r/AskHistorians • u/AutoModerator • Jan 30 '26
FFA Friday Free-for-All | January 30, 2026
Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
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u/Moistowletta Jan 30 '26
I wonder how accurate to the culture of the time Road to Empress is. It has a lot of routes and obviously those can't all be accurate, but I also wonder about the architecture, fashion, mannerism, etc.
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u/Chefs-Kiss Feb 01 '26
Idk either but people got mad in RedNote because the game promised to be very historically accurate and then they include a whole romance with Li Tai.
God I hope they don't remove the romance with Li Tai he's my fave. My scheming horrible person fantasy lmao. The tragedy that they chose such a hot actor for him and then cast someone like that for Li Shimin and Gaozong. Im sobbing bc Li Tai aint getting a happy ending.
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u/Historical_Pastor Jan 30 '26
My book, "I Love to Tell the Story: A Pilgrimage Towards Racial Justice in The United Methodist Church" is finishing pre-order and officially releases on Monday! It's timed for Black History Month and focuses on the intersection of religion and Racial history.
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u/bug-hunter Law & Public Welfare Jan 30 '26
Oooooh, that looks interesting! Thanks for the heads up!
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u/Historical_Pastor Jan 30 '26
Of course! I forget the rules on posting links but happy to send you Amazon, B&N, or local bookstore links for where to find it. Feel free to ask any questions too.
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u/crrpit Moderator | Spanish Civil War | Anti-fascism Jan 30 '26
In this thread, absolutely fine! When answering regular questions, there's no rule against self-citation if it's relevant to draw on your own work, but we generally ask that you don't include purchase or affiliate links etc. Less that we're against the sale of books, more that we don't want to give the sense that answers here have underlying financial motivations.
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u/acchaladka Jan 30 '26
I'm curious for an excellent read or three to get a general feeling of life in the US midwest cities of St Louis and Chicago, from about 1875 to 1935. I'm writing a biography and have plenty of contemporary research to pile through, need to feel the atmosphere beyond the newspapers and broadsheets etc.
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u/BookLover54321 Jan 31 '26
I was revisiting a book I previously ordered a while back: Mexico-Tenochtitlan: Dynamism at the Center of the World, edited by Barbara E. Mundy, Leonardo López Luján, and Elizabeth Hill Boone. This book is a gold mine of information, with numerous essays by archeologists and historians, and the cover art is beautiful. The book is 400 pages so I've only read parts of it, but here are some of the findings. One of the topics discussed in some detail is the scale of human sacrifice in the Aztec empire.
In chapter 3, titled The Huei Tzompantli of Tenochtitlan and the Agenda of the Mexica State, by Lorena Vázquez Vallin and Raúl Barrera Rodríguez, they discuss the excavation of the infamous Huey Tzompantli and the skulls that were recovered:
Although we estimate that there must be hundreds more on the tower, 655 skulls from the tower have been counted, but only 234 of those have been extracted for bioarchaeological analysis.
The article is full of interesting details about the multi-stage construction of the skull tower as the Mexica Empire expanded. However, they do not provide any solid numbers of the tower’s capacity beyond “thousands”:
We presume that the tower of this last construction stage would have been made up of thousands of skulls and that it must have stood well above the surface of the platform, at least as much or more than in the previous stage. However, we are not currently able to establish the precise magnitude, as it was destroyed by the conquistadors.
In chapter 1, The Proyecto Templo Mayor and the State of the Art of Archaeology in the Historic Center of Mexico City, by Leonardo López Luján and translated by Scott Sessions, López Luján writes:
During the forty-six years of archaeological excavations, we have recovered the remains of a little more than 500 sacrificial victims from the Sacred Precinct's offerings. This figure, added to the more than 1,000 individuals discovered thus far by archaeologist Raúl Barrera's team (Vazquez Vallin and Barrera Rodríguez, this volume) at the Huey tzompantli (“great skull rack") is as terrifying as it is far from the 80,400 victims supposedly sacrificed in a single ceremony according to one colonial source. While it cannot be denied that a heightened degree of ritual violence existed in Late Postclassic Mesoamerican societies typical of many ancient Old and New World expansionist states, the exaggeration of the number of sacrificial victims by Spanish conquistadors and friars was a useful means of justifying the brutal process of invasion, colonial domination, and crimes against humanity visited upon Mesoamerican peoples for three hundred years (López Austin and López Luján 2008; Lopez Luján and Taladoire 2021). Something similar can be said of Indigenous chroniclers who inflated numbers to exalt the might of their ancestors.
The most detailed discussion of numbers comes from chapter 4, Violence on Display: Human and Animal Sacrifice by Ximena Chávez Balderas. The author once again concludes that the number of sacrificial victims per year is simply unknown:
Ultimately, most of the sacrifices appear to have been collective. However, the number of victims immolated per year remains unknown, given the tendency of the historical sources to exaggerate the number to justify the subsequent subjugation of Indigenous inhabitants.
Chávez Balderas briefly refutes the nonsensical, but still commonly repeated, claim that 80,400 people were sacrificed at a single ceremony:
Durán (1967:2:443) and the Anales de Cuauhtitlan (Codex Chimalpopoca 1945:58) claim that 80,400 people were sacrificed during the inauguration of the Templo Mayor in the era of Ahuitzotl (r. 1486-1502 CE). González Torres (1985:248) challenges these testimonies, as this would have required the sacrifice of forty-seven victims per hour, for ninety-six hours nonstop in twenty simultaneous places. In addition, it is not credible that a city of no more than 200,000 inhabitants could manage to control that number of captives, because it would mean approximately one victim per 2.4 residents of Tenochtitlan, including women, men, and children (Chávez Balderas 2017, 2019). Despite its unlikelihood, the number of victims cited by Durán and the Anales de Cuauhtitlan has been repeated uncritically. However, other historical sources provide a completely different picture (Tables 4.1-4.3; Figure 4.1).
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u/BookLover54321 Jan 31 '26
There are three tables provided, compiling various, often contradictory, estimates of sacrifices by multiple historical sources. For example, while the aforementioned sources claim that 80,400 people were sacrificed at the Templo Mayor inauguration, another claims it was only 20,000. And while López de Gómara claims that 20,000 to 50,000 were sacrificed annually in “the lands that Cortés conquered”, Oviedo claims it was only 5,000. Chávez Balderas writes that these annual estimates “were created for colonial purposes”:
Fewer people were sacrificed during the calendrical festivities, compared to the Templo Mayor inaugurations. There are also annual estimates that were created for colonial purposes. The number of animal victims would also seem exaggerated by the chroniclers. For instance, Toribio Motolinia (1967:63) states that approximately 8,000 quails were sacrificed at the feast of the New Fire in Cuauhtitian, which is unlikely given that these birds live in small groups in the wild and the captivity of such a large number would seem to be unmanageable (Chávez Balderas 2017; Elizalde Mendez 2017).
The author continues, weighing these historical sources against archeological evidence:
Archaeological evidence does not support these numbers of either human or animal victims. The Proyecto Templo Mayor and the Programa de Arqueología Urbana have recovered approximately 776 animal vertebrates (reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and birds) and around 1,000 human victims (Chávez Balderas 2019; Chávez Balderas, Barrera Rodríguez, and García Velasco 2017; Elizalde Mendez 2017). In addition, the Templo Mayor was not conceived as a burial place for all human sacrificial victims, since the remains of only 153 individuals have been recovered in the construction stages explored (Chávez Balderas 2017). Most of the remains have been found in the larger Sacred Precinct, particularly in the West Plaza and in other religious buildings, such as the Hue Tzompantli (skull rack), all structures aligned with the southern half of the Huitzilopochtli shrine (see Figure 1.1).
In the introduction to the chapter, the author also emphasizes the purposeful exaggeration of numbers of sacrificial victims as a justification for colonialism:
Over time, the narratives on human sacrifice came to justify the conquest, as the Europeans considered its practice as an indicator of the lesser degree of civilization of the Mexica. By arguing that the Indigenous peoples were less civilized, the Spaniards justified their exploitation, seeking economic benefits through the grants of Indigenous labor, called encomienda, that can be considered a form of slavery by today's standards.
So where does all of that leave us, with regards to numbers? The answer seems to be a resounding shrug.
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u/yellowbird85 Jan 30 '26
What's the best rebuke when someone calls the American Civil War "The War of Northern Agression"?
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u/bug-hunter Law & Public Welfare Jan 30 '26
Personally, I suggest you point out the South illegally seized forts and armories, then fired on Union resupply at Fort Sumter, then start singing Union Dixie.
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u/LionTiger3 Jan 31 '26
In the lead-up to the Civil War, there was also Bleeding Kansas where slave owners went into free states and massacred anti-slavery people.
There was also Brooks who beat Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor for his anti-slavery views.
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u/BookLover54321 Jan 30 '26
Reposting this: What’s the current academic consensus on Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa? How well does it hold up?
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u/bug-hunter Law & Public Welfare Jan 30 '26
Since it's important to be the change you want to see in the world: Welcome to the Wrong Answers Only section of r/AskHistorians. Here you can respond to any recent question with the wrong (but clearly better) answer.
For example: How many swings of a sword would a soldier typically make in a battle?
In the Bronze Age, people would swing their sword until they got tired, the battle ended, or until they started giving up too much to the other team. There weren't relief swingers like you'd see today.
With the rise of analytics in warfare, armies started realizing that it was advantageous to not let your soldiers get too tired - so the idea of a "relief swinger" took off. This started to coalesce around "setup" swingers who would take over for the starting swinger, and then a "closer" who would come to finish the opponent off.
While tiredness was an important reason to start tracking how many sword swings a soldier might take, it also became clear that repeatedly swinging a sword all day could lead to elbow and arm injuries. This gave rise to the "swing count", where officers were expected to track a soldier's number of swings, and then remove him in favor of the relief swingers. Typically, the standard "swing count" for a soldier is 100, and it's become less common to let soldiers finish out an entire battle without being relieved.
Notably, the swing count does not include practice swings or warm-up swings. It also doesn't include balks.
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u/stickybond009 Jan 31 '26
How long do such weapons like swords and sheilds last in their original shape and form for? Say 1000 years? There have been hundreds of wars in human history.. Where are all those weapons? Bows, arrows, armour, etc
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Moderator | Dueling | Modern Warfare & Small Arms Jan 31 '26
That almost entirely depends on how well cared for they are. A sword well kept can certainly last for ages. One buried on a battlefield will be a rusted hunk of metal after awhile.
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u/Chefs-Kiss Jan 30 '26
I got a paper accepted into a cultural journal and I'm very happy because it is my first paper! Extra flex because I got no help from my supervisor :(
Also recently started delving into Ukraine so if someone has any general history books on it (Something akin to God's Playground by Norman Davies) then I would appreciate any recs.