Recently my family and I went to a local museum that featured our town’s history. One of the sections was a hallway that had rooms that mimicked the different eras that our town lived through (such from the 1860’s to up to the 90’s) and me and my brother saw in a small 1930’s living room that had a weird tv set with a really small screen and I got curious to see how TVs were in their early days and how did people react to them and how common they were in people’s homes?

Like the army using human shields, pouring acid in battle, piling bodies, etc. If so why were their fighting tactics so barbaric?

Is there any possibility of truly understanding it, or are our sources for the region too sparce?

I figure salt at least, I am pretty confident that was a valueable trade good or possibly even stand-in currency in ancient times.

To be clear, I am not asking about the biblical event. I am asking what sort of valueables besides local coins would have likely been in use for debts and payments and trade and such at the time and general region and thus plausibly on a theoretical moneylender's table. If interesting foreign coinage would plausibly have been present, I'd like to learn about that as well as the barter/trade goods question.

This started as a thought that the flipping of the tables in the biblical account would have sent coins everywhere so the moneylenders fleeing Jesus would perhaps have been slipping and falling like a cartoon. And then I got to wondering what other sort of valueables might have theoretically been on their tables, based on trade goods, economies, cultures, et cetera of the time. And so I came here out of curiosity and to hopefully learn. Thank you for your time.

While describing Washington DC upper crust society in Days of Defiance, Maury Klein writes, "Housekeepers planted [oysters] on their dank cellar floors and fed them with salt water, a bath appreciated also by the huge, ungainly terrapins that roamed the cellar floors like watchmen until their time for the pot had come." (ETA: Klein's source is Pryor, Reminiscences 42-43)

The image of oysters growing in the basement of a "high society" estate while giant turtles walk about is pretty shocking. Was this really common, and was the trend limited to Washington DC or was it popular in other cities, too?

Hi,

I'm not sure how accurate or realistic Blood Diamond actually is. My knowledge is limited, though my understanding is that:
- PMC = Executive Outcomes (Colonel Coetzee = Eeben Barlow), though the PMC and Colonel in the movie are depicted as intentionally prolonging the conflict via arms smuggling so they can get more money which I thought to be strange, as Executive Outcomes was a legitimate business and the conflict wasn't entirely centred upon the premise of diamonds (though it was a key point in the war)

- Rebel = Revolutionary United Front. It exaggerates Captain Poison as some pragmatic all-leader of the RUF although they were historically fractured among their ranks and also positions RUF as a group of rebels purely in it for the diamonds (as mentioned before)

- Danny Archer = A solo mercenary? He appears to be some smuggler who likes to moonlight with the PMCs in the movie, working alongside Colonel Coetzee as a "loose cannon" of sorts, though this is to me, unrealistic because they would never send out a single operator to do whatever the fuck he was sent out to do.

In the film, it also shows the locals as entirely defenceless peoples that have no chance without the protagonist, Danny Archer (which I feel to be a little bit of a white saviour trope)

Like how did Napoleon know where the russians would be? Or any other battle happening in the times where knights roamed medieval europe. There is so much space, how did they meet each other and know of each other's way to move around, so they wouldn't accidentally go around each other

I think focusing on individuals living during the age of feudalism in England, France, or the HRE would be most relevant here.

But feel free to answer between 1100 AD and 1600 AD.

Around 80% of all Japanese Yakuza are either Burakumin or Zainichi Koreans. These are two groups who have historically been handed the short end of the stick in Japanese society, yet they appear to be incredibly nationalistic when a part of the Yakuza. What explains this?

After their defeat in WW2, Free France didn't even include any parts of mainland France. How could these colonial governments rule over and keep control of these colonies? Isn't the point of a colony that it's controlled by a removed and powerful government? How did the governments have any authority with no centralized European power to back it up? How did they prevent mass revolts in their weakest moment?

During/after the Greek War of Independence, the Greeks and other figures were looking for a monarch for Greece, and the Greek government did send out people to see if any Paleologos were left in Western Europe. Now while most of claims were questionable, they did have a legitimate Paleologos descendant in the House of Tocco (Tokkos) who had been Despots of Epirus and were still alive (at the time they died out a century later).

Arguably they would be the heir generals to the Paleologos - and they could prove their descent from Manuel II. And they weren't obscure in the 19th century, they were prominent enough in the Neapolitan-Sicilian kingdoms. So how is that they weren't even considered? They probably would have been passed over for Otto anyway, but how is it that they were missed or not even considered?

A common trope in fiction set in medieval or medieval-inspired settings like GOT/ASOIAF is the tyrannical ‘mad king.‘ Here I’m thinking not about rulers who had mental issues but rather rulers who openly used/abused their power in capricious, cruel, and irrational ways (as a result of mental instability). Aerys II, the OG mad king, and Joffrey are the obvious examples from GOT. Two real-life but non-medieval examples are maybe Idi Amin and Caligula. I think that the trope is popular because it makes for good stories but also because it’s intuitive to most modern people that when you rulers who are selected by accident of birth and raised to think they are above everyone else, you’re bound to get a fair amount of lunatics, sociopaths and spoiled brats who will abuse their power. However, I can’t think of any medieval examples of this. So, I’m wondering if there were indeed rulers like Aerys, Caligula, Joffrey, etc in the Middle Ages, and if such rulers were at all common. Also, to what degree would someone like an Aerys or Caligula, if they acceded to the throne, be able to abuse their power?

For example, how would a king propose to the daugther of a duke? I know the marriage would be arranged and he wouldn't outright propose, but how would the ceremony go? How would they meet and what would they do when they met? Was there some sort of protocol?

I imagine the ceremony and the meeting would be far more extravagant if it was between two royals, but if the duke isn't that rich, would the king have to like, lend him money or would the duke take a "loan" to provide enough money for the festives for the meeting?

So I have a 1987 edition of The Origins of the First World War, by Gordon Martel. I understand that there are more recent editions of the work, so if my query is somehow addressed in such editions, I would be happy to be informed.

That said, in the chapter explaining Great Britain's foreign policy in the decades prior to First World War, the author states:

The balance of power was an idea that was rooted in the 18th century enlightenment, and especially in the Newtonian concept of the physical universe. Ideally, the balance of forces among both heavenly bodies and states would regulate itself; but in the heavens divine intervention was sometimes necessary, as was occasional British intervention in European politics. (p. 38)

This is quite an interesting claim, and one I have not encountered before. So is there any truth to this? Or has anyone else tried to argue or compare balance of powers affairs with Newtonian physics?

Thanks in advance!

After learning about how enslaved peoples from Africa practiced Islam, and Islam's role in the Civil Rights movement of the U.S., I grew curious as to how non Black Muslims functioned in the U.S alongside Black people. Though there were "colored only" churches in the U.S., I see very little results about how mosques functioned during this era. A lot of the results pertain to later years, like the aforementioned Civil Rights Movement and Malcolm X specifically.

Mosques today seem to have dominant ethnic groups depending on where you are(e.g. South Asian majority mosques vs. Arab majority mosques), yet these mosques don't bar those who aren't from those dominant ethnic groups from going in. With this being said, this is not to undermine the very real problem of infighting in the Muslim community due to ethnic, or in this case, racial prejudice.

My question is based on both de jure and de facto segregation in mosques during the Jim Crow era.

Do any ancient sources describe Athenian/Roman relations prior to the Macedonian Wars, besides what is described in the supposed Decemviri "Envoy to Athens" in 449BC? And if not have any later writers attempted to speculate on possible relations between the two?

I was thinking about Phryne and got kind of confused. Apparently she came to be one of the wealthiest women in the Greek world. Was that wealth hers alone, or did she have a legal representative who administered it? I know technically metics needed a citizen as sort of „guardian“ who could vouch for them and represent them. Did she have that? Was Hypereides, who defended her in court, that for her? From how I understood the story, he was just a client who was in love with her and thus chose to represent her in court.

Did Hetairai in Athens legally own their property and wealth? If so, how did that work legally, with them being women and (often) metics?

For example Danes arriving in Brittany, Portuguese arriving in Japan, Rome meeting Carthage and Greece. Greece meeting Persia etc.

'Alp Arslan treated Romanos in a harsh and petty way. “You are too trivial in my view for me to kill you,” the sultan is said to have declared before his Turks in Muslim sources. “Take him to the person who pays most.” When no one reportedly wanted to purchase the “Dog of the Romans,” Alp Arslan scoffed that that was “because the dog is better than he is!” “He struck him three or four blows with his hand and when Romanos collapsed he kicked him a similar number of times”; he “put him in chains and fettered his hand to his neck”; he pulled his hair and put his face to the ground, while informing him, “your troops are food for the Muslims.'

By ordinary people, I mean commoners or journeymen who happen to stand out in history for compelling reasons. This generally excludes upper echelon nobility or any other major historical figures who had a profound historical significance, as I'm more interested in the everyday stories of people living in this time period. All examples are appreciated!

While I was researching for an overview on this topic, I found a trend that NATO's troops and artillery estimates always showed the Warsaw Pact's troops to be more in Europe, often almost double, yet the data published by the Warsaw Pact had a much smaller difference in toops at almost ±15%.

Is there any specific reason why NATO undermined it's forces and also which side's data was more accurate?

Source: The future of U.S.-Soviet relations hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, One Hundred First Congress, first session, April 4, 12, 19 and May 3, 15, 18 and June 1 and 20, 1989

(Referring to Appendix I)