives you only the consonants and some long vowels and requires you to simply infer the rest of the vowels yourself based on knowing what the words should be - e.g. *al-ʕarabiyya* 'Arabic' is spelled <ʔlʕrbya> * Chinese characters may tell you nothing at all about their pronunciation, and what they do tell you may be 2500 years out of date (or totally irrelevant to the way they're being used, when they're used to write non-Chinese vocabulary in Japanese - e.g. 時 'time' includes 寺 'temple' because in Old Chinese 時 was read something like \*də and 寺 was read \*sdəʔs; but in Japanese 寺 is *tera* and 時 is *toki*) * Irish's pronunciation is (almost) entirely predictable if you know the system, but knowing how Roman letters are used in other languages isn't enough to guess at how Irish uses them very well - e.g. *an dtiochfaidh tú* 'when will you come?' is pronounced something like English might spell "ahn jukuh too" ([anˠ dʒʊxˠə tˠuː]) * Mayan gets at syllable-final consonants and long vowels by spelling whole extra syllables whose choice of vowel tells you what the inside of the last syllable is supposed to look like - so <ba.ka> is *bak* or *bahk*, <ba.ki> is *baak*, and <ba.ku> is *ba'k* * Korean spells underlying forms of words rather than the surface pronunciation, requiring you to know some things about the language's phonological system - so <hak.nyeon> 'school year' is pronounced like *hang-nyeon*

How often? French can have different pronunciations for identical spellings: couvent, vis, etc. it’s by no means as frequent as in English, but there’s certainly a score or more of orthographies like those two. https://bescherelletamere.fr/bizarreries-de-langue-francaise/. Although there may be two pronunciations, instead of talking about obviousness in the abstract for a string of letters, I’d consider a sharply reduced range of possibilities when the string occurs in context.

Is there an equivalent of italic text in non Latin derived languages?

After typing out this long answer, I realize that I answered it more as a question about typography than linguistics. Hopefully this is still useful. ----- To restrict the scope of "equivalent of italic text" a little, I will interpret your question as about using italic vs roman type to set quotations, express emphasis, or more generally draw some kind of distinction. In Chinese, there is a similar typographic convention. The default typeface used for body text is usually 宋体/Song typeface), sometimes also called 明体/Ming typeface. This would be the equivalent of roman (serif) typefaces in western publishing. The alternative styles used for emphasis and quotations are often 仿宋体/imitation Song or 楷体/Regular script style typeface. Let me show you three examples where this typographic convention is in action. The first one is an example of a block of quotation in the middle of the text set in imitation Song. The second one sets it in regular script style. The third one is actually translated from English, so we can in fact compare the usage in the two and see some differences. First, in the Chinese convention, block quotes and epigraphs are set in non-Song/Ming styles, sometimes with an indentation, while in English they are distinguished from the surrounding text by size and indentation. Second, in the English book, foreign quotations are set in italics ("vessel (*qì*)"), but in Chinese since the scripts are already different, there is no need for further distinction ("器（vessel）"). There are of course other differences in typographical conventions, for example using endnotes vs footnotes, indentations of the first paragraph, usage of sans-serif styles, etc. However, I still believe that the main styles of Chinese typography enable a contrast that corresponds to the roman vs italic contrast in general principles. I should also note that there is some nuance in terminology. The terms Song/Ming, imitation Song, and Regular script style are all names of typographical styles, here specifically intended to refer to modern typefaces. Song/Ming features horizontal strokes that not tilted, thick vertical strokes contrasted with thin horizontal strokes, almost no variation in stroke widths, and triangular terminals (kind of like serifs) at the end of horizontal strokes. Imitation Song types have slightly tilted horizontal strokes, less contrast between vertical and horizontal strokes, small variation in stroke widths, and more varied terminals. Regular script style typefaces imitate the calligraphic regular script, often have more tilted horizontal strokes, strokes that vary gradually in widths, and terminals that reproduce the features coming from by writing with a brush. Note that regular script is also a calligraphic style, which has been the standard in formal handwriting since at least the 7th century. It is actually the ultimate basis of all the typographic styles mentioned above. The history is fascinating but a bit complicated, so I won't dive into it. I just want to make clear the distinction between the regular script as a calligraphic style, and regular script style typefaces, which are modern typefaces that imitate calligraphy. Other "calligraphic" typefaces exist, too, but are used less in book printing than in graphic design. In those cases, one should also be careful to distinguish between the calligraphic style in handwriting and the typographic style in printing.

According to Wikipedia, usage of Japanese katakana is comparable to italics.

Why is English a Germanic language despite having tons of Latin and French words?

English is still Germanic because that's the origin. No matter how many words you replace that won't change. And the amount of Latin in English is kinda overestimated. Sure there is a lot, but not that much more than other languages. Much of it is academic or highly literary language that you only see in the dictionary without being used that much. Marking Latin words with **bold**: > There was once a **farm**er who had three sons; he was **poor** and old and in **poor** health, and his sons didn't want to work much. A **large**, good **forest** belonged to the **farm**, and the father wanted the boys to go lumbering to **pay** off some of the **debt**. > After a long time he got them to listen, and the oldest went out lumbering first. When he came into the woods and started chopping a bearded **spruce**, a **large**, huge1 troll came over to him. "If you are lumbering in my **forest**, I will kill you!" said the troll. When the boy heard, he threw his axe aside and ran home as fast as he could. He barely had any breath when he came home and told what had happened; but the father said he had the heart of a hare; the trolls had never scared him away from the **forest** when he was young, he said. > [..and so on..] 1. Huge is Germanic, but came through French.

Because, although heavily influenced by French, it is still directly descended from the Old English of the pre-Norman Anglo-Saxons, in regards to the majority of its vocabulary and, most importantly, its grammar. In vocabulary, English also tends to have lots of synonyms, one word of Germanic origin and one of French origin, to refer to roughly the same thing, and its basic vocabulary of things such as connectors is still clearly Germanic.

Why does Meaning of English(American) words chang over the years?

What you're describing specifically is a type of semantic change alternately called pejoration or degeneration (or probably other things, too, but those are the ones I've heard most commonly). Semantic change is an entirely natural process, all languages go through them. Pejoration (when a word's meaning gains a negative connotation) is interesting in part because the same *types* of words undergo it. To take your examples, what this means for the future is that any word describing the intellectually disabled community will eventually perjorate as they become used more often outside a strictly scientific usage. Another good example is words for "bathroom." Bodily functions are taboo to talk about in certain cultures, therefore the words associated with them will be euphemistic and changing. (An example I love is that talking about bodily functions in public is so taboo that people often just say "I have to *go*" and then you don't even have to specifiy where or what you are doing or anything!) Anyway, this is often called the euphemism treadmill. It's also important to note that euphemisms and what words undergo perjoration are different in different cultures depending on what things they want to avoid talking about. The "politically correct world" is simply noticing that these words have taken on a perjorative meaning and they are then trying to retaliate by using a new word that doesn't yet have the same connotations.

The meaning of words in all languages shift over time. It's just a natural linguistic process.

Is absence of noun cases related to existence of articles and vice versa?

Hungarian has articles and also a great many noun cases. Arabic has articles and noun cases too. As does Irish. Old English did as well. Greek, both modern and ancient. Mandarin has neither cases nor articles. So there seem to be a lot of counter-examples. You can compare more in WALS: Definiteness: https://wals.info/feature/37A#3/14.09/79.72 Cases: https://wals.info/feature/49A#2/18.0/148.9

Not only German but other Germanic languages as well. Also Romanian, Albanian and Greek. That's only for Western Indo-European languages.

How do people actually "learn languages" through television/movies/media?

It probably wouldn't be very useful for starting to learn a language that you previously knew nothing of but TV's great for improving your passive comprehension and picking up new words/phrases in a language you already to to at least some extent (especially with subtitles on).

For me personally, it helps as it teaches new vocabulary but i wouldn't say you could learn a new language that way without a solid base material

Is it safe to assume every internet connected device is compromised / bugged in some way by governmental security agencies?

No. this was a lot fo the thinking pre-snowden. It was assumed that the three letter agencies had a backdoor to simply pop crypto when they wanted to (and if they could, then so could well enough funded criminals), and therefore there was no point in spending much time on TLS etc. Snowden showed that, no they don't have a magic way to break crypto, they rely on end point compromise, and sitting on a huge war chest of zero days and clever mechanisms to recover keys from EUDs... the number of people who get genuine implanted firmware on their routers etc.. will only be high value targets. This is why we have TLS Everywhere and similar pushes. The Maths works. There is value in implementing good security. Feel free to assume everything is broken outside of your own system, so that you design better and implement safer, but don't assume that everything is compromised if that leads to a "meh" response.

No, it is not safe to assume.

Those of you who make 200k+, what do you do and how did you get there?

It's the same in most industries. The first way to pull this off is to be ridiculously talented, and highly, highly skilled. Like pro athlete top 1% of all people skilled. Obviously that is extremely difficult, instead keep working on your skills but also focus on soft skills. Communicating with clients, working with your peers, and leadership skills. Learn how to build a team, notice I use the word build instead of run (which you have to be able to do too). Your value to an organization will be greatly increased if you can bring on new people, train them, run them, and grow an organizations capabilities. That's the secret to making the big bucks.

Few options here. 1. Consulting, principal level or higher 2. Security management, director level and higher 3. Live in the Bay Area and work for a huge company

Is there *any* valid reason Wells Fargo limits passwords to 12 characters?

Worked at a bank some time ago. I recall having internal password restrictions due to the mainframe (z/OS). Not sure if that’s the case here but seems likely that behind all of the middleware sits a mainframe as the “weakest link”.

They're incompetent, as are most financial institutions. And why in the world would you bank with Wells Fargo? Did you miss the huge scandal where they signed up millions of people for accounts they never wanted? Go anywhere else, seriously.

Is the Military a good way to start a career in cybersecurity?

Ill start with the cons to make sure you get the bad news first **Cons:** **Going active duty means you might not get the job you want, the AF is gonna put you where they need you**. So the question you need to ask yourself, what if you dont get selected for a cyber position? What if you are personnel or security forces? You could potentially cross-train after a few years but there is no guarantees with anything Dealing with the stupidity in the military (which there is a lot of) Military healthcare isnt the cream of the crop when it comes to healthcare Hurry up and wait (lots and lots of this) So much time wasted on CBT training (enjoy that green dot training!) TDYs/deployments can be long and a pain (especially if you have a family) Technical training isnt as new as you expect because updates/changes are slow when it comes to AETC **Pros:** Air force life/living is way better than the other branches You get a job for the length of your contract (as long as you dont fuck up) GI Bill (this is huge!) Healthcare (also a con, see below) Clearance (and potential for working with some neat projects) Free training Great network opportunities TDYs depending on what you end up doing (can be a con) Have you taken the ASVAB yet? For Cyber warfare you will also need to get a passing score on the EDPT Before you talk to a recruiter make sure you meet the minimum standards for height and weight. If you are not even close to it, a recruiter is not gonna invest any kind of time into you

Retired Navy here. Go Army - leadership within the Army is heavily investing in their people. Much more so than any other service. Make sure your recruiter shows you, in writing, that you will get this MOS: https://m.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/browse-career-and-job-categories/computers-and-technology/cyber-operations-specialist.m.html Seriously, recruiters don't always give you the full story. If it isn't in writing, there is no agreement. They will send you through literally years of super valuable training, and then give you offensive experience that's super rare. Makes you quite marketable when you get out.

As an Infosec Professional, what security metrics do you track?

glasses of scotch/month. It's a better indicator than most.

At the end of the day, after nearly two decades in ops / infosec... what I've learned to be the most powerful metrics to capture are: * TCO (total cost of ownership) vs. value derived from the tech / labor... sort of a cost / benefit breakdown * Labor efficiency / effectiveness rates (people cost way more than tech, and are irreplaceable for many security functions) Why? Because outside rare circumstances security is seen as a cost center to the business and everyone else in the org wants to minimize spend on it until something awful happens, etc... Focusing on metrics that tie spend to value in meaningful, quantifiable ways has been the only way I've experienced to sustain / focus a workable budget & risk tolerance. Like another commenter said, KPIs -- though those vary, often wildly, based on the key business concerns of the org / customer.

Do you use threat intelligence?

As someone who has recruited for and build several CTI teams, the biggest challenge is operationalizing the intelligence. The intel is only as good as it's ability to inform SecOps, TVM and hunt teams so they can take relevant action. Make sure those lines and procedures are clearly established and defined by all parties involved.

Google ‘SANS FOR578’ and read the TI course syllabus, will give you a broad initial understanding of how Threat intel can be applied. We use a collection mgmt framework and Threat Model in our org and it absolutely works.

How has Donald Trumps Twitter account not been hacked yet?

I wonder what his passwords are like? "hillarysucksbigly" "45isthegreatist" "hannityluver1"

https://help.twitter.com/en/safety-and-security/account-security-tips If you follow these tips, your account should be for the most part fine. However I hear there is big money on bribing those that work at cell phone companies to be an insider on helping someone get past the 2FA on cell phones (porting numbers) I have seen a post or two on r/tmobile trying to get access

How does a threat Intel company business model work?

I use to work at zerofox and have had a lot of time to study not only their business model, but most of the TI industry business model. * Primarily B2B. Most are SaaS companies that provide a "platform" to access intel * "Intel" can mean many things depending on the customer, but: * Threat Feeds are the tried-and-true example, but those are a small piece of the pie * Human Generated/Human consumed, Machine Generated/Machine consumed, Human generated/Machine consumed and Machine generated/Human consumed intel reports * Finished intelligence in the form of reports * Flash reports on goings-on in the cyber world (log4j, conti leaks, LAPSUS$) * Threat analyst support that serves as an extension of your company. Anything from 1 hour/week to 40 hrs/week dedicated support * Custom engagements in the form of bespoke reporting * Purchase of illicit material from the criminal underground, or brokering transactions * Ransomware negotiations * Data breach acquisition * Dark web monitoring Lots of shelfware, lots of "features" that arent ever used and plenty of marketing that can be smoke and mirrors in some cases. The platform you see could be automated only 30% and the rest if human driven

I work at Unit 42 by Palo Alto Networks. I don’t speak for them. There are a few angles: - Yea, they largely sell feeds. If I recall we sort of moved from this model to embedding the feed into the TIM product and selling that. Edit: The other comment is right but some of that stuff our DFIR team handles e.g. ransom negotiation. - They may go B2B but it’s also common IMO to be owned by the company wholesale (see: us). Because if it’s bilateral that’s where your intel is coming from (at least in part) whereas an outright B2B sale doesn’t enrich your data in any way. - Some groups do their own unique stuff, say contracting out the threat analysts. - The only angle you haven’t pointed out is they’re a very effective technical marketing vehicle for whatever they’re attached to. Blogs about the newest TAs is gonna lead to consulting and firewall clickthrough.

Willing to Relocate - What Are Some Active Cyber Security Regions?

VA is huge for the Gov side right now

Any of the tech hubs Memphis appears up and coming Atlanta Austin Raleigh Dc area New York metro These are all places that seem to be putting out new stuff. Most major citiies also seem to be posting

People in SOC/IR, what are some common alerts you encounter?

The most common? Repeated login failures.

As a L2/L3 in the past now architect the most common one was probably location alerts thanks to 365

What kind of benefits or disadvantages would a cyber-security degree have over a computer science degree?

You can pretty easily teach a good computer scientist the harder parts of infosec, but not the other way around. The truth is there's a lot of overlap at the technical level, but most "cyber" degrees don't go deep enough. Degree in cyber == playing catch up on complex technical shit. Degree in CS == filling in gaps and adopting a mindset.

Security is hard if you don't know everything about what you're trying to secure. If you're primarily interested in security don't let that stop you but don't ever feel secure in your ability until you really know and don't get cocky. That's the gist of what I understand of that conversation, though.

Best/safest password manager for personal use?

KeePass.

I like Bitwarden, mostly because I can self host it. I also liked that I could share passwords with my wife on the free tier. BitWarden is open source as well, if that matters to you, and there are a couple alternative implementations of the self-hosted version if you decide not to use their docker image.

Why does a firewalled system respond to NMAP scans?

Firewalls can reply even when the port is blocked, or they can just drop the request. So change your deny/reject rule to a drop and no response from the firewall will go back the the scanning host.

Are you scanning from an IP that is allowed?

Did I mess up my chances at a top secret clearance?

Do NOT try to lie to them about it. Your chances are way better if you disclose exactly what happened.

i dont think anyone cares about a high schooler getting into a poorly configured active directory tbh. “Hey kid we found out u ran a red light in drivers ed. ‘Fraid we gotta kick u outta the FBI now.”

You have 30 seconds to 1 minute of physical access to someone's logged-in computer: what do you do?

I email their team and offer to buy lunch.

Give them a good lesson of never leaving their machine unattended, *especially while logged in as root*... > chmod a-x /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2

Is it possible that our world has simply become too complex and intertwined to ever really change and a lot of politics is just for show?

Beaudrillard has lots to say about this. Check out on Simulacra and Simulation. Or this version of his Precession of Simulacra translated into American english: http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/91

You should read some Carl Schmitt if you enjoy this topic. His work *The Concept of the Political* dives deeply into this question. His conclusion is that *it is* all for show, and that this show is the only thing which gives life any fulfillment/meaning. He was a Nazi btw, so take everything he says with a massive dose of skepticism, as you should when reading anything in general anyways.

Would Wittgenstein use emojis?

Not quite an emoji but Wittgenstein does use what he calls a picture-face (pretty much a smiley face) as an example of a picture-object in his distinction between *seeing that* and *seeing as* in Part II of *Philosophical Investigations* and writes, "In some respects I stand towards it as I do towards a human face. I can study its expression, can react to it as to the expression of the human face. A child can talk to picture-men or picture-animals, can treat them as it treats dolls." So while I don't know if Wittgenstein himself would use an emoji, I think, by his latter philosophy, he'd get what's going on if, at some point in a written conversation, someone used an emoji to represent their own facial expression, or at least the sentiment that it implies.

I mean they seem a part of a shared form of life between people. So they presumably have a place in a language game to give them meaning. Whether or not he would personally use them is something you’d have to ask a biographer.

Is there a philosophical term for holding symbols higher than the ideas those symbols represent?

Reification) is a term some thinkers use to describe that behavior. In its most general sense, reification is a term describing a tendency to treat abstractions, social relations, cultural practices, metaphysical beliefs etc. as though they were real, concrete empirical objects with their own independent existence. So in the case of the US flag and patriotism, the flag itself starts to be treated as though it literally *is* democratic freedom, and so anyone who harms or disregards the flag is ipso facto harming or disregarding democracy itself. So the flag goes from being an emblem to a symbol, and from a symbol to being a thing in itself. It's similar to the concept of idolatry in theology - an idol is a carving or other representation of a divine being. Over time, worshippers begin to treat the idol as though it itself were the divine being, so that, for example, if something bad were to happen to the idol, the god or goddess would be directly harmed. If the idol is scorched by fire, the goddess is burned and scarred, etc. Nearly all religions grapple with the problem of idolatry, which seems to come from a basic human tendency to prefer the concrete over the abstract. A more thorough discussion of the term reification, its usage in various schools of philosophy and its history here.

The word 'fetishization' is not specifically philosophical, but philosophers certainly use it in contexts similar to those you've described.

Is it possible to teach ethics to an AI?

I can address part of your question from a computer science perspective. In the general sense, an AI is just code, so you can write the code a particular way. This is only "teaching" in a very loose sense; the code has not _learned_ ethics. If this is what you mean, then it is possible, but as a practical matter we are quite bad at it. For example, consider YouTube's copyright enforcement policy. Google, perhaps more than any other company, has a strong preference for solving their problems algorithmically rather than through the use of human beings. So YouTube copyright claims are dealt with in a mostly-automated way, and the way the code is written defines how Google will interact with its stakeholders (content creators, complainants, users, etc). This gives us perhaps the clearest view we currently have of what the ethics of a fully-automated and algorithmically-driven society may look like. As it turns out, and quite unsurprisingly, the algorithms are almost always written in such a way as to minimize YouTube's legal liability. As a direct result of this, YouTube's automation creates outcomes in the world that are harmful and cause suffering. An ethicist would almost certainly design very different algorithms than the ones actually being used, but Google isn't talking to ethicists - they're talking to lawyers. I see no reason to expect this to change. So society has a desperate need for philosophers/ethicists, and this need is only likely to increase as more and more things are automated, but they will probably _not_ become society's biggest assets, because the people building the automation are not interested in listening to them. On the other hand, you may be thinking of a more technical definition of "teach," where the ethical knowledge is not embedded in lines of code written by humans, but is instead arrived at by the AI agent itself. This seems possible, although I'm not aware of anyone having actually done it. We would need a large dataset of ethical situations and the correct choice to make in those situations. An AI agent could use any of several machine learning algorithms to analyze this data and produce a policy, which the agent could then apply to future problems not present in the initial data set. To the extent that the agent makes correct choices, we can say it has "learned" ethics. If we use one of the algorithms that produces interpretable results, like a decision tree (and particularly _not_ like a neural network), an ethicist might even find the results interesting - though more likely, they will just be oddly biased due to data anomalies. (For example, if we give the agent many training examples involving financial transactions and few training examples about murder, it may incorrectly deduce that avoiding murder is less important than avoiding insider trading.) In this sense, philosophers/ethicists would be crucial to the process, because they would need to provide the training data, and would need to evaluate the agent's performance. If society is to actually _trust_ these agents - for example, if we envision some (non-dystopian) future where court cases are decided by a perfectly-ethical AI instead of a human judge and jury - then we would need ethicists not just for this technical work, but also to help us arrive at a universal consensus about _which_ ethical systems are the correct ones. But even in this situation, it still doesn't seem to me that ethicists/philosophers would be society's _biggest_ assets - as compared to, say, robot repairmen.

I spoke to Stuart Russell about normativity-sensitive AI and not merely human-aligned AI.

Can someone explain to me why Plato's work isn't terrible?

I think this misunderstands what's happening in the dialogue and over-estimates the ease with which you can really upset Socrates' apple cart. It's easy enough to say you've outdone Socrates when he's not around to answer your objections, after all. One important feature of all the dialogues is that Socrates is not merely arguing with strawmen - he's arguing with and against views that are grounded in what people believed at that time about virtue. The whole deal of *Republic* 1 is that Socrates is sorting out the views of Polemarchus and his dad, who derive their notion of justice from certain traditional Greek viewpoints, especially as they are grounded in things like Hesiod, Homer, and Simonedes. What Socrates is doing here would be akin to someone walking up to an every day American and trying to work out the problems of the notion of "rights" using their own notions as derived from, say, the US Constitution. What the nature of virtue is ends up being a serious issue throughout Plato's corpus, and it's not always easy to tell when Socrates is offering up something he believes himself or when he is just offering up what he thinks his interlocutors must believe, given how they talk about virtue. All of this is to say that it's easy to think that Plato is just high fiving himself in a dark corner, he's actually doing a pretty useful de-/re-construction of some views which are, in one way or another, taken seriously. Even so, it's easy to over-estimate how dumb these arguments are, for instance, your response here seems to confuse what Socrates is doing rather than give a good beating to it: > The relationship between a skill and an inverse skill just doesn't apply to moral values or personality traits—"justness" is not a profession. Socrates is not just talking about "skills" here, but, more specifically, a kind of practical knowledge which is more akin to something like a "craft" or an "art." That is, it's a kind of know-how which you can have and put to work. Now, maybe you think that virtues are not know-hows - maybe you think that virtues are not even knowledge. That's fine, but do you have a good argument handy that will unproblematically defend this against Socrates? There's a pretty good chance you don't. So, when you say: > The most introverted person is not also the best at being extraverted. The most charitable grandmother is not the best at being selfish, etc. You've jumped the gun here and just helped yourself to a conclusion in just the same way you accuse Plato of having done. It seems like you've assumed, without justification, that "justice" is like "introversion" and then carried on the analogy into another virtue, "charity," without having defined any of the words or said what kind of thing they are. Yet, even if Socrates has his way with Polemarchus, this is Polemarchus' job in the story. He's a kind of patsy for a really dumb argument that his aging father was making - an argument he didn't even care enough about before wandering off. Polemarchus isn't the real competition in *Republic* 1 - that's Thrasymachus, who is anything but a pushover. The people in the dialogues have different roles to play, as in a play, and, similarly, people in the real world are differently good at arguing. Some existent people who claim to know stuff just don't seem to, on closer inspection.

I agree that the passage you cited might not be Plato's "gem," but it's hard to respond to "the formula of the arguments in Plato's work—Socrates draws shifty comparisons to prove or disprove a point, they often go completely unchallenged by the braindead strawmen that he's arguing with, and at the end they're left speechless" if I don't know what dialogues you're talking about outside of the Republic. For example, Socrates lays out some pretty complicated arguments about various aspects of the soul in the *Phaedo*, some of what he says about perception is certainly useful to philosophers studying problems of the structure of the mind and representation today-it's not just of historical interest, it's a way into philosophical problems. I also personally find *some* of Socrates' more absurd remarks and arguments entertaining; another reason their absurdity fascinates me is because of the mundane historical distance they reveal between us and these texts-something that may have not been so odd to people in the ancient Academy is entirely strange to the modern reader-I think it is an exciting and specific kind of literary experience. Moreover, Socrates was recognized as a quite eccentric character in his own time, and its pretty clear Plato is touching on that in some instances (in the *Theaetetus* Socrates makes a long-winded digression about how philosophical dialectic is quite like being stripped naked and dragged into wrestling practice when one is shy to remove their clothes-the others characters make some remarks which display they were fairly puzzled by the intentions of the statement). I can't make you like Plato but I encourage you to check out some more of his works if you've only read parts of the Republic! There are certainly some topics which are no less than esoteric or mystical-poetic (or just trivial) and might not be entirely relevant to the rational thinker of our own time but other texts are so rich in philosophical insight you could hardly have an exhaustive discussion on them unless you spent a few weeks dissecting them and proposing various interpretations-no joke!!

Degree holders: What's been best thing about formally studying philosophy?

I can't not ask philosophical questions. So being able to deal with them in a satisfactory manner is important to me in various ways; well-being, happiness, autonomy, etc.

> What's been best thing about formally studying philosophy? Studying philosophy. Or, I suppose, having time and energy dedicated to studying philosophy. > How does that show up in your life/how have you been changed for the better by it? It shows up as happiness/I am happier.

Why is there such a strong aversion regarding relativism in philosophy?

Relativism implies that rational consensus is not possible: if truth is whatever seems right to you, the only way I can change your mind is through nonrational means (persuasion, extortion etc.). It is no coincidence that Protagoras was the main antagonist to Plato. Philosophy, from the very beginning, was motivated by the experience of the forceless force of the better argument, as Habermas somewhere puts it. Relativism is essentially the denial that there even is such a thing as a better argument, full stop: what's better is whatever seems better to you - or your community. Briefly put, relativism contradicts philosophy's self-understanding as a science of reasons.

One definition of relativism is that what is true to some might not be true to others. You can see how that deters an argument and why it is important that the common base of agreement is not relative.

Philosophers that criticized phenomenology?

*Pace* the other commenters, it's not clear that critiques of introspection apply to phenomenology; certainly not to Heidegger's, and, depending on your reading, arguably not even to Husserl's. (See Zahavi's *Subjectivity and Selfhood*, esp. Chapter 4, for discussion.) The later Wittgenstein, if not in the *Philosophical Investigations* themselves then in the period of his work in which he was working out some of that book's crucial ideas, makes clear that he regards phenomenology as closely related to his own grammatical form of investigation--in one or two places, he even identifies them! (See the "Phenomenology" section of the *Big Typescript*.) And some of the methodological remarks in, e.g., PI §§109-33, are strikingly phenomenological. As for critiques of phenomenology: French philosophy starting in the 1960s or so was marked by increasingly radical departures from the phenomenological method, notably in the work of Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, and now Badiou and Meillassoux. (Levinas thought of himself as in some ways still doing phenomenology, Derrida less so, and Deleuze hardly at all.) Characteristically, these rejections were motivated by a sense that because the phenomenological method involved an attempt to discern the essences of phenomena as given to the subject, it could not make sense of such things as difference, absence, otherness, affective existence prior to the formation of subjectivity, or the mind-independence of the objective world. (Some of these critiques, I think, are more sophisticated and bear more weight than others; Levinas and Derrida knew phenomenology very well, Meillassoux less so.)

I would say the later Wittgenstein, in his *Philosophical Investigations*, puts forward arguments against introspection as a method that can be employed against phenomenology.

Why did camus mean by rebelling against the absurd aren't we suppose to accept the absurd and lives with it?

I think Camus's ideas of rebelling against the absurd is to live in spite of the absurd. Rather than rejecting it or coming up with a "reason" for the universe, you accept it and keep going anyways. That's a sort of rebellion against it.

I would say for Camus rebelling against the absurd is how his ideal person, the "Absurd Man" defeats crushing existential dread. In the end of Myth he talks about some specific examples of who he considered to be rebels and also lists some occupations that he feels fit the bill.

Why is philosophy so largely looked down upon in American society and what could be done to change this?

I agree a lot with /u/drinka40tonight's post. I think there is another important factor at play here. People don't read. Philosophy requires a lot of reading even if you're an amateur enthusiast. You simply cannot understand philosophy sufficiently through Wikipedia, Youtube videos, and tl;dr on Reddit. Shit, I can't even get most Redditors -- a forum on the internet that basically requires you to read in order to enjoy it -- to read more than 1,000 characters on a post without basically requiring a tl;dr. I've even seen other times Redditors loudly proclaim their anti-intellectualness saying shit like "anything that can't be explained in a sentence is probably bullshit." Unfortunately, no one has found a way to make philosophy more popular without sacrificing the complexity of arguments that one gets in reading. In a country like the United States that basically shuns reading like it's a measles vaccine, it seems to be expected that a subject that requires more than an 8th grade reading level would not be very popular. I think another contributing factor is that "philosophy" is used colloquially to mean "whatever half-baked bullshit I thought up." It's the same sad fate that metaphysics has on the shelves of Barnes & Noble: Not enough David Lewis and way too much Deepak Chopra.

1. It's too hard. The original texts are hard to read. That's a turnoff and a barrier to entry for most people. 2. It seems irrelevant. Practicality and pragmatism are American values. If a thing doesn't have a definite purpose, well then, it better be fun. See #1. If you want to change this, all that needs to be done is to put the ideas into sparse active language, and clearly demonstrate how these idea are going to make your audience's lives better. In other words, market it. Which prompts the notion that it would be possible to hire a good marketing firm to sell philosophy to America. That would be hilarious.

Why does it seem like non marxist socialism isn't a popular thing to find academic work on?

The basic reason, I'd argue at least, is that marxism gives the most robust and well developed analysis of society and most importantly of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Christian and anarchist socialisms rely especially on either an argument from moral goodness, or from a perception of human nature as inherently altruistic. Today when anarchists are writing analysis of social problems they either rely on outright moralism, or fallback onto marxist categories. The arguments over the need for a socialist state I think are most typically of the basic realism of marxist, against the idealism of anarchism. The basic problem is just that the overthrown class will want to regain power and will go to great lengths to do this, and some system needs to be in place for defending the revolution. Anarchists tend to glide over this problem, while marxists argue that this means there needs to be a new state which can militarily defend the revolution. I think this means that marxist socialism just has a lot more 'meat on the bones' so to speak, than anarchism. This is not to say that anarchism has nothing to offer, academically speaking. *Seeing Like a State* by James Scott, or *Debt* by David Graeber. I'm far less impressed by people like John Zerzan or even Murry Bookchin. I just went to look up something about David Graeber and it confirmed something I suspected above. In 2004 he published a pamphlet basically outlining a research program in anthropology aimed at developing an anarchist social theory. In the pamphlet he himself makes the point that historically marxism has been very theory oriented, while anarchism has always been more practiced focused. Basically they've never felt it necessary to have figured out society before trying to go out and make immediate changes in local issues. That anarchism has always been extremely local, focused on immediate problems means that there is extremely patchy theorizing. Graeber also points to that Marxism has been focused a lot on the big questions of revolutionary strategy, while anarchism has been focused a lot on ethical discourse. I think the marxism of somebody like Althusser represents the polar extreme from what most anarchists, it's hard to take althusserian anti-humanist marxism and tell exactly *why* it is workers should rebel. When Marxism, being such an involved social theory to start with, means you can take it an do film analysis, or study class struggle in ancient Greece or Medieval India, talk about conflicting modes of production in early Canada, or try blending it with Lacanianism or any number of other theoretical discourses. There is just a lot academically you can do with 'marxism', and there isn't a parallel "scientific" social theory within anarchism.

Reading David Priestland's "The Red Flag" (the book I recommend most for anyone wanting the story of communism) and he writes how Marx spent more time criticizing other socialists than capitalist advocates. Socialist contemporaries of Marx hailed from an earlier tradition of socialism dating back to thinkers from the French Revolution, and many of their ideas were fanciful to say the least. Some wanted a primitive and idylic pre-industrial society, some wanted an austere and muscular society modeled after the Spartans, but all these were rather pie in the sky. Marx was somewhat unique in that he complimented capitalism, gave the devil its due, and wanted a future building off of its successes. Marxism appeals to action oriented socialist because it gives a vision of analyzing the causes and effects of class structures and the changes thereof. Its education and strategy all at once. It is easy to see why Marxism would become so prevalent when it is more practicable and appealing to the everyday modern man. It is no coincidence why the Marx inspired revolutions had more in strength and longevity than the anarchist ones.

Are Jordan Peterson's interpretations and derived conclusions regarding Jung, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche accurate?

Contrapoints goes into a lot of detail about his overall ideology, and how he misrepresents some historical figures and schools of thought.

It is difficult to imagine any extent or past Nietzsche scholars agreeing to Peterson's interpretation of the death of God or counting his response to it as adequate to the problem of nihilism. It would seem Peterson would rather us reinvest our belief in another metaphorical God of some kind than attempt a transvaluation of our Christian mores.

Is there a name for this sort of negotiation/manipulation tactic?

I took a few logic courses in undergrad, and we did go over a lot of informal fallacies and cognitive biases there, but I don't recall seeing this specifically named. Like others have said, you may have better luck on a rhetoric forum, but in my experience not everything one can describe has a name like how you're looking for. I think just calling it disingenuous behavior is ok for most situations. If it doesn't end up having a name I think yours works well though, so here's to it catching on.

It’s kind of like the ship of Theseus except the whole becomes something different rather than identical to the original.

If we live an infinite amount of finite lives, then logically does this mean we will experience every kind of death and pain there is on repeat for eternity?

The set of all even natural numbers is infinite. You can go through all numbers one by one, but neither you will get a repetition nor will you encounter all natural numbers. Infinity doesn't exhaust every possible combinations necessarily.

If there a reason to think that 'we live an infinite amount of finite lives'?

Why is Max Stirner so much more obscure (or less influential) than other German skeptics, and other forerunners of postmodernist thought?

A few Italian scholars pay attention to him and wrote some very good books (Fabio Bazzani and Giorgio Penzo would be the first names I can come up with) on Stirner, trying to take him seriously and engaging with his work in a deeper way. Unfortunately, I am not sure if any of these works have been translated into English - Giorgio Penzo's book might be available in German and/or French translation (I can check that tomorrow). Generally speaking, the biggest (historico-philosophical) reason why Stirner was neglected is Marx having criticised him in German Ideology, which seems to have convinced most people Stirner wasn't worth engaging with, and as a consequence Stirner wasn't really read.

I'm not the most familiar with Stiner however I'd say, all things considered, he is quite influential. As to why he isn't *more* influential? I assume it's for two reasons. One is the limited work he is known for, while the works of Marx or Nietzsche go into the thousands of pages Stirner wrote relatively little(at least that we know of). The other reason why I could easily imagine affected his popularity is his character, being more of an observer might have made him more a part of the Young Hegelians than a philosopher in his own right at the time. The rest being probably explained by the time that has passed.

Karl Popper called Marxism a pseudoscience, what other philosophical theories would be pseudoscientific according to his theory of demarcation?

According to Karl Popper his own developed view on the scientific method is non-scientific, and this is completely fine. There is no automatically implied derogation in a mere fact that some theory is not a scientific theory, and in general Karl Popper's method is applicable just to empirical sciences, and for instance mathematics or philosophy are aside of it, this includes Marxism.

You say that, like as though most people/philosophers hold that Marxism is a science. Does anyone argue for Marxism to be a science?

Why did Kierkegaard laugh at all the desires of the bourgeoisie?

As someone else has mentioned, this is from Part 1 of Either/Or, found in the Diapsalmata. Kierkegaard wrote the book pseudonymously and very specifically was not representing his own thoughts. Instead, he was writing from the approach of an individual who is an intelligent pleasure seeker. That being said, this section of the book is entirely made up of aphorisms. It's a very whimsical, fun read. It's difficult to really take away anything from this section other than an overall viewpoint of what the intelligent pleasure seeker looks like. Basically, all the aphorisms represent a thought in the mind of such an individual (named "A" in this instance). When looking at this aphorism it shows us how the intelligent pleasure seeker looks with disdain and humor upon the regular populace. I'm sure we've all met such individuals, and some even fancy themselves good philosophers. Think of the coffee house philosopher who read Nietzsche once and now thinks that he's better than everyone else and you're kinda of the right track. "A" thinks that the desires of normal people, safety, a family, a consistent life, are all worthless. A person isn't truly living life unless they are in a constant state of flux (this is a huge paraphrasing of what he later writes in Part 1 of Either/Or, a section entitled "The Rotation of Crops"). So these people are worth laughing at. it's worth noting that some of the criticisms that are brought forward here seem like good criticisms. Kierkegaard, overall, is fighting against a complacent public that believes whatever a person of authority tells them and thus never venture beyond the surface of anything they are told.

I disagree strongly with the other comment here (edit: quennslandbananas's). It's ~~just a journal entry (I assume)~~ not a brilliant philosophical insight, but it's surely not bad teenage poetry. K laughs at these people because they do not realize how deep these things truly are. Surely wisdom is more than just the consensus of the masses, surely kindness more than saying thank you at the dinner table. And yet, most people then (and now) think such important things in life really are that simple.

Are there any philosophers who advocate for an extremely high standard for epistemic justification?

Skeptics often have pretty high standards. I mean, if they didn't, they wouldn't be skeptics, right? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/

I think Hume’s skepticism around causation is probably the most famous example. https://iep.utm.edu/hume-cau/

Do philosophers actively believe their philosophies or do they typically regard it as an alternative way of thinking?

>Do these philosophers go through life shaping their actions around their unconventional world view, or is it all just a series of thought experiments? This is a good question and I believe that it totally depends. You might be interested in this piece on 'Truth vs. Dare Philosophers'. >I remember hearing that western philosophers are more concerned with thoughts and reaching philosophical conclusions through mental reasoning/the construction of arguments while eastern philosophers reach philosophical conclusions by incorporating their beliefs into actions, i.e the concept of reaching Zen. This is hardly true. Geographic difference makes little difference in how philosophers act. There is, e.g., so much more about "Eastern" philosophy than Zen, if the idea of "Eastern" vs. "Western" philosophy makes much sense at all.

I’m not sure I quite understand what you are asking. It would be very strange for a philosopher to argue for a position that they didn’t believe in.

Whats the difference between Nihilism and Zen Buddhism?

Uhh, one of them is religion and a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and the other is a diffuse term from Western philosophy? The popular Western idea of Zen confuses a lot of people, but Zen is an orthodox school of Buddhism that affirms the same things that other Buddhists do. An ethical system, rebirth, seeking enlightenment, compassion, etc. It's the furthest thing from nihilism.

Nihilism regarding meaning is not connected to emotions like "long-term happiness". It's based on the idea that "meaning" is incoherent, so it is impossible for any meaning -- whether natural or artificially created -- to exist. So based on your account at least, nihilism and Zen Buddhism seem to have pretty much nothing to do with each other.

"Philosophy as a field still harbors many, possibly a majority, who think that serious philosophizing has occurred only in the West, and who dismiss non-European modes of thinking... as abstract nonsense" Is this claim true?

I think that the most important part of this conversation is what we mean by the word "philosophy". As a word, it is something that came out of the western tradition, and people who did "philosophy" did it while being mindful of that category. When you try to force this western category onto thought that was developed in a completely different conversation, of course it doesn't fit. You see a similar misfitting between the categories of "religion" and Eastern traditions like Buddhism or Confucianism. This is also why you can't judge "eastern philosophy" by the standard of "western philosophy", and vice versa. It is why it is a non-argument to say that "eastern philosophy is bad because it is non-rigorous", who you should be saying is that "eastern philosophy and the western standards of rigor are incompatible". This just tells us (the obvious statement) that we can't (fairly and in all cases) judge a given school of thought by the standard of a radically different school. The new question becomes, why do we elevate a certain school above other incomparable schools? In other words, why do people in the west prefer western philosophy? Now this seems like an easier sociological question to answer, and I think much of it has to do with translation. I don't mean translation just between languages, but the associated translation of all the associated cultural baggage. If you grew up in western culture, you are predisposed to the ways of thinking that helped shaped that culture. Similarly, you would expect "eastern philosophy" to be much more appealing in the east, and as the western hegemony decreases to take a more and more prominent role in the 'cosmopolitan world' as people who have grown up in western culture are forced to share their current positions of power.

take a look at the Why is my curriculum white? campaign, which began at the same university as the ~~Coleman~~ issue. The real problem - highlighted in the video - goes far beyond simply "dismissing non-European modes of thinking" to say the studying of black theorists only in relation to negative events in black history (such as slavery) which reproduces notions of victimhood and powerlessness in the minds of whites (and blacks) (and implicitly the superiority of whites).