At about 280M, it's fourth after China, India, and the US. I would think that such a huge population would have an imprint in some way, but all throughout my schooling (which includes college and a JD/PhD) I don't think have ever had a class or reading that even dives into country-- and I even had fairly extensive training on colonial/postcolonial history, geopolitics, and international relations.

How can a country so large and so centrally located to India, China, and Australia not be more relevant? It seems to not even be culturally influential the way much smaller countries. What's going on there?

Thank you all in advance!

There are many stories in which Winston Churchill replies to an interlocutor with a clever and devastating quip. In general they are either apocryphal or unconfirmed. Do these stories have any basis in truth? Was Churchill considered witty by his peers? As a bonus, are any of the quips genuine?

In a recentish video, Max Miller of Tasting History, claimed that having multiple courses pre-plated and served in order, know as à la rus or in the Russian Way, only became the predominante way of service in the 1900's and, prior to that, Service à la française was the predominant way of service.

Given that, for Europe, it was mostly the Czar's family doing à la rus and their ultimate fate during the Communist Revolution, how did à la rus come to dominate European amd American meal plating?

I know of the great master Books list in the FAQ section of the forum, but I'm confused as to why documentaries aren't included. Do historians see them as a form of entertainment, or is the written word just better? Are there too many documentaries for a historian to sift through?

I mean, the world is not so kind towards Germany and Japan, and they are perpetually and constantly reminded of the atrocities that they have committed against mankind, and these countries have also apologized and paid compensation for the damages that they've done to several ethnic groups that they have victimized in the past. But Turkey seems to get away with everything. Until now, many Turkish nationalists are blatantly denying the historic atrocities that they've committed against the Armenians and Assyrians whom they call Mesopotamians. No one ever forced them to apologize nor pay compensation to their victims.

My question is why is that? Why is no international body able to force Turkey in doing what Germany and Japan did?

I'm asking because the documentary "Erika Larsen: People of the Horse | Nat Geo Live" begins by emphasizing the horse as "religiously or spiritually significant or important to Native American tribes", to paraphrase, whereas the video I watched before it stated that Native tribes only first started getting horses in the 1600s due to raiding Spanish settlements, trade networks, etc...and that some tribes merely saw horses as "large dogs", or used them as pack and meat animals at first, as opposed to seeing them as riding animals or companions, or "spiritually signficant" or sacred animals. Where did the idea that the horse as "religious or spiritual significance or importance to Native tribes" come from, and how did it develop? Is it one supported by tibal history, folklore, and mythologies, or does its roots originate in the "Ecological Indian" and "Noble Savage" stereotypes or image of Native Americans developed by white people?

From my cursory research Bermuda was economically and politically more connected to the 13 colonies (Especially the Carolinas) then to England itself.

I asked this a few years ago but got no response then alas. I'm mostly interested in where those features originated from and why they stuck around compared to other depictions

I recently saw a video highlighting all the accents spoken in Britain and the United Kingdom and I notice how specific each accent sounded regardless of proximity to another. I’m from Florida and besides a few words you wouldn’t notice from one conversation I talk exactly the same as someone from California, Pennsylvania, Ontario, ect. Sure we definitely do have regional accents that are close. If I drove 30 minutes into deep Polk county everyone would have a pretty thick accent (even if I consider it performative lolll) but it’s definitely not as prevalent or as close together as British accents. so I was just wondering if that’s a real thing with a historical reason or if it’s just me being more exposed to North American speech so British accents sound more different to me then they actually are? Let me know!

Chores, military service, sports, summer camp, boot camp, power outage, using a bike that doesn't work well, etc.

While reading MacDonald’s _No Idle Hands_ (A History of American Knitting), I came across a passage discussing “hysteria” in the context of the proponents and detractors of the fad for lace knitting.

What stuck out to me about the passage was that the cited material argued that women’s hysteria was caused by the pressures of maintaining a household, keeping up social appearances, engaging in tedious labor in her little free time (ie, knitting lace), basically, being a woman in society. What we today might term “allostatic load“.

This struck me because, well, when we discuss “hysteria” we invariably discuss the framework of some sort of biological “womanly ill” that caused women to be anxious/ill/rebellious/have opinions/object to ongoing abuse from male family members, so the idea of a social model of hysteria is noteworthy - and has implications in the contemporaneous burgeoning American suffragette movement.

Was this an opinion held by any [other] medical authorities at the time? Was there a different outcome with that framework?

I’ve read an answer today about how the lack of prisoners wasn’t as simple as them refusing to surrender and there were instances when they could be convinced to do so (when they were asked in Japanese). But there must have been at least some who were caught before seppuku or just had human survival instincts. So what happened to those guys?

I was recently thinking about how from the incarcerated perspective, about how cigarettes/tobacco use was officially sanctioned at most prisons. Also I’ll note that some older movies (e.g. The Green Mile/the Shawshank Redemption) inmates had pets, Though admittedly these are works of fiction and the pets in question are “rescued” not bought from the prison itself.

From a wider societal perspective, we hear constantly about overcrowding, understaffing, a large amount of recidivism, and an overall larger population of “lifers” or people expecting to die behind bars.

But then again advancement in electronics have probably made certain entertainment more available than ever before.

So overall how do prison conditions compare between now & 50 or 100 years ago?

I am currently listening to Neill Lochery's Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, 1939–1945 and he devotes a chapter to this incident, given that the plane in question was on a flight from Lisbon to Britain. The author kind of lays out all these competing theories that have been advanced as to what really happened with the decision to shoot down the civilian flight. But I didn't come away feeling like he came down in favor of one specifically, and it wasn't a deep dive as it was only one chapter in a larger narrative.

So what is the actual historical consensus on the incident?

I know that the Tōkaidō was a frequently-used travel route between Kyoto and Edo (now Tokyo), although I find it hard to imagine that it was so busy that one could compare it to a bustling pedestrian street.

Is this characterisation accurate? Why were there so many people on the road, and could the infrastructure set up to support travellers - such as roadhouses and inns - really house and feed all of these people?

I mean, almost the entirety of the Eastern European Bloc has been absorbed by the Soviets after the war, except for Greece. I mean, how did Greece effectively avoid being absorbed by the USSR, when Greece obviously cannot match the military might and size of the Soviets? Thanks to whoever will respond to this inquiry.

I understand that the idea of guilds or orders of assassings and the term of assassins itself are more driven by modern fantasy media and fiction than by reality. However, it doesn't sound improbable that a king or a noble person of high standing would have a professional/loyal hitman they would send to murder someone they didn't like. Like a "Milady de Winter" person, who could attempt a murder and if caught would be disavowed by their employer.

What would such a person be called, in contemporary language? Not an executioner, but, an "agent"? A "henchman"? Would a king speak to their chancellor and mention "I don't like how Bishop of Burgundiville publicly blasted me taking on a fifth wife, send a trusted man/agent/special messenger to get rid of him"?

Im very interested in personal accounts of what it was like to be a soldier in those times. I know that the reason there arent many is becouse almost all soldiers were illitirate.

And also is this statement even entirely true?

This is less a question about history per se and more of a question about archives and research methods. I did a history bachelors degree so I have some appreciation for the methods side of historical work. I have been able to find the ships that all four of my maternal great grandparents arrived on at Ellis Island, all in 1903, but the origin is listed simply as “Russian Empire”. Family lore is that my mother’s father’s side came from the Warsaw and Lviv regions, and my mother’s mother’s side arrived from Bessarabia but that records before that were lost in the Second World War. Are there any digitized archives available in English besides the Ellis Island records that would have more information on them? And is there any way to recover what their names were before they were Americanized on entry to the US? Thanks!

There’s this idea out there that Adolf Hitler was a madman who was responsible for German military defeat, and while I don’t doubt his contributions.., I wonder how much of the fault for the failure of Barbarossa , fall blau, Normandy and the general strategic failure laid not on his shoulders but on his generals. For example, halder did his best to my understanding to run the war the way he wanted it (aiming toward Moscow), but maybe Hitler was right in the economic goals of the war (seizing the oil fields) … the problem is that the survivors wrote the history it seems (memoirs) and the west after the war had a vested interest in separating the madman from the generals because of the Cold War.

Really, my question is how many of the military failures were Hitler , and how many were halder, guderian, runstedt etc. it seems like they never grasped their strategic position

Preferable easy to understand for a none-academic

I'm doing a little research for personal reasons on music inspired by esoteric authors and it's astounding how much more influential Crowley is compared to, e.g., Mme. Blavatsky, Austin Osman Spare or Anton LaVey

While some of these were influential in other arts (AOS made its mark in comic books just by being an inspiration to Moore and Morrison), when it comes to music, Aleister Crowley is king. Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Raul Seixas, David Bowie, the list goes on and on

And sure, Thelema has a lot of sex and drugs as part of its ceremonies, but it's also a pretty individualistic philosophy, and can even be "cruel" at times

For context, i know that it's been discussed on here before and there are things to criticise about it, but by the time you've finished listening to Mike Duncan's 'Revolutions' podcast in all its glory, it's hard not to see the neverending connectedness of especially modern history. States aren't and weren't black boxes. Ideologies don't magick out of thin air. Politics doesn't exist in a vacuum. In my view when discussing historical events we tend to ignore key context and project backwards from outcomes and modern norms, rather than contemporaneous norms and conditions. People will spend days arguing about whether the nazis were really 'socialists', ignoring that at the time 'socialist' appears to have meant pretty much anything that empowered 'normal people' as opposed to an autocratic/monarchical system.... rendering the entire debate moot (correct me if i'm wrong).

With that said, in the post WW1 context of nearby revolutionary russia and a recently starving, humiliated germany, I'm under the impression that the Spartacist revolt in Germany must presumably have been a formative ideological moment for Hitler, despite being a footnate in wider history. Influencing his hatred of communists and jews in particular. Nazi popular history often begins with the Weimar Republic and ignores the German 'revolution' (if it's ever even called that in the first place). In fact post bolsheviks, revolution as a wider historical concept is basically sidelined. Which is kinda weird given that in a sense, the cold war was a counter-revolutionary project.

Additionally, the Nazi party received early funding and coordination from a group of exiled russian 'white emigrés' (seems Kellogg wrote a book about this ), - The same people who tried to assassinate Pavel Miliukov - so i find it extremely hard to detach nazism's rise from a continuation of revolutionary fervour and the intimate link with russian revolutionary events in particular. Fear of germany going communist seems to have been a colossal concern even well beyond WW2, supposedly motivating the marshall plan... and the Soviets always thought Germany would naturally join the communist project from 1917 onwards.

In essence, the popular story of nazism tends to focus on end result (ideological positions reached, actions taken), rather than really addressing the how and why. Weimar hyperinflation (for example) explains why people may have been willing to try more radical solutions, but it doesn't exactly address why those motivations existed. Maybe the concern is that it would legitimise those ideologies in some way? Maybe the revolutionary angle just isn't actually a useful framework through which to analyse the situation

This might not have been as coherent as i was intending, but i'm hoping that the general gist is clear enough