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Americans who work in a Middle Eastern country, how did you end up there and what is the process like?
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I worked in Dubai for a couple years. I was referred by a former professor to my future boss who needed American butts in seats asap. Sent him an email, did a quick phone interview, then interviewed in person at company hq in Pittsburgh and got on a plane to Dubai a month later. Pretty straightforward process. They put me up in a corporate apartment for a month while I got myself situated and gave me a stipend for expenses. Overall a very nice gig with high salary and no taxes. I came home in 08 when shit hit the fan. I’d start researching American companies with offices in Dubai, and then start reaching out personally on linkedin to American managers working there. You might get a bite eventually. Don’t bother applying for positions online, reach out personally and introduce yourself.
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Also, not me personally but someone I know outfits older US planes in Iraq with new cockpit equipment every year. He lives on the base and then he gets to go to a hotel with armed guards once a week or something like that. He makes lots of money for it though.
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Is it cheaper to run a 400W heater at max settings, than a 800W heater set halfway?
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Yes. They're consuming the same amount of power, which is 400W. But running a heater on max for extended periods of time causes wear-and-tear. You may have to replace it sooner, which will cost more in the long run.
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In theory, it should be exactly the same. Watts are watts. The difference will be in how accurate the settings are, if the half way mark on the 800w heater is really at 400 watts, and the 400 watt heater really consumes that much. Conversion of electricity in to heat is easy to do, and very very efficient. If your oil heater is taking in 400 watts of electricity, it is outputting nearly exactly that amount of heat. If it was a different type of heater, it may have a fan that may be larger and use more power on the larger unit, but being an oil heater that shouldn't be the case.
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What was the dumbest thing you said a product should be designed for that was declined, but you found out end users ended up doing?
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We made an interface for a computer vision application to make reports and export them to PDF; we had to make lots of changes to comply with client expectations; project got extended in order to make a perfect report... ...end user just takes a picture of the image on-screen with their cell phone and sends it with WhatsApp.
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The safety mat should be wide enough that operators cant straddle it. An operator straddled it and got hit by a log.
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What happens to the data in a memory card when you delete it?
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Imagine a post office full of PO boxes is like your storage card. “Deleting” data is like removing the mailbox numbers, and flagging the boxes as available. When you want to put something new in the box, everything inside is thrown away, and a new numbers put on the door. Any mailboxes that already had stuff inside, that stays put. Formatting the disk is like going through each box, and throwing away all the contents.
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Not an engineer but it doesn't become empty, the data just becomes inaccessible and can be overwritten
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Do you treat contractors differently that your “actual” coworkers?
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Back when I was a contractor at a very big company there was a big summer company picnic. Because of some weird labor law contractors were allowed to attend (unpaid), and eat the food (because the cafeteria was closed for the day), but we were not allowed to take any of the free swag.
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I’ve seen both sides of this, when I worked in medical devices my company was weirdly awful to the contractors and now working in defense they are treated as equal I always treat everyone the same but I was once actually yelled at by the hr lady at my old company because I invited one of the contractors to a party at work (which was a retirement party for another guy on our team that I was planning) She said if you treat them as full time employees they can start trying to claim benefits and so I couldn’t invite them to parties or things like that. We also had stupid little rules like their name plates were yellow instead of blue and they couldn’t come to plant meetings and just little ways they weren’t included I always thought you know I’m not a lawyer so maybe I’m missing something but treating someone with respect =/= them being a full time employee to me. Seemed like a weird power trip to my uneducated eyes
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Is planned obsolescence an integral part of an ethical business model that drives engineering and innovations in products?
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Speaking from what I have seen * I am always being pushed to rush to the bottom. This does mean longevity suffers. * often there is a core component that has a lifespan that it is not worth finding a replacement for. As a result everything sorta follows that. If I know that the core can't be reasonably replaced and will only last 10 years then I am not going to worry about the rest of the system lasting 11. This happens more then you may think in the chemical world. * I did work for a terrible company that deliberately ruined their own designs to charge more and more often for repairs. * you get what you pay for. Give me more money and you will get a longer lasting product. * there are non-profitable tradeoffs for lifespan. Colder electronics lasts longer, so do you want to pay to run cooling for multiple years so maybe you get a few more months out of your product? Electricity isn't free. * sorry but I am not going to break myself trying to support your ancient software because you are too cheap to buy new. Older machines don't fit in the tech ecosystem any more and they become harder and harder to deal with. Tech is like anything else. It has to move with the world it is in.
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It’s less than you imagine. Designing something to last five years is different than designing something that will fail at five years. It’s probably more expensive to have something designed with a planned end date.
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Climate Conscious Engineers: where do you work?
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Didn't go in to it for that specific reason but i work in the rail industry. Rail is by far the greener option vs driving so I feel by pushing this industry and the engineering we do to make trains more efficient I'm doing my bit.
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I work in transit. Stood up our zero emissions group and zero emissions bus transition plan, stood up our resiliency team and assessment consultant, pushed for battery electric locomotive development, designed a mixed use rail/trail transit system, and helped move along about half a dozen TOD projects at stations for over 10,000 units of transit accessible housing.
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Engineers working for major defense contractors - what is your typical annual raise?
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Absolute shit. It's why I'm trying to leave and get into tech.
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3.6%. We get raises in November. I fully expect my team and me to get below inflation raises this year. I hope they don’t all quit. I wouldn’t blame them.
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Do British engineers apply a seal to their drawings to signify their approval?
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Yes and for the ceremony you have to kneel before the queen and she touches a scale to each shoulder, it's so beautiful.
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Yes, you can order one here. Chartered engineer status is the closest thing we have to PE, but it's rarely a requirement. The only things that require it are public services like roads, bridges, the electricity grid, etc. Even then, I don't think the stamp is needed. I guess some people just like to have it.
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Do you constantly have to learn new stuff as a professional engineer?
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I work in R&D. I regularly take a topic I know nothing about, learn as much as I can (from info available), then learn as much as I can by coming up with my own trials/tests. Once you learn this skill, it applies to all faucets of life. It can also be difficult to not get stuck with analysis paralysis.
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We are learning daily as structural engineers. You have barely scratched the tip of the iceberg when you come out of school and realize you actually know very very little about daily design tasks. Codes change every few years. City or government standards and specifications are always being revised. You are constantly designing new elements or solving problems you haven’t seen before. If we weren’t challenged to learn daily I’d have much less job satisfaction.
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What items have made your remote working life better?
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A bidet and a standing desk. Note: The two are not related.
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Desk plants (very small plants) that are easy to take care of. They're adorable <3
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What is the maximum diameter for a pipe/straw sucking up liquids?
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There's no theoretical limit to diameter. There *is* a limit on how high you can suck something through air depending on liquid density and atmospheric pressure. In a way, the sucking side of a straw or pipe isn't producing the force on the liquid going up it. When you suck away some gas from the space in the straw you decrease the pressure in the straw. The atmospheric pressure all around us keeps pushing on the liquid from the outside with constant force. This force is enough to push some liquid up into the low pressure area you've made inside the straw. Keep reducing pressure in the straw and the liquid will keep being pushed higher from below. The catch is once you have sucked ALL the gas out of the straw you have a vacuum. You can't possibly decrease pressure further at this point as there's nothing else to take out. Which is why there is a height limit.
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No, why would there be a limit? What do you expect to happen when crossing that limit? Dont't think of it as "sucking". The liquid is pushed up due to the pressure at the bottom being higher. If there was a limit for that, there would be a limit for any type of pipe in which a liquid is moved up.
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How does your company handle large amounts of test data?
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you quietly nod to most questions while updating your linked in profile.
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Step one: hire an intern... The easiest way to start is to standardize the folder structure. I'd recommend project based, then date, then data type... You are talking month(s) of work to do this. Now you can find your stuff, and you can look at bringing in a database builder. If you want to be ultra low cost use Access and link back to the data. It's not fancy, but it's maintainable and searchable. A programmer could probably build you a sleek custom database, but it's up to you.
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As an engineer, are you paranoid using things because you know how they work or are maintained?
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I'm a certified bridge inspector and structural engineer. With the factors of safety built into everything I'm not paranoid, but we keep a lot to ourselves because the public would be.
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After my internship at an automotive factory, I'll never buy a GM or Chrysler
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Engineers, do you regret studying engineering/your discipline?
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If I could do it all over again, I'd get my eyes fixed and go be a pilot I think. The thing I probably hate the most about being an engineer is going on the engineering subreddits and seeing this question almost daily, though.
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Did Mechanical, don't think I'd change a thing. I've had opportunities to do design and manufacturing engineering, work on things that have gone up to the space station, work on racecars, do some travel, software engineering and analyst work, marketing materials and magazine ads, you name it. Love the diversity and opportunities.
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How can i slow down the motor from an old desk fan?
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You'll need to use a gearbox if you want to get a decent amount of power out of it. Keeping power constant at lower speeds requires more torque, which requires more current and generates more heat. Without any cooling system, the motor is not designed to operate in that region and will likely overheat.
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You could always add gears or a chain/belt to reduce the speed at the output shaft. Planetary gearboxes are quite compact, and allow you to greatly reduce the rotational speed and thereby increase the torque available for whatever you want to do.
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Could you easily do most of the problem sets you were assigned to do that were given in your introductory physics(ie classical mechanics and classical E&M) again without reviewing the material over again or would most of the material be forgotten if you did not review it?
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Anyone else find posts like this a bit ridiculous? To me this screams "reassure me that it's okay to not fully understand the material (ie. do poor) in this core class because practicing engineers don't remember it either".
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Nope .
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What allows a brake pedal to go to the floor in a car?
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Either there's air in your brake lines or your master cylinder isn't sealed good. Not sure if you want the brake pedal hitting the floor, but that's the sign when you don't have brakes
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My brakes don't go to the floor. Brake fluid isn't compressible, so if your pedal goes to the floor then there is air in your line.
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When you roll down a car window with water on it from rain and it comes up clean, where does the water go?
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The weather strip on the window wipes most of it, but some gets thru When some gets thru, this then drains out the bottom of the door. Some also get into the door while the window is closed despite the window generally being fairly well sealed, so the electronics in doors are protected from water spray to a point (not submersible however) Other crap also falls in, sometimes leaves, and this blocks up the drainage, so it needs to be cleaned sometimes
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Clearly from the comment section, the only correct answer is the door panel goblin. Take care of him, and he’ll take care of you.
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Managers/leaders, what is your field and what are some of the biggest things you've learned about leading people?
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I once asked my favorite manager: >"Can I ask you for advice or resources about successful project management? For every project I've been involved with over the past 4 years, I've become the de facto "project manager." Unfortunately, for every project I've been involved with over the past 4 years, I've also done the lion's share of the work (I'm currently on a project where I've done 2-5 times more hours of work than the other group members). I think this is indicative of poor project management on my part, but I don't know what to do to improve." He responded: >"the first thing you need to determine is what's the reason behind of you doing the "lion's share" Is that because the work of others is not up to your standard? Most of the time this is the case with young project managers. If the work of others is not up to your standards then they tend to take up on themselves to bring the work to par. If that's the case, then you need to develop different approaches because in the long run this will be stressful and unhealthy for you. >There's a different situation when others are simply not doing their part or not delivering their assignments on time. This is somewhat similar to what I wrote in the first paragraph, but under no circumstances you should fill up the slack and finish on your own. >The first task of a project manager is to build an effective team where all participants feel valuable and important to the whole team. The first step in assembling an effective team is to build communication. As project manager you should set out a plan with well defined tasks and timelines. Implement weekly meetings and have all participants on the table to discuss progress and to check if all have met their goals for the week. Sell your plan to the team and let them give their input on how to improve the plan. That way everybody buys into the goals >When goals are not met, it can be clearly discussed in the meeting and other individuals will naturally step in to help the lagging team member. New ideas will flow and your project will tend to stay on track and on a focused path. Your job then essentially becomes guiding the team to the right direction. >Mistake #1 of project managers is that they feel the need to be the technical expert on the matter. This is not true. The job of the PM is to assemble the team and focus in making it flourish. The first thing you need to know is that you don't know everything. You need to rely on others to deliver a successful project. >As far as people not delivering tasks on time, the weekly meetings with weekly goals will put the slacker on the spot for all others to see. Most of the time, the team steps up to help the individual not delivering the tasks on time. This is how team building is accomplished. >Most importantly, build communication first and if possible on a daily basis. Set weekly goals and track at every meeting. You don't need to check progress on a daily basis because people will tend to feel pushed in this manner."
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Loyalty is the only coin with which loyalty can be bought. Also, everyone you deal but with should know that you aren't afraid of doing their job, you only ask it of them because they are more capable of doing it in a timely manner, this must especially stand out for busy work or crap work.
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Why are more powerful cars less efficient at the same conditions (eg highway cruising) as economy cars?
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Larger engines have more losses: throttle is more closed, more pistons mean more friction too.
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Electric cars are the reverse of gas powered cars. They get better efficiency in city/low speed driving then highway. Couple reason for this. EVs have regenerative braking that allows some power to be captured and put back into the battery when slowing down which comes into play when city driving. Also ICEs are just horrible at converting the energy in fuel into movement. Typically a ICE likes a specific steady RPMs where it is most efficient. So a ICE will get better mileage on the highway then they do in the city where they are constantly changing RPMs. This is why a generator can be more efficient then a car with a gas engine.
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For someone who is an aspiring engineer, what would you suggest to learn first, excel or python?
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As an engineer with 36 years of experience, I suggest you learn engineering first! Tools come and go with time. They vary with your needs. They are all useless if you don't fundamentally understand the spring math, physics, chemistry and logic.
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Excel has always been the fallback, brute force way of doing anything with data in my 15 years. I've used perl, R, python, groovy, SAS, and more, but Excel has always been the way to do quick and dirty charts, pivot tables, summarizations, sorting, and more. Ultimately both are very good to learn, but Excel first.
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What is the coolest idea/solution you have ever come across as an engineer?
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Most boiling water reactors use hydraulically operated control rods. The rods go in the bottom of the reactor, meaning they cannot use gravity as a failsafe for ensuring the control rods can be inserted for a SCRAM/emergency reactor trip. Each control rod has a hydraulic accumulator which can provide the energy to insert the rod. However, to ensure that all control rods can insert even without these accumulators, GE put a ball check valve on the insert port at the rod drive unit under the reactor which allows the reactor's own pressurized water supply to act as the hydraulic pressure source for scramming the rod. While it is lower pressure and slower than the accumulators are, it's still better than nothing at all. I just thought it was pretty neat, and simple, as you virtually always have sufficient pressure in the reactor to drive rods in.
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The linotype. It's both hilariously convoluted and outdated, but immensely impressive at the same time. Before it was invented, a newspaper of more than 8 pages was unheard of.
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What’s your company’s PTO/Vacation/WFH policy?
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I work for a fortune 500 that bought my 10,000 employee company, so policy is in transition. I'm a design engineer, in my role it is 90+% office work. Under a certain number of years, it is 15 days of combined sick leave/PTO per year plus 11 holidays a year. Imo,it's standard for the US but it should be more. My whole team had been WFH the last 18 months, with a few people allowed in the office (masked and temp checked) if they need to be closer to the servers for loading times. We have a test facility that's been going throughout, but I have to get an onerous amount of permission to go in, which has meant no outbreaks
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3 weeks vacation + 12 flex days a year. Our group doesn't fall under our permanent WFH policy, but we have remote access to all our systems since covid, so whenever things get back to normal work wise I will be able to occasionally work from home (on Friday when I'm taking a half day, etc.) Edit: should say 4 years of experience right now. 10 years gives me 4 weeks, 20 (or 15) gives me 5 weeks, 25 is 6 weeks.
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Why doesn’t Tesla model s run out of battery quickly?
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If you are driving your Gas powered vehicle that has 300 hp, do you use it at 300 hp at all times?
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The latter, like any car. If you want a ballpark number, the average is more like 15 kW.
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Is this normal for an engineering interview?
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I had something similar. During an interview with Mars, Inc. (candy manufacturer) for an internship they pulled out a full size, fun size and mini Snickers bar (in the wrappers) and asked me what I'd need to do to make all three sizes on the same production line. I asked to open the packages (they said ok) so I could break them open and see the differences. And then I talked about how I'd need to adjust equipment to grind the peanuts smaller or make the chocolate coating thinner or adjust the cooling time on the smaller ones. After the interview, I asked on of the interviewers how they actually did it. And she said that they'd never try to run something so different on the same line. And that they were just asking to judge my approach to the problem, not the actual answer. I got an offer from them, but took a different offer for that summer.
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I think you're more likely to find this type of thing with small companies. It's the type of interview I would do for my 40 person company if we were hiring an engineer, and I'd be specifically looking at how the candidate approached solving the problem. Generally speaking, I want to know if the person I'm hiring can broadly apply engineering processes and methods to solve problems, I'm not trying to test their knowledge of a specific subject. I want to know how you'll act when you have a problem you haven't studied for, and if you can take what you learned and apply it more broadly. It sounds like they were looking for you to take the processes you know for boat manufacturing, make some reasonable assumptions about how pencils are made, and apply your knowledge to this particular problem set.
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What are some easily available thermocouples(can interact with the arduino ide) with a really high response time(less than 20ms)?
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These type of threads are a trap - OP very clearly does *not* need a thermocouple with a 20ms 'response time' because: A) They aren't asking about a thermocouple response time, they're asking about scan rate of an I2C interface and totally disregarding the actual physical properties of the sensing junction, which anyone who actually had this requirement would understand. B) Even assuming that this requirement *is* real obviously interfacing a thermocouple to an arduino as a voltage input using a voltage conversion IC is the correct way to get high frequency data, not using an intermediary I2C or SPI interface. Again, this is something that anyone who *actually* had this requirement would know. OP has managed to confuse themselves into thinking that the solution to a problem they havent thought all the way through is some outlandish hardware spec, when in reality it's almost certainly that they don't fully understand their problem. But none of the above matters, because this is a drive-by post. OP will never return, will never take advice, and everyone (including me) posting in this thread is wasting their time. This happens about once a week.
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What are you doing with temperature that needs that kind of speed?
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Should I worry about THC drug testing for my potential new engineering job?
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If the job needs government clearance (secret, etc) and you're asking this question, then move on to the next job posting.
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Yes, you should worry. Weed has been legal in my state for 5+ years and I still get random drug tests.
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Is 50k too low for an entry level biomed engineer job in silicon valley?
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50k is too low almost any place. Median salary in San Jose for entry level biomedical engineers is 65k, and 75th percentile in 75k. We are very selective but are in a cheaper city than anywhere in California or east coast, and our new hire fresh grad biomedical engineers come in at 70-75k, so better salaries are out there. 50k in California is internship territory.
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Salary.com and glassdoor.com are your fiends in this.
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What was your best "I think I got away with it" moment in an interview or networking event?
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I've been reading these responses and trying to draw parallels, but about the best I can come up with is gracefully exiting a conversation before crop dusting my way across a convention center.
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My technical interview was over the phone once. They asked a question about Lambert’s problem, which I remembered the name of, and I managed to stall long enough to dig out my Orbital Mechanics textbook and remind myself of what it was. Played it off like I just needed a second to remember the whole thing.
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Do any of you wear the steel ring even though you didn’t go through an Order of the Engineer ceremony?
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Someone once called it a "purity ring" 😂 I wore mine immediately after graduation('18) but before I started at my job and while traveling, a Canadian asked me if I was an engineer. I've also noticed someone in Amsterdam wearing one. I haven't worn it since I started working.
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Assuming you're in Canada (the rings don't mean much outside of Canada) you can go to another ceremony to get one.
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Outside of programming, what is considered the "spaghetti code" of your field?
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Two things: Incomprehensible constraints/mates within large CAD assemblies. It's literally like trying to reverse engineer someone else's brain to understand how they've mated parts together, only to realise they've done such a shit job that it becomes merely an exercise in futility. Secondly, CAD file management. Especially Vault within Autodesk Inventor. When you start dealing with levels of detail, it becomes a right pain to save/check in/check out without overwriting what's on your local drive.
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The LAN in my office.
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Is getting masters degree worth it?
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My graduate advisor gave me this advice: If you want a master's degree, get one. If you are doing it to make more money, don't bother. He went on to explain that the difference in salary versus the cost of tuition and missed salary while in school were pretty much a wash, as there are factors that make a much larger difference (industry, for example). In terms of opportunity, there may be slight advantages for someone with a MS, but that's also pretty marginal. So it's really just this: do you want a master's degree?
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Yes. Where I work it's practically required for some types of promotions. PhD not so much.
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What are the requirements for a runway to land a 777?
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I am looking at the answers in this thread and they are a little too engineering-y, relying on the required takeoff runway length or a runway historically used. A pilot of one could probably easily tell you that they only need X feet of ______ (dry lakebed, pavement, etc.) to get the thing on the ground in a less-than-ideal, but feasible, way. As far as hiding the thing, at this point you'd have plenty of time to disguise it even if you don't have a hangar, because everyone is busy looking for debris in an ocean as opposed to a plane on land. EDIT: the real question is where you find a pilot qualified enough to do it and willing to be part of such a plan. Extortion I guess? Anyone know of a pilot who went missing recently?
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It's in a chop shop right now getting a new paint job.
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So my electrical engineer of a boss just dropped this on me- 800 and 400 MHz radios will trigger GFCIs and (probably unrelated) battery - operated paper towel dispensers in our facility at a range of <5 ft. What's going on, and how to fix?
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Surely you remember when everyone had GSM phones that sometimes you'd leave them next to a poorly shielded audiio cable or headphones or the chord of a fixed phone even, and when you got a call/text incoming you'd hear the beeps from the GSM modulation. Same thing.
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Remedy, not solution: paint them with EM/RF blocking paint. http://www.lessemf.com/paint.html
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What's your best story of someone freaking out when they finally realize how complex of a problem they're dealing with?
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The more general freak outs I see from new hires are just that real-world design problems are so vastly different from school. You don't know all the requirements yet and they will probably change at some point. Sometimes the constraint is schedule or price rather than the "best" way to do something. There is often no obvious end-point of being "done" with a design: you can analyze, tweak, and rework the thing forever if you wanted. Eventually you need to say, "good enough" and know that you might not have caught every tiny little detail. The ones that catch on quick get used to the iteration and reworking of an idea. The ones that have trouble think they are doing something wrong when they have re-designed that bracket a half dozen times. Best one I can think of was an intern. She had great credentials, was doing a five year program to get a masters degree and had one more year left before she would come back full-time. So we gave her a great intern design project: design a fancy bracket to mate our test part to odd-shaped production hardware (it's actually hard to find projects that are good for beginners and take longer than a day!) This was mostly a test of her CAD skills and knowledge of manufacturing - the brackets had almost zero load on them but needed to be stiff and durable (we told her they would be machined from aluminum). The hope was that we would get a design, I would help her tweak it to be good enough to actually use, and then we would have her do the drafting for it and learn some practical GD&T. So I let her go at this bracket for two whole weeks....Well, her CAD skills were top notch! She designed a bracket so horribly complicated that to this day I'm not actually sure anything other than a 3D printer could create it and it used just about every solid modelling button our software has. It had squared sections with oddball curved edges, very thin stiffening sections that had oval cross-sections (!), and fillets. fillets on everything. This was partly my fault in that I did not look at her work early-on, otherwise I would have actually stopped her from creating such a monstrosity...but she also didn't exactly ask for help either. So we had to chat about why this bracket probably couldn't be manufactured, would likely cost tens of thousands of dollars if it *could* be created, and would be nearly impossible to actually control tolerances on the sections we cared about. Just because you can do things in CAD, doesn't mean you should! It became clear that she really had no idea how actual parts were manufactured and once I quickly sketched out something that could do the job at 1/100th the cost, I think she kind of understood how much she didn't know. The thing was so silly I had to take that bracket out back and put it down. I can still see the tears in her eyes.... Sadly, I fear she may have had some doubts about being a designer prior to this and I pushed her over the edge. She came back to my company after completing her degree and went into a management rotation program instead of engineering. :/ As an aside: any mechanical engineering undergrad program that doesn't have you at least make one thing on a mill and one thing on a lathe can die in a fire.
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Discovering that real engineering problems are messy and not easily wrapped up with a bow the way they are in school is a watershed moment for a lots of new engineers. I ran a transportation test lab for an appliance manufacturer and that meant lots of thermal conditioning to -30F and lots of impacts. That’s a particularly bad combination for plastics since most are quite brittle when that cold. One new engineer’s experience stands out though. Let’s call her Sara. She was right out of a top engineering program and was going to set the world on fire with her brilliance. She was very much a Type A overconfident go getter. Sara’s first project was to re design some plastic clips that hold the console to the top on a washing machine. I went to an early concept review and offered some feedback and offered to help in any way I could before it was time to test for production approval. All I got was attitude that she knew better and didn’t want or need any advice from anyone. I heard nothing until we got the approval test request in the computer system. OK then... The machines with her brackets show up. We pack them up and pop them in the -30F thermal chamber and wait 12h. After the machine is down to temperature, the next step is a series of impacts into a barrier at 7 ft/s. Along with the impact came the sound of shattering plastic. We open the top and look inside, it’s not a pretty siight. I go in the lab office and call Sara, “You should come down to the lab and take a look.” Sara comes in, looks in the top of the carton and sees the carnage. The console is now only attached to the rest of the machine by the wiring harness and there are shards of plastic from her parts all over. Before I can say anything, Sara bursts into tears and runs out of the lab. On the one hand, I felt vindicated because I had tried to give her some ideas and she was such an arrogant little shit. On the other hand, I felt bad that she took it so hard and I’m not the kind of person who likes making people cry.
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Medical device engineers, what are your thoughts on the ethics of current open source ventilator movement?
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15 years in medical device development (mostly firmware) - I think people are vastly underestimating what it takes to make a safe, effective device at scale. Setting aside the potentially slow response time, there is very little that FDA asks for which you shouldn't be doing anyway to make a good, solid device. Similar to 'High schooler invents way to extract water from the air' news stories - proof of concept is about 0.001% of the work. EDIT: there are known ventilator designs that can be built. Throwing money at manufacturing capacity for these known designs makes more sense to me. If there is spare engineering knowledge capacity, why not use it to get these designs up and running in car factories, etc.
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I don't think it will be ethical to advocate for typical engineering rigor if this virus continues and there's tens of thousands of people that need ventilators and won't have access to them.
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What are the pros and cons of working in the defense industry?
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I'm going to add one thing because noone mentioned it already : ethics. Make sure you understand that sometimes, "defense" is a word for "offense". If you are not comfortable with working with stuff that kills people, this may not be the correct field for you. PS: I'm not arguing whether these people deserve to die or not.
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Con: slow af. A lot of hurry up and wait. Pro: keeping country and servicemen and women safe.
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How in demand are engineers?
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Any time I see an article about engineer shortages I always laugh. There isn’t a shortage of engineers. There’s a shortage of people willing to take these jobs at the current market rate.
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I think that it can be challenging to find a job for many reasons including career field, experience, location, and personal. I am a mechanical engineer and have been able to stay "in-demand" because I am willing to move to where the jobs are located. If I were to stay in one place then I imagine that it would be much harder to find a job that is a good fit for both myself and the company.
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How long can I hold a metal under yeild stress before permanent deformation ?
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The rate of permanent deformation is proportional to the stress raised to some power (depending on the creep regime), and proportional to exp(-1/T). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creep_(deformation)#General_equation
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If you design assuming your yield stress is half of what it actually is and limit maximum design deflection to 2%: Probably long enough.
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Hey everyone, i would like to know if it is physically possible to make an RFID system that covers for example a distance of 1 km or more?
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Insufficient information for a meaningful answer. Not being flip but what is the underlying problem you are trying to solve? This is an XY problem. Aircraft have transponders, but these are active. Is that RFID? What are you wanting to track, and how many are there?
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Technically, yes, sort of, but you won't like it. RFID is just radio frequency identification. Can I broadcast a radio frequency over a large area? Sure, with a big enough antenna and power supply. The trick is the device you're scanning for. You're going to have a hard time with a passive component of any kind as your RF sensitivity would have to be extremely high over a large area and any response would likely be lost in the resulting noise. It's pretty much going to have to be powered. And it's not likely to have a huge antenna/power supply to have the same range if it's portable. The nearest solution to what you're asking for that I know of are biometric telemetry devices for athletes. Ultra wide band comms with an array of antennas around football fields etc. I don't know your application but I suspect GPS geofencing is a better plan.
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Consulting engineers: What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the profession in the next decade?
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Lump sum fees. We are professionals, yet seem to be treated as an item to be procured. This forces us to take on the client's risk and is contradictory to our "do the right thing" ethos. Don't accept lump sum fees.
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Civil here, I'll bite. Explaining to our clients the cost and schedule impacts of increased regulations at a municipal level. This especially applies to stormwater runoff and treatment from a land development perspective. It is an inherently subjective design area, and no, I don't know when Joe Reviewer is going to respond to my submittal, nor do I know what his interpretation of my analysis is going to be. Scheduling and cost are everything from a developer's perspective, and the growing uncertainty and difficulty in obtaining stormwater permits is something I'll be dealing with for the rest of my career, I imagine. The great clients understand, but it's a hard sell to new clients. As far as a practical solution, I'm a fan of regional stormwater mitigation. I feel like a significant stormwater impact fee would be more palatable for developers than the current paradigm of uncertainty. Regional detention and treatment is more cost effective and can provide public benefit with park use, whereas on-site mitigation is expensive, a maintenance nightmare, and often a large loss of unconnected real estate.
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What did you do for your final year project?
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MechEng. Formula SAE.
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Aerospace, did two projects: 1) For Senior Design, worked as a team to do the change design to replace the typical Lycoming engine in a 172 with a Delta Hawk turbodiesel. Weight + balance, structural, fuel, power, avionics, etc before/after comparison. Inspired by the actual turbodiesel 172 that was announced just previously in 2007. No actual hardware, it was purely calculations and change drawings. 2) For Composite Structural Design and Analysis, built snowboards. Machined out a wooden press on the 5-Axis CNC, laid up fiberglass, carbon fiber, and ptex, metal edging, machined in binding locations, etc.
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Why don't hydraulic presses shoot forward like a captured bolt when their payload(?)
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Imagine the press like a spring. When you lower it, applying pressure to the object below compresses the spring; and the more compressed the spring is, the more force you apply. If the object breaks, suddenly the spring is unloaded and blows through the table. Now imagine that the spring is *really stupid* stiff. Like, compressing the spring 1mm is 20 tons of force. Now when the object breaks, the spring hardly moves at all. This is how a hydraulic press works, except the spring is oil, and oil acts like a really stiff spring.
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It’s because hydraulic fluid doesn’t compress. There isn’t any stored energy in the system so once the pump stops, the press stops
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Say I'm a secret agent and I want to hide secret files in a place someone wouldn't look, could I theoretically store and (retrieve them) them on my audio cassette tapes?
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Here is a scheme plausible enough for a screenplay. The audio cassette contains a well known piece of music such as a classical symphony, Played back it sounds to most of us to be the music we expect, but someone in the room has perfect pitch. She scowls as if fingernails are being scratched across a blackboard because she notices that in some passages each note can be heard to be slightly sharp or flat. Some one else in the room is a percussionist, he taps his fingers in time to the music and looks across to the other musician asking "do you notice the beats?", "Late, late, early, late, early." Now its the moment the otherwise artless geek perks up and exclaims "Flying fish and fiddlesticks!" for she is truly deeply nerdy, "Its a kwam signal hidden in there!" "What, the flying fish is a kwim signal?" the exasperated entertainers exclaim. "Not kwim!, it's Q A M - qam!" the nerd says confidently. Exasperation become excruciating expectation of elucidation. "Again, what is Q A M qam for those of us born on this planet?" "It stands for Quadrature Amplitude Modulation" the nerd says with a big smile like she is about to be given a prize or at least a pat on the back. When neither reward is rendered she continues "Each unexpected slight rise or fall in pitch, each delay or acceleration of the rhythm, they can be decoded to 1's and 0's. There's a hidden message of binary data!" "Ok", with puzzlement replaced by possibility the others ask, "what now." "Find an original copy of that symphony for me. We need to put both recordings through my audio analyser. You know, like in "The Conversation" but this time we go digital on this." she sniggers like she's just made a joke only she gets. "Anything else?", they now ask the nerd with barely concealed contempt having been replaced by grudging respect. "Yes, yes!" the nerd is now in the zone, "Get me a copy of 'Einstein on the Beach', no get me the whole Philip Glass back catalogue. There's a bigger conspiracy here than we imagined."
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In addition to what others have said you could also encode your data to an audio signal and re-encode to data on the computer. This would of course be entirely overly complicated and inefficient, but it would provide data storage functionality while still keeping the cassette an audio device.
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Which 3D modelling software is most used in the industry?
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In what industry?
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I think Autodesk AutoCAD is 30% of the market thanks to mostly smaller firms. Autodesk products themselves are quite popular. Revit is popular if you have any job that involves floor plans, Inventor is popular for general 3D modeling, Solidworks is a popular for car manufacturers and consulting companies, CATIA is popular in aerospace (namely Boeing), I think P&W uses NX (either that or PTC). You can get all Autodesk products with a 3 year student license which you should do and learn how to do the basics, like creating wireframes, assemblies, and drawings. Autodesk is quite similar across its products and learning Autodesk products is good for the job hunt (specifically Revit, AutoCAD, and Inventor). Also recommend learning C++ since a lot of small-medium companies pair up EEs and MEs on job assignments. Knowing C++ or Java helps you stay on the same page as your project buddy. Not sure why C++ is so popular in engineering when it is only semi popular in computer science but it is. I know Harris in specific looks to hire mechanical engineers who know C++.
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As engineers, what are some of the coolest projects youve ever worked on?
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Finite Element Analysis on the suspended looping coasters by Vekoma International. I concentrated mainly on the wheel assemblies. Good times! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_Looping_Coaster
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I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you. Well, not really true, I couldn't tell you to start with.
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American Engineers: What are your experiences with the Metric system?
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SI makes a lot more sense to me, and I much prefer to use it when doing math. In class, we always used it to solve problems. But my intuition is still set in Imperial units, having been born and raised in the U.S.. When designing, I tend to think in inches rather than centimeters, but after the brainstorming phase I convert everything to metric (and round to sensible quantities, of course). Do I wish I could think in metric and avoid the conversion step? Yes. But when I hear something is 8cm long, I can't visualize it without quickly converting to the approximate equivalent in inches: in this case, a little more than 3in.
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In school we were expected to be fluent in both however, and bear with me, in class it depended highly on the subject matter. If it was more theoretical then it was nearly 100% in SI as would only be appropriate. With other more pragmatic courses (internal combustion engines, power plant design, etc) it would be in imperial since that was more industry standard for those applications. Now I work in building system and power plant energy efficiency and we utilize both depending on the convention. Generator output and electrical use is always measured in SI, however prime movers (the engine part), motors, boilers, etc all seem to be in BTU or HP or whatever concocted unit (BHP, what the hell??) is standard there. Basically it varies. My point of view is similar to /u/aDDnTN ,basically its just more conversions. Frankly if you are even a mediocre engineer, you are capable of doing to very simple algebra required to transfer from one unit to another. It should be the least complex skill you posses and barely be counted as some sort of proficiency. In my perfect world I would argue for all SI, however I believe it has been discussed with some academic rigor that it would be severely cost prohibitive to do so in the US. Good luck on your exam!
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What were the most amazing/crazy technologies or products developed by and engineer in spite?
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The Voyager mission. JPL was denied funding for the mission beyond Saturn but the engineers decided to design the spacecraft and trajectory to intercept Uranus and Neptune anyways......once the public saw the images of the gas giants they got funding for an extended mission turned back on. Amazing foresight by those engineers and scientists.
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Not exactly what you're asking, but Thomas Edison promoted the electric chair as a method of execution in a furtive attempt to discredit 'dangerous' AC power.
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Will real-time FEA/CFD solvers eliminate the need for dedicated simulation engineering roles?
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As a rough comparison of timescales, in my work I'm currently implementing some SPH (particle-based) CFD for simulation of a fairly modest gearbox, to figure out lubrication distribution. On a few top-end GPUs this will run you ~2-3 days, and cost a few hundred pounds. That's for one case, at one operating point. ANSYS can do all the colourful marketing they want, but the truth is that at this point in time, real-time CFD won't give you much that is useful for a real industrial application. As computing power scales up, we will extend these methods to more complex problems - into large transient runs across whole drive cycles, perhaps. But I think these problems will be with us for quite some time. Also, as they get more complex, we will need smarter people to define and implement such things. I'd see the role as the potential for being at the forefront of something really, really cool - definitely not something that will become obsolete.
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A good FEA engineer should also make a good structural engineer. We will always need both, if not to run the analysis, we will need them to interpret it.
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At what frequency is electricity generated at power plants?
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It's generated at 60hz (in the US). Amusingly, you can't even "do it wrong". If you attempt to run a generator at the wrong frequency, the grid will push back with all it's might to prevent that. Bringing up a generator onto "the grid" requires syncronizing the generator before attaching it to the grid. If you miss that step, you have the entire current capacity of the grid to slam your generator into sync... which will burn out parts, or more likely, break very large mechanical parts as you have an infinite power sink to drive that turbine and generator into the right position.
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Very large turbines such as the steam turbines in a nuclear plant will indeed run synchronized to the net frequency at either 1500 or 3000RPM \~ 50hz (for US this would 1800 or 3600RPM), you can find some examples on p8 of this GE turbine document: https://www.ge.com/content/dam/gepower-pw/global/en\_US/documents/alstom/gea31902-nuclear-turbine-island-solutions-29-10-15.pdf smaller turbines may not run at the exact RPM but will generally have a conversion stage, usually mechanical or some form of torque converter for Gas turbines. all of these are generally synchronized to the net before they are coupled. ​
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Female civil engineers, how would you describe your first job experience?
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Hi there! Female structural engineer here. Ive been working almost 10 years and I'm still with my first company. Theres about 9 men and 1 other female engineer here. Sorry this might get long... Coworkers: Most engineers these days seem to realize that women in stem are becoming more common and it's not a big deal. You likely won't be the first female engineer the company has ever employed (although you might!) There have been times where I felt like my coworkers where dismissing me or not acknowledging my ideas. I'm not sure how much of that is because I'm a woman, though. Really everyone just wants to be right and prove they are smartest. Be tough (but not rude) and don't let others push you around. You will be new and they will have more experience than you, so try to learn from what they tell you and respect them just as you expect to be respected. But if you really feel your coworkers are consistently treating you poorly, speak up. Clients: Clients are the worst when it comes to sexism IMO. Most of them are not bad to work with, but you will come across a few that are. It's usually the older contractors/architects who have been doing this a long time that refuse to 'take orders' from a younger, inexperienced woman. They will test you and say things you find offensive. They will call you 'sweetheart' and tell you that they need to speak to a 'real engineer' because you couldn't possibly know how to help them. They will tell you your design is wrong and stupid and have an "I've been doing it this way my whole life, what do you know about it" kind of attitude. When that happens, stand your ground. NEVER scream or yell at your clients. It's almost like that's what they want from you. "I have to go by the code and this is what needs to be done" or "I have run the calculations and it can't be done the way you are proposing". Usually mentioning 'the code' or your 'calculations' shut them up. Social Aspect: At first I was super timid and didn't really understand the vibe of our office. I took offense to a lot of things that were said and now looking back I totally realize it was just my coworkers' way of interacting and getting to know me. I eventually set my limits with them clearly and I think that earned me a lot of respect, honestly. If they start a discussion that I find inappropriate or makes me uncomfortable, I will say something like, "seriously guys? Can we not talk about that" and they will usually apologize and admit they didn't realize I was within earshot. Also, there have been a couple of social gatherings that weren't official office parties, but everyone except for the two women were invited. Professionally I get alone fine with my coworkers, but I will never be a part of their clique. It makes me sad but it's also just sort of how it goes sometimes. Obviously this is just my experience and yours may be very different. I kind of wish someone had told me this back when I started, though. Good luck!!
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I originally started in a small office, only 7 people, with only the administrative assistant for female company. Honestly, it was a blast. The guys were not much older and were very respectful. They almost developed a brother like relationship with me, sticking up for me when needed but not afraid of cracking a joke either. My current office is very similar, about 20 people, and just me and the admin are female. Again, everyone I work with is awesome. I’ve never had an issue with coworkers. It’s the outsiders that bother me... in field work, random people like to make the joke “it’s about time they sent a pretty one” which is so inappropriate. I’ve also worked with contractors who take a long time to trust me. Or people on the phone who were forwarded to me have asked for the project manager once they hear my female voice, even though I am the project manager! As I get older I find myself sticking up for myself more. I don’t get head-on confrontational but I don’t just sit back and take it either. My favorite thing it so question them on why they think I’m an oddity. Do I wish I had another female at work? Yes, just to chat with another female engineer. But like 99% of the time, I don’t even think about it. Also it’s pretty freeing to do whatever I want with clothes and makeup because none of the guys ever comment on it.
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Why have speed limits not changed, despite automotive performance & safety making progress?
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To add: Most of the highways are not designed for vehicles to go 120 MPH. What is a comfortable turn at 75 can get a bit squirrely at 120. Add to repeat what other people have said: PEBKAC. People are really bad at judging speed and distance at the speeds we are talking about. At 120 MPH you at are going 180 FT/SEC. You are getting to the point of over driving your ability to see and react to the road conditions. Plus throw in other cars, weather, a random animal and things go sideways (literally) in a hurry.
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Speed Limits are not about the car or people in them. It's about the surroundings. Neighborhoods, pedestrians, businesses, schools are all put at higher risk with highway traffic speeds next to them.
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Why does everybody use 18650 lithium batteries?
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Others have covered some other points, but I also believe it's easier to do thermal control on smaller cells, because of the low mean distance to your heat sinking or airflow.
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I'm not an engineer but I think it has to do with versatility. This battery size allows the battery to be used in a multitude of applications, a perfect example is I'm using a vaporizer that uses 18650's to power it, it's also used in some computers as well from what I've been told. It also gives the advantage of modular replacement, if one cell goes bad, that cell can be replaced instead of the whole battery. When you think about it from a engineering perspective this makes a lot of sense to use banks of smaller batteries instead of big bulky specialized batteries.
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SpaceX-mania- does standing out in aerospace necessitate bad work-life balance?
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A few thoughts: - Prestige in a job is only worth something if you're trying to leave it. Do you want to work somewhere because it looks good on a resume or because you want to work there? - I evaluate a job by the following criteria: 1. Is the work interesting? 2. Is the work-life balance acceptable? (You answer to this will likely change over time). 3. Do I get along with the people I work with? (Not always easy to tell ahead of time) 4. Is the organization a good fit for me? (Hard to know what to look for in early career, but you'll learn to pick up on clues and things to ask during the interview as your career progresses) 5. Does the compensation meet my needs? (Look at the whole picture: salary, insurance, retirement, vacation, especially in the context of the cost of living where you will be working) For me personally, the answers for SpaceX are yes, HARD no, maybe, probably yes, and no. - In my experience, moving up in aerospace is about doing **good** work, not **more** work. My salary increased by about 50% within 5 years or so of hiring in where I work, and I've made a name for myself more than anything else by setting expectations appropriately regarding the quality and timeliness of my work and meeting them. - Start off doing 60 hour weeks and you are going to get tired. You are going to burn out. The quality of your work will suffer. People will come to expect your 60-hour output. When you can't keep that up anymore and have to drop back to something sustainable, it will look to your management and internal customers as a drop in productivity because you set unrealistic expectations. End result: you will have a bad time.
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Work to live, young engineer, don't live to work. Extra hours are fine if you're getting paid for them but always remember: 1) you're an engineer, so money won't always be a problem for you and 2) "every Bob made on the job is paid with flesh and blood." I guess what I'm saying is, if you wanna live long enough to collect a retirement, prioritize satisfaction over prestige. But to answer your specific question: no, you don't need prestige to stand out. Just basic competence, especially once the greybeards start retiring en masse.
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Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (IASSC) vs Six Sigma Black Belt (ASQ) Do you have any advice which one to get/which one is more valuable in certain industries?
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dont waste your time and money for lean and six sigma courses. Instead study on your own. Lean is a way of thinking, a life philosophy and the way you treat yourself, your work and other people. It is also a leadership approach. Non of it can be learned during a course. If you really want to do lean, you must study it for yourself and then go out an work with people on the shopfloor, be humble and lead them to continuous improvement of their working environment. Sounds easy, but it is extremely difficult. Only few succeeded. Six Sigma is a sophisticated statistical approach to support lean efforts. If you want to become a Lean Thinker read those books: * Taiichi Ohno: *Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production* * William Edwards Deming: *Out of the Crisis* * Jeffery Liker: *The Toyota Way* * Paul Akers: *2 Second Lean* (eBook is available for free, just google it) * Mike Rother: *Toyota Kata**: Managing People for Improvement* * David Mann: *Creating a Lean Culture* \--------- when you finish these books and you'll learn to see, you can start with Six Sigma, because without solid lean foundations, it will only be a superficial attempt to start a next new cost control program, an Lean is not cost-control!!! #
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The important thing is to be able to think critically and statistically about a problem. A certificate generally matters less though you may still want to throw the buzzwords out to get through the door. To me it is actually a negative because it means you just wanted to check the box and don't have what it takes to gain / apply that knowledge otherwise. Generally speaking, the more alphabet soup behind someones name in their email the more of an idiot they probably are.
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Matlab or Excel for calculations at work?
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I’m a mechanical engineer working on shock and vibration analysis for structures. I’ve been using mostly MatLab and excel. Excel is a given, you should know that for sure. It’s super versatile and can be used in many different applications. How I use it is for post-processing of data (good for applying formulas to a lot of data quickly) and they also generate prettier plots than MatLab which is good from a client communication perspective. I use matlab to do the heavy lifting. They have a lot of useful prebuilt functions, you can create your own functions,etc. I’ve been using it to go through a directory of folders, processing the data in each folder and outputting data files, MatLab figures and PDFs. I’ve been using it to calculate power spectral densities, converting narrow band frequency to octave band, data using various statistical methods like Karhunen-Loeve to name a few.
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Python > excel > matlab for me. Matlab has only been used when there has been an requirement to do so. Excel is handy when I interact with people who’s not familiar with python (and it’s something small and simple).
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Failure Friday (17 Dec 2021): Break something at the office this week?
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Minutes ago I closed the final version of a submittal due in 2 hours… without saving it anywhere.
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I did a webinar for 1000 people and realized as I was presenting that I had made an error in my calcs. Had a grumpy email from a VP in my inbox before I even finished the program. Fucking embarrassing.
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"What are your long term goals?"
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Does "Become independently wealthy so I can spend the days jerkin it and playing video games" work? On a more serious note, it's kind of a "what do you want to become?" sort of question. Do you want to go the technical route and be a senior engineer with a PE or do you want to go the management route and have a team of 20 engineers working underneath you? Do you want to work as a designer or in the field? It's a hard question to answer when you are younger because you haven't had time to vet out what you like and dislike in a workplace setting.
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Early retirement.
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What daily stuff of your job do you automate using scripts?
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Nothing. I started a couple things before management caught wind and told me that by me making the process more efficient, it would take less time, which means we charge the client less time, which means less revenue. I’m looking for other work currently.
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Making coffee.
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Should I abandon EE school to become an electrician?
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19k per semester is a ridiculous sum of money. How many actual classes do you need to graduate? Can you pay per credit, take 1 or 2 classes a semester while working as an electrician? Take longer but may be more doable
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>I'm only about 2.5 years away from my degree Isn't it a 3 year degree? Anyway, if you think you can finish it, do it. You can always work as electrician after you get your degree. Judging by what you wrote, seems like you want a degree but you aren't ready to put in work. Online or not, it requires a lot of work and discipline. Managing time and being organized are first things that you should look into. I've spent few hours studying almost each day.
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Why isn't common angular measurement from 0 to 100 degrees?
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Embedded software engineers (like me) will divide rotations into "binary radians", with 256 (or 65536) divisions per rotation. This makes the most use of the processor's register size, and has the convenient property of 255 + 1 = 0. Rotations are handled automatically by the wrapping of the register.
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Because our modern system of measuring both time and angles is based on the math systems of ancient Mesopotamia people. Those cultures' (Babylonian, Assyrians) numbers were base 60 not 10 like ours. That's why you have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle. I'm on my phone so I can't link it, but type 'Assyrians base 60' on google and read the first link which is to a PDF.
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What alternative methods could be used to transport water to the higher levels of an extremely tall skyscraper?
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Also consider that if you were going to store and distribute water from the top floor, the head pressure at the bottom of the building would be very high. You're probably going to use multiple header tanks for this reason anyway and this makes multiple pumping stages even more appropriate.
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Steam doesn't rise spontaneously, it rises due to bouyancy. Less dense fluids rise when in more dense fluids, if density differences are due to temperature then heat will transfer. This is why you need to constantly burn fuel to keep a hot air balloon afloat and ultimately why your idea won't work - heating stuff to make it rise uses lots of energy. It takes a lot of energy to boil water. The amount of thermal energy required to turn 100 degree liquid water into 100 degree steam is equal to the mechanical energy to lift that water 230 metres. By no coincidence you need to remove the exact same large amount of heat energy from water vapour to turn it back into liquid water, so condensing clouds is also very energy intensive. You need cooled (refrigerated) surfaces for condensation to take place. Also, your water supply is at the mercy of the weather at one very small area, low humidity for a week? No water. So staged pumping is, and for the foreseeable future, the best we have.
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How do I communicate to my team that mechanical engineering isn't a quick and simple task?
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You’ll appreciate this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
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Make a cube with a lot of holes to hold boxes and define the interface for the boxes. Put the electronic in the boxes, and let them decide the interface there. Done 😂. Set a schedule for yourself, and be pragmatic on what do you use your time on. Don't use your time to redefine the wheel. And whenever you can, run away from there.
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Engineering-wise how feasible is it to build the Trump's wall?
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From an engineering standpoint, I'd point you to the following two sources: The Great Wall of China is 13,171 miles long The US/Mexico Border is 1,952 miles long Obviously, there's no reason it isn't *technically* possible.
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Technically speaking its feasible. Structurally a wall is pretty simple to design and build, especially since such a wall would only have to resist dead loads (the weight of the wall), wind and live loads (the weight of anybody who does manage to get on top). It gets a little more complicate if you want to make the wall harder to bypass. Taller ads costs, as does extending it underground to discourage tunneling. Same thing for building multiple walls for defense in depth. Its less about the engineering challenges and more an issue of costs. The wall will be expensive, simply because 3144km of anything is expensive. The biggest challenges are political, financial and project management.
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Is it possible to craft functioning, non-destructive, guided missiles for RC planes?
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Do you want to be put on a list cause that's how you get put on a list.
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Guided implies that the flying time of the missile is long enough to perform meaningful course corrections. This poses a fundamental problem in that it will need a lot of energy to fly in a sustained way. I'm not going to say it's impossible, but the added constraints of "nondestructive" makes this very difficult. Anywhere you have a lot of stored energy involved in a collision, it's hard to make it nondestructive. The best fitting "self propelled" projectile I can think of is an air rocket. Bottle rockets might be an option as well. They are _relatively_ harmless. I think the self guiding thing makes this hard on the scale you're considering. Maybe it would be easier to have "aim assist" on the release mechanism on the plane.
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Is this true?
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Here is the entire quote: >When Cortés and his men landed on the sunny beaches of today's Veracruz, it was the first time the Aztecs encountered a completely unknown people. >The Aztecs did not know how to react. They had trouble deciding what these strangers were. Unlike all known humans, the aliens had white skins. They also had lots of facial hair. Some had hair the color of the sun. They stank horribly. (Native hygiene was far better than Spanish hygiene.) >When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico, natives bearing incense burners were assigned to accompany them wherever they went. The Spaniards thought it was a mark of divine honor. We know from native sources that they found the newcomers smell unbearable. The native people of Veracruz weren't even known as Aztecs. That immediately jumps out to me. Aztecs lived hundreds of miles away and were rivals. If I'm not mistaken they were Totonacas.
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I am not able to get a hold of the book online at the moment, and I'm not on campus to look myself. What source does he cite specifically when he states "native sources"?
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What even was the German plan to defeat America?
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Plainly put, Germany's plans were quite vague. Hitler had a notion of a coming superpower showdown between the United States and Germany, which we can trace back to the 1920s, and which the more immediate conquests to the east were intended to fuel, as noted by Tooze: >one last great land grab in the East that] would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States. But it is important to emphasize that he wasn't talking purely in terms of military conquest, but rather in terms of Germany becoming the dominant superpower in the world in the more general sense. Certainly the need to go toe-to-toe with the US was clear enough, but his plans for that weren't. A large part was the naive belief that the United Kingdom would agree about the threat of the US and side with Germany, providing the obvious, necessary naval might needed to control the Atlantic. This *obviously* didn't come to pass, but in turn tightening relations with Japan supplanted that and now it was the Japanese Navy which in German minds would provide the necessary naval component, and in fact was a significant factor in German willingness to declare war in 1941 despite the lack of a specific treaty obligation. But planning never went much further than that. Vague ideas of spheres of influence, and some rough sketching out of long-range air campaigns with planes that never even entered production can be found, but I think the best summary comes from the Japanese Ambassador, who reported a conversation he had with Hitler in early 1942 where the summary amounted to "How one defeats the USA, [Hitler] does not know yet". There were always more immediate concerns, be it the French, the British, or the Soviets, and direct, military challenge to the United States just never went beyond the day-dreaming stage. This is a brief sketch though, and for a more thorough treatment, I would point to [this older answer of mine which covers similar ground, as well as this one which is more focused on the background of pre-war attitudes towards the USA.
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Are there any disagreements between English and U.S historians on any facts/aspects of the American Revolution?
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This is an interesting question and something that people have been wondering about for a long time. Before I can answer it, I feel like it is worth disclaiming that I am not British, in terms of national origin. I am American, was educated from elementary school through my graduate program entirely in America, so when I speak here, I am talking about what academic historians say about the American Revolution on the university level stage. I have no knowledge what schools, books, or teachers say for students beneath college level. Fortunately, since the American Revolution is something studied globally, I’ve studied historiographical debates of modern and previous historians in Britain, and I will be happy to discuss that here. Overall, the majority of historians who studied and reported on the American Revolution currently have no major conflicts with American historians who study the same time period, but this is not true for all of the last two centuries. The first person to tackle this question was British historian Richard Middleton, who conducted research and wrote about it in his article, “British Historians and the American Revolution” . His article mainly seeks to study what early British historians said and reported on the American Revolution. I feel obligated to point out that in these early days of the discipline of academic history scholarship, being objective was not something that was desired. Early historians, generally speaking had very little problem with letting their biases show. This drastically changed during the middle of the 20th century, as historians sought to become more objective in their study and reporting of history. It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of British scholarship in the first century and a half after the American Revolution took place was mainly focused on British perspectives; such as British politics and economics during that period. Americans, especially during the 19th century conducted a lot of history related to the biographies of the "Founding Fathers" and also many sub-topics within the war itself (like military history of the Continental Army). Far fewer British historians studied American perspectives on the war, such as the Continental Congress, the Founding Fathers, or the Contiental Army. Middleton noted that many British historians were British apologists, who did side more favorably with the British Crown's decisions during the war and were very critical of the rebelling colonists. This article does a few interesting things, first it accounts for a history of early British Historians who studied the American Revolution and notes that some of the early historians from the late 18th century were in fact more favorable in their views of the rebelling colonists, but they were the minority. Historians tended to be torn between two radical positions in the U.K. One historian, Sir George Otto Trevelyan created a three-volumne account of the American Revolutionary War between 1874 and 1880. Trevelyan, a liberal, reported that the first twenty years of King George III’s reign was a period of regression for English laws and and rights. His writing reflects that the Americans were justified in overthrowing the British government, calling the Americans “law respecting people, who did not care to encroach on the privileges of others and liked still less to have their own rights invaded.’ Middleton, 50]. This created one of the first historiographical debates in this particular field, with other men, like William Massey and William Lecky arguing for the traditional “Tory” view of the war. Where Trevelyan came down hard on royal governors and British officials in America, historians like Lecky was much more gentle on them, saying that they were just loyal men trying to fulfil their duties to the King. [Middleton 51]. Ultimtely, Middleton noted a few key differences between these earlier types of scholarship between American and British scholarship on the war: > From this study of British historians and the American Revolution, one or ore general conclusions can be drawn. In the first place, there has bee na curious dichotomy between scholars on both sides of the Atlantic as to what actually constituted the Revolution. Most British writers do not appear to consider it to be properly underway until the fateful year of 1775, while for most American writers, it was then merely a matter of dotting the ‘i’s’ and crossing the ‘t’s’ on the declaration of independence [sic]. There has also been little attempt to understand the revolt of the thirteen colonies by analysis of their social, economic, or politiocal development, lines of approach for so long popular with the American historians. [Middleton, 58] Historians during the 20th century, especially in the post World War II era appeared to settle more soundly into the more objective approach to history. Middleton spoke also of, at the time of the publication of that article in 1971, how there was a revival of the British study of the American Revolution during his present because of the infusion of American culture, history, and politics that exploded in those preceding decades. [Middleton, 56] In recent history, the vast majority of historical scholarship that has come out (at least as what I’ve seen and studied] has not conflicted with the current consensus of scholarship coming out of the United States. Some British historians, like Stanley Weintraub’s *Iron Tears* has [pointed out some differences that he sees in views of the American Revolution, but nothing really seems too far out that it would conflict with what other historians would say. For instance, he shows that from the British perspective, the “taxation without representation” rallying cry of the colonists was a bit weak of an argument from the British perspective because many of the Englishmen living in England were not represented in Parliament either. (His book though more-so focuses on how the Average person in Britain felt about the war, rather than focusing on Historians studying that period). Overall, modern scholarship between historians of the United States and Britain tends to add to the historical conversation in general on this topic, rather than causing conflict between them. Historians will disagree in every field, it's why consensus does not have the same power as a fact, but there isn't anything fundamentally different between scholarship coming out of the U.K. versus what is coming out of the United States or other countries. Edit: fixed typos
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Was Cleopatra's famously exaggerated beauty the work of her enemies?
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I wrote my dissertation on Roman representations of Cleopatra in Literature and there are a few issues with this statement. First of all, Roman authors tend to not actually refer to Cleopatra as beautiful. Plutarch even says she is not as beautiful as Mark Antony's Wife Octavia (Plurarch, Life of Antony section 54?). What Roman authors do tend to say about Cleopatra as that she is power hungry, sexually promiscuous, and foreign to Rome. Propertius, Elegies 3.11 describes Cleopatra as a 'woman who fornicated even with her slaves. Virgil only describes her as an 'Egyptian wife' on the verge of suicide (Virgil, Aeneid,8.709) , and Horace says she is 'drunk', 'perverted', 'in a frenzy' and 'crazed' (Horace, Odes 1.37). Plutarch says that she spoke several languages and, more importantly, specifically says that she managed the ruling of Alexandria and Egypt well! (Plutarch, Life of Antony, 27). The idea of Cleopatra being this beautiful woman tends to come from later cinema, think Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra (for more on this I would reccomend D.W Roller (2010) Cleopatra: A biography. To say that the ancient sources give us an entirely negative view of Cleopatra is false, but it is important to remember that Cleopatra is seen against a backgrop of Foreign, specificially Eastern, decadence, and against the power systems and political powers which were allowed of women in Ancient Rome. She tends to be painted as Manipulative rather than beautiful, alluring and dangerous rather than seductive. She is painted this way because her powers, being the Pharoh of Egypt, was so so far removed from the powers which would be allowed of Roman women in the Late Republic/Early empire that there was no way to assimilate her. Therefore, she tends to be painted like this. So yes, there is an element of Rome not ebing able to process a capable woman, but Cleopatra is not, and has never been 'made' beautiful by the ancient sources, we, as a modern society, have only inferred this from the sources. But it is important to remember that Cleopatra has been credited, even in ancient times, with cleverness, and an ability to rule. Edited to add: DISS LINK AT BOTTOM Ancient Sources: Horace, *Carmina,* tr. N. Rudd (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004). Plutarch, *Comparison of Demetrius and Antony*, tr. I. Scott-Kilvert and C. B. R. Pelling (London, 2010). Plutarch, *Vitae Antonius*, tr. I. Scott-Kilvert and C. B. R. Pelling (London, 2010). Propertius, *Elegies*, tr. G.P. Goold (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990). Vergil, *Aeneid,* tr. F. Ahl (Oxford, 2007). Modern Sources: Harders, A.C. (2015), ‘Consort or Despot? How to deal with a Queen at the end of the Roman Republic and at the beginning of the Principate’ in H. Börm (ed.) *Antimonarchic Discourse in Antiquity* (Stuttgart) 181-215. Jones, P. (2006) *Cleopatra: A Sourcebook* (Norman, Oklahoma). Pelling, C. B. R. (1988) *Plutarch: Life of Antony* (Cambridge) Roller, D.W. (2010) *Cleopatra: A Biography* (Oxford). Tarn. W. W (1934) ‘Cleopatra’ in S.A. Cook, F.E. Adcock and M.P. Charlesworth (eds) Cambridge Ancient History (Volume X) (London) 35-40 Wyke, M. (1992) ‘Augustan Cleopatras: female power and poetic authority’ in A. Powell (ed) *Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus* (Bristol) 98-141. (this one is likely the most important for what you are looking for) Edit: Link to Diss here since so many people are asking. Its not wholly on Cleopatra, and it has some untranslated Latin but its pretty simple. Its an undergrad diss so you cant go quoting me in your essays sadly. PM me if you have any wild questions about it! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1a2so3juJ2sfhMVbzh8oaz4AUopDZsNBW/view?usp=sharing
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Greetings. Not to discourage further responses, but do check out these older answers : Most people see Cleopatra as an Egyptian, but she was actually Greek. What is her real story and how did we come to the legends about her? by u/cleopatra_philopater Cleopatra is pretty (in)famous for her sexual exploits at this point. Is this based in ancient accounts or is it a modern invention? by u/cleopatra_philopater and u/XenophonTheAthenian Hope this helps.
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Is Indiana Jones a good archeologist or is there some things he isn’t doing right?
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*(This is an extension of my thoughts here)* From the available biographical evidence, we have every reason to believe that Indiana Jones is a good archaeologist. I've previously covered what training Indiana Jones would have received, what professors he would have had, and who his colleagues might have been. I've also looked into what kind of school he taught at However, not much more can really be said about Indiana Jones' archaeological methodology, because we rarely see him in anything but extraordinary circumstances. The majority of the films are about him acquiring precious or powerful artifacts before someone nefarious does: * The Hovitos idol in the opening of *Raiders*, which Indy must get before Beloq * The Ark of the Covenant in *Raiders*, which Indy must find before the Third Reich uses it to conquer the world * The Sankara stone in *Temple of Doom*, which Indy must recover (there's nothing vageuly archaeological in the whole film, the entire film is set in towns/palaces/temples that are still in use) * The cross of Coronado in the opening of *Last Crusade*, which Indy tries to steal from looters * The Holy Grail in *Last Crusade*, which Indy must again reach before a Nazi officer uses it * The eponymous *Crystal Skull*, which Indy must steal back from the Soviets The only instance where we see Dr. Jones doing any kind of research or, really, any kind of search that he instigated himself, is at the start of *Raiders*. The opening shots clearly show a well-equipped team loaded with all kinds of equipment for a proper excavation. It's not long before Indy realizes something is up. He takes Satipo alone into the Hovitos temple, and proceeds through it with extreme caution, showing the requisite skills for any archaeologist: keen observation, knowledge of the cultural context, and careful steps to avoid damaging the architecture or himself. Fully aware that there are less scrupulous people after him, Indy is very much in the right to take the idol and leave. Soon he is betrayed and captured, and we're left without knowing anything else of Indy's own interests. I'll admit that Indy's trek into the rat-infested tomb under Venice shows him in a more negative light- he rips some burial cloth for a torch. But when he and Elsa reach the knight's sarcophagus, Indy does a non-destructive rubbing of the lid, which, given the time constraints and non-feasibility of photography, seems reasonable. Indiana Jones is not a tomb raider because we never see him to set out to raid tombs. He clearly meant to do much more at the Hovitos temple than was actually done. He takes the Ark of the Covenant, or attempts to, so that the Nazis can't access the full power of God. He steals the Sankara stone back from the murderous cult that stole it from its proper owners. The entire point of the *Last Crusade* is that Indy is not interested in the goose chase that his father has gotten caught up in, but in spite of this must take a literal leap of faith to save his father and prevent the Nazis from getting the key to immortality. **If the question is tomb raiding or all-powerful Nazis, the correct answer is tomb raiding.** If he's not a tomb raider, then what is he? The Indiana Jones films are explicitly modeled after the pulp magazines, radio shows, and early comic books of the 1930s-1940s, as well as the adventure novels of the preceding decades. There's a clear inspiration for Indy in Allan Quartermain, Professor Challenger, and Doc Savage: characters whose bravado or inquiry lead to run-ins with exotic tribes, Lost Worlds, and ancient legendary ruins. This is the same tradition that gave us the secret identity: The Spider was >!Richard Wentworth!<, The Shadow was >!Kent Allard!<, and Batman was >!Bruce Wayne!<. In a literary sense, Indiana Jones falls right into this trope. He's a vigilante who hides his activities from the public, but is known by an elite few for his exploits and by a trusted team of supporting allies. For this reason, I would argue that Indiana Jones is an archaeologist in the same way that Hal Jordan is an Air Force pilot or Peter Parker is a news photographer. Hal Jordan's pilot skills help him as a Green Lantern just as Indiana Jones' archaeology skills help him as an adventurer. The stories we see about him don't show him in his civilian career, but in pulp hero mode. ___ But what of the archaeology of it? What Dr. Jones is doing is what we would call surface collection or salvage archaeology. Before any excavation, and sometimes during the initial survey and registration of a site, a team will collect artifacts that can be found on the surface, This will be done systematically and unobtrusively. Some archaeologists will plot transects (i.e. parallel, regularly spaced lines) that a team will walk across to record features, identify locations of high artifact concentration, and, as necessary, collect surface artifacts. Other projects prefer to this in grids, plotting out regular boxes that can be then assigned values. In either case, should artifacts be collected, their original location will be noted on a hand drawn map or with a GPS point, and they will often be photographed in situ. Why would archaeologists do this? First of all, because these artifacts are on the surface, it is unlikely that they are what we call a "primary deposition," that is, where the culture that used it left. It is likely a case of secondary deposition, decontextualized by burrowing animals, erosion, or agricultural activity. Thus, we only lose so much information by collecting it. There is an entire disciple called "taphonomy" that is dedicated to the study of how things end up where they do, but, even then, the amount of taphonomic information on the surface is limited. Second, surface artifacts are very helpful for understanding a site before excavation, and therefore directing where further research takes place. Excavation is costly and destructive, and should be done as little as possible. Archaeologists want to be sure that any excavation they do will offer useful data. The form of artifacts can inform what kind of activities were happening in area, their style can help date the site, and their area of distribution can help define the coverage of habitation. Lastly, surface collection can be necessary in areas where looting is a real and present danger. An archaeological dig is a beacon for looters. In my own work, I've returned to an operation in the morning and found shovels and stacks of ceramic sherds left by lazy looters in nearby tombs. When artifacts are sitting in the open and looters are known to be active, it is much better to extensively document those artifacts and collect them than it is for them to be looted and never seen again. Thus, in the situation where a golden idol is sitting on a pedestal at a site you're about to excavate with a series of spikey traps in front of it, *you grab that idol.* I mentioned salvage archaeology because that's the closest real-world correlate to getting the Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis do. There's an entire commercial field of archaeology called contract archaeology or Cultural Resource Management (CRM). In many countries, before major construction can begin, a contractor must submit an impact statement showing that the construction will not have a substantial environmental or geological impact. They must also prove that it won't have detrimental archaeological impact. If the state is building a highway bypass, or an electrical company is building a new line, or a town wants to institute a new technological park, they will hire a CRM team to survey the land that will be built on. We go out, dig a series of test pits, and look for any evidence of occupation. This is quick and dirty work. On my best days I could dig 25 of these "Phase 1" test pits. Unlike the slow, careful survey I describe above, Phase 1 CRM surveys try to cover as much ground as possible as quickly, but as orderly, as possible. You dig a hole (something like 30cm x 30cm, and down until you hit bedrock or sterile clay), you record the soil strata, and mark if you found any cultural material. Then you move on. When a hole is positive, you might dig some more in a grid around it. If there's a large cluster of positive test pits, you might move on to Phase 2: carefully excavating 1m x 1m test squares to identify cultural features (e.g. post holes, trash pits). If you've got cultural features, a Phase 3 excavation might be begin- you've got a site! You've also (usually) got a mad construction company. One week you're excavating is one week they're not building and one week their client has to wait. The fact that any archaeological survey is happening is great. But the pressure is always there to get moving so other folks can get building. There are great CRM firms, and I was privileged to work for an incredible one. There are also terrible ones. But in both cases, you are operating with the knowledge that everything you see is about to be destroyed to make way for a road, building, or parking lot. That means that if we do a Phase 2 operation and don't find any cultural features, we go in with a bulldozer to scrape away huge swaths of dirt 10cm at a time. Is this destructive? Heckin' duh. But it's exactly what's going to happen to the land anyways. It's a last ditch effort to find and salvage any cultural material that may be there. __
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A side question on the history of archeology, would Dr Jones have been a good or bad Archeologist in his period?
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What's the origin of the marsh/swamp as an evil and foreboding place in film, literature and other media?
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There is almost certainly no single origin for the trope of the grim, mysterious, or downright evil wetland. It appears in cultures across the globe, in early texts as well as more recent media. Wetlands cover about a quarter of the Earth’s land area, and there are many, many types—peat bogs, salt marshes, mangrove swamps, floodplains… Given this impossible-to-cover scope, I’m going to point to just a few factors that may play into the negative perception of such biomes, at least for some cultures, at least some of the time. Also I’m interpreting the “evil and foreboding” of your question pretty widely, to encompass a spectrum of weird, supernatural, and frightening associations. I’ll cover five broad categories of spookiness associated with wetlands: disease, predators, natural dangers, the concept of the liminal, and lawlessness. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, and there's undoubtedly more to be said. Also, as you’ll see, aspects of each of these qualities inform and shade into one another. /u/lunes8 goes into this in more detail, so just briefly: the association between wetlands and disease isn’t some relic of ancient superstition. Mosquitoes still kill about 700,000 people a year, far more than any other type of animal. As this map shows, more than half of the world’s land was malarial prior to the twentieth century, and this half included nearly all regions that were historically densely populated. Cholera, typhoid, and other nasty diseases are likewise linked to water supply, and so to the landscapes from which people draw their water. In premodern Eurasia, the killing power of wetlands was associated with the “miasma,” the fetid vapors of decay that rise from swamps. The ancient Greeks and Chinese alike attributed numerous fatal diseases to this fog, and the belief that miasma causes epidemics was prevalent into the 19th century before finally being replaced by germ theory. Moving on to somewhat larger animals, wetlands are home to a number of dangerous beasts, including crocodilians, snakes, sharks and other predatory fish. The Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest on the Bay of Bengal, contains a famously deadly population of tigers. Bears, boars, hippos, and other irascible megafauna also frequent these habitats, particularly at times of year when humans may also be more likely to enter them in search of resources like salmon or mast. Alongside—and perhaps at least somewhat inspired by—these biological creatures are the countless monsters said to dwell in swamps, marshes, lakes, and rivers: the Stymphalian birds and Hydra of Greek myth, the Australian bunyip, the mishipeshu or “underwater panther” of indigenous North/Northeastern America, the nahang of the Iranian world (whose name means something like “the one who pulls its prey beneath the surface”), and the Swamp Apes and Loch Ness Monsters of modern cryptozoology, to cite just a few. Some scary water dwellers, like Peg Powler of the Tees, may play “nursery bogey” roles, keeping children cautious around dangerous activities (like straying too close to deep water.) Others, like Grendel, are used to express complex anxieties about culture, history, and colonization. But in various forms, their stories are told worldwide, rooting a deep connection between wetlands and uncanny, often malevolent beings. Probably equally important for the imagining of these monsters are the numerous natural dangers of wetland environments. Quicksand is probably the most cinematic. Drowning remains the leading non-congenital cause of death for children 1-4, and traditional balladry is full of woeful tales of drowned lovers. Simply getting lost in the wilds is incredibly dangerous, and shifting ground, mist, lack of landmarks, and thick vegetation can all make wetlands especially easy (and treacherous) places to get lost. The power of swamps to bewilder travelers is typified by will-o’-the-wisps, glowing atmospheric phenomena (probably including flares of marsh gas as well as bioluminescent animals and plants) imagined as wicked spirits leading the unwary into the mire. The presence of supernatural beings is in turn linked to the perception of wetlands as liminal or transitional zones. They often occur at the junctures between different biomes, and around bodies of water which have often functioned as boundary markers for human societies. Wetland topography is regularly re-shaped by flooding and other forces, and constant transformation is also perceptible in the amphibious creatures that live in these areas. These and other associations have given an explicitly otherworldly cast to wetlands in numerous cultures. Many peoples associated with the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex along and east of the Mississippi River identify the wet, gloomy, and transformational aspects of swamps with the Lower World, a realm of chaos and death as well as wealth and fecundity. In Northwestern Europe, lakes and bogs are frequently depicted as passage points between the human world and otherworldly realms. Medieval texts like *Branwen ferch Llŷr* and *Tydorel* describe the terrifying consequences of human interactions with the denizens of these underwater spaces. As with the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, there was a recognition that wetlands contained great wealth for those who dared to delve into them—but that these rewards were often guarded by uncanny powers. There really was literal treasure in European wetlands—many Bronze and Iron Age goods have been recovered from ritual deposit sites in pools, swamps, and marshes. The occasional association of such items with bog bodies, corpses eerily mummified in peat bogs, may have further contributed to the perception of wetlands as sites inhabited by bizarre and unsettling entities. And of course, as /u/ThatHapsburgMapGuy says, wetlands have always been inhabited by human societies. While I disagree with their contention that the vilification of wetlands “must be recognized as a discourse of modernity”--there are few more evil swamps in literature than Grendel and his mother’s lair in Beowulf—I fully agree that it is, also and often, “a discourse of exclusion.” Following their citation of James Scott, it’s reasonable to say that wetlands are up there with mountains and deserts as biomes that have historically resisted systems of state control and legibility. Border zones, difficult to map, dangerous to outsiders for all the reasons discussed above, very hard to pacify with roads and fortresses—wetlands have long attracted those who seek to live outside (or on the margins of) states. People move to, or stay in, these zones for a variety of reasons: for example, holy solitude (like Saint Guthlac), banditry (as depicted in the great Chinese novel *Shuihu zhuan*, ‘Water Margin’ or ‘Outlaws of the Marsh’), freedom from taxation and conscription (as with the runaway serfs who contributed to the formation of Cossack communities along the Dnieper), or anticolonial resistance (the last native Prince of Wales, Dafydd ap Gruffydd, and the Wampanoag sachem Metacomet are only two of the many resistance leaders who made their last stands in swamps). From the perspective of central governments, these regions and their intractable communities are easy to depict as enemies of civilization, even as states covet the resources they hold. All of these features feed into the fictional “bad reputation” of wetlands. Note, though, that especially the last two factors can have a positive valence, depending on narratorial perspective. For every foreboding swamp, there is an idyllic riverbank, Yoda’s hut, or rebel stronghold. These contest the discourse of wetlands as obstacles to human flourishing, and insist instead on their ecological, social, and political importance.
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This is a much bigger question than meets the eye. The first point to note is that swamps and wetlands were vastly more common prior to the seventeenth century, and were always home to human communities for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Whether in waterlogged mountain valleys or in the vast marshes which stretched alongside the always-shifting rivers, people lived alongside and in wetlands for almost all of human history. James Scott has recently argued (somewhat provocatively) that wetlands were the real cradle of civilization, hosting settled communities many centuries before the first city-states coalesced \[Scott, 2017\]. And more specifically for Northern and Central Europe in Early-Modernity, the cold and wet climatic patterns of the Little Ice Age probably meant that living with water was a normal aspect of human life for the majority. And while disease has already been noted here, wetlands could provide essential resources for survival. For example, when the uplands dried out in the early spring and late summer, livestock could reliably be put to pasture in wetlands and served as keystone species \[Biro et al. 2019\]. When agriculture failed due to disease, climate, or war, the wetland offered a reliably extreme diversity of food sources, not to mention refuge from landlords, tax collectors, and pillagers. Certainly African slaves and Native Americans found the dense wetlands of colonial America places of refuge and security, where they founded maroon communities. Perhaps as late as the 1850s in Hungary (the Pákász), 1991 in Iraq (the Marsh Arabs), and even today in the Danube Delta in Romania (the Lipoveni) communities continued to live in wetlands on mixed cultivation and hunter-gathering, sometimes using reeds to build their homes. So the question of how swamps and wetlands became places of evil must be recognized as a discourse of modernity, and as a discourse of exclusion. When early modern European writers talk about the people who live in swamps, they invariably emphasize their backwardness, sickliness, and lack of industry. Malaria is a very good reason to not want to live in an early-Modern wetland, but this discourse is one specifically used to justify the drainage of wetland for intensive agriculture first by the aristocracy, and then later (in the mid to late eighteenth century) by the Absolutist state. As David Blackbourn observes, "violence was the midwife of reclamation." Attempts to drain wetlands invariably met with local opposition, like the famous "Fen Tigers" who sabotaged the draining of seventeenth-century England. For this reason, land clearance became a military affair, and one of the key reasons for the founding of military engineering corps in the Habsburg Empire, Prussia, and to a lesser degree France and England. Even today, it's the US Army Corps of Engineers which is responsible for building and maintaining the massive dikes desperately trying to keep control over the Mississippi River. At the same time, the people who lived in and relied upon wetlands were always intentionally made invisible. Back to your original question. I would say that while wetlands have always been avoided for their diseases by some, the negative idea of swamps as evil and foreboding was radically intensified in the nineteenth century, in narratives written about the landscape that existed before mass drainage works. Where the Hungarian bishop Nicolaus Olahus describes the marshes of the Banat region in the sixteenth-century as extremely rich in fish products, 300 years later the Hungarian revolutionary nobleman Mór Jókai describes the same region as being (in the previous century) a "waste and roadless empire of marshes; a country of wolves, of frogs and turtles... covered both for people and beasts by a poising mist" \[Magina, 2015\]. He gets even weirder, claiming that there were clouds of mosquitoes and gadflies so thick that they could kill cows, and so many "serpents and other reptiles’ armies" that outside in the fields their heads rose like never yet seen plants." Thing is, Olahus described a landscape he could see around him, while Jókai was describing a world that was already long gone. For reference, I'm hoping to start a project mapping biomass loss between the 1780s and 1820s in the Habsburg Empire using the first topographic maps. My back-of-the-napkin estimate is something like an 85% reduction in the wetland of the Tisza \[Theiß\] river in southern Hungary due to canalization, way before environmental and climate data even began to be recorded. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2017. David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany, 2007. András Vadas, Weather anomalies and climatic change in late medieval Hungary: Identifying environmental impact, M.A thesis (Budapest: CEU, 2010). Adrian Magina, From Swamp to Blessed Land: Transforming Medieval Landscape in the Banat, 2015. Timothy G. Anderson, Cameralism and the production of space in the eighteenth-century Romanian Banat: the grid villages of the ‘Danube Swabians’, 2020. Biro et al., Reviewing historical traditional knowledge for innovative conservation management: A re-evaluation of wetland grazing, 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341440968\_Conservation\_and\_herding\_co-benefit\_from\_traditional\_extensive\_wetland\_grazing
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Towards the end of WW2, why did the Nazis not resort to chemical weapons on their retreat all the way to Berlin, especially on the eastern front?
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Overall, practical reasons stemming from the fear of retaliation figured heavily in the Germans' choice not to employ chemical weapons in the final years and months of the European War, and moral concerns were far from the only factors playing into German thinking. First, Ian Kershaw's *Hitler: A Biography* reveals that by the late stages of the war Hitler was distinctly fearful of Allied initiation of chemical warfare despite their commitment to a no-first-use policy. In a February 1945 conversation with Goebbels, Hitler exclaimed that in the event of an Allied usage of chemical weapons, he would order the mass execution of large numbers of captured British and American prisoners of war. [1] Records of Hitler's conversations with his inner circle demonstrate that by early 1945, Hitler possessed little compassion for either enemy combatants or even for German soldiers. In response to the bombing of Dresden in mid-February, Hitler had to be talked out of shooting Allied POWs en masse in retaliation. One of the aspects of this proposed war crime that appealed to him most was that the Allies might execute German POWs in revenge, motivating German soldiers to fight harder. "The reason that they [German soldiers] give in so easily in the west is simply the fault of that stupid Geneva convention which promises them good treatment as prisoners. We must scrap this idiotic convention." (Ch 27) Such callous exclamations by Hitler in the final year of war challenge our confidence that Hitler still possessed much of any attachment he had ever had to conventional "moral reasoning." Certainly, the practical impacts of Allied retaliation using chemical warfare were easy for German leadership to imagine. Stanley Lovell, former head of the wartime Office of Strategic Services's office of Research and Development, relates in his book *Of Spies and Stratagems* a transcript of a conversation with Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering during a postwar interrogation, in which Goering relates that usage of chemical weapons in defense of the Reich was avoided out of fear of retaliation. As the German army relied substantially on horse-drawn transportation, chemical reprisal by the Allied armies would significantly impede logistics, as horses could not be efficiently protected from poison gas [2]. Lovell's book is not to be taken at face value, but at any rate this purported dialogue does highlight that the German army would also suffer from the effects of chemical warfare. Allied forces had certainly made clear that they were prepared to respond to the initiation of chemical warfare. In June of 1943, President Roosevelt made it clear to the Axis powers that the Allies would retaliate in kind to any usage of poisonous gas: "Any use of gas by any Axis power... will immediately be followed by the fullest possible retaliation upon munition centers, seaports, and other military objectives." [3] Nor was this an idle threat--throughout the war the western Allies were materially prepared for the possibility of chemical escalation. A rather notable incident highlighting this fact involved the air raid on Bari, Italy in December 1943, in which the transport ship *John Harvey* carrying mustard-gas bombs was destroyed by German planes, inadvertently releasing its poisonous cargo. Finally, as the Allied advance continued into Germany proper, the tactical use of chemical weapons became increasingly impractical. Fighting on German soil, chemical warfare would naturally endanger German noncombatants. At the same time, Soviet troops also eventually overran the sarin and tabun gas production facilities themselves. In summary, it was quite clear to the Germans that they stood to lose far more from opening Pandora's Box than they would gain, and the specter of retaliatory chemical warfare, which Hitler himself feared, was a sufficient deterrent to play a large role in discouraging the initiation of chemical warfare by Nazi Germany. [1] Ian Kershaw *Hitler: A Biography* [2] Stanley Lovell *Of Spies and Strategems: Incredible Secrets of World War II Revealed By a Master Spy* [3] Albert J. Mauroni. *Chemical and Biological Warfare: A Reference Handbook*
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Follow ups; Did the Nazis have meaningful stockpiles of chemical weapons? What was the allies’ planned response in the event of widespread deployment of chemical weapons?
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Did medieval people really believe in dragons/sea monsters or it was a just a weird belief like Aliens are today?
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Thanks to /u/gynnis-scholasticus for the summons. Speak of the devil (or folklore) and he shall appear! Let me know if you have additional questions. I call to question your dismissing a belief in a historical period by saying it may have been "just a weird belief like aliens are today." Beliefs in historical periods are exactly like the belief in aliens today. That is an aspect of modern folk belief. Like all beliefs, there are adherents and there are skeptics, but folklore persists. Everyone has it, even when they do not recognize it as such. Part of the answer that our friend has linked to consists of the following: Regarding whether people believed in dragons, the same could be asked about giants. I can address this from the point of view of the pre-modern European folk and how they thought about dragons (and giants for that matter). We can use that perspective to project backwards to gain some insight into the medieval point of view. That method is not without its flaws since traditions by nature change, but the pre-modern perspective can be useful in shaping an understanding about what the nature of its medieval counterpart. First of all, it is important to understand that from the pre-modern European folk point of view, dragons (and giants for that matter) were not something that anyone normally described as actually seeing. People told legends (narratives told generally to be believed) about encounters with ghosts, fairies, mermaids, etc. because these entities were thought to co-exist with people contemporaneously. Dragons and giants were generally relegated to distant places or the remote past. They told stories about them, but only in how they were part of the historical record or about how people far away encountered them. Part of the reason for this was practical: one can fathom a world being shared with extraordinary entities that could hide in "our present world." These included creatures of human or smaller size or creatures capable of invisibility. It was not easy to imagine large creatures existing in the world and not being seen by everyone. A dragon (or a giant) in the neighborhood is hard to overlook. The folk used a type of logic: fairies and ghosts can hide in our midst, but dragons are large and destructive enough so that they would be immediately discovered; we have not discovered any dragons in our midst; therefore no dragons must live around here, and they seem to exist only in the past or far away. The folk described dragons in their historical legends and in their folktales (narratives that draw on folk belief but are told as fiction). In these stories, dragons are large and menacing, but a hero can kill them. Granted, that hero may have extraordinary abilities, so the dragon can be graduated in size to represent a heroic menace. The answer, I believe is that the folk tended to imagine a dragon as very large - elephant sized perhaps. Medieval artists often depicted dragons as much smaller - as you indicate. I suspect (but do not know!!!) that the medieval artist was asking the same question: how realistic is it for a hero to kill a beast that is overwhelmingly large. Pragmatism and a goal to be realistic may have down-sized the dragons. I have seen those painting, and they have struct me as wrong after having read folktales about encounters with dragons.
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Some time ago I answered a similar question by linking to an old u/itsallfolklore answer, with u/epicyclorama making important corrections
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I want to read a book like Guns Germs and Steel, but isn't ridiculed by modern historians/scientists like Guns Germa and Steel, what should I read?
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Two books which have the epic sweep of *Guns, Germans, and Steel* but are more widely respected these days are both more circumscribed in their geography than GSS while, if anything, cover even wider swaths of time: *Europe Between the Oceans: 9,000 BCE to AD 1,000* by Barry Cunliffe and *The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World* by David W. Anthony. Both are very well respected and cover similar subjects--the rise of Indo-Europeans--but take slightly different approaches and so make slightly different arguments based. Cunliffe is an archeologist, and makes an argument for Anatolian origins wheras Anthony uses more linguistic evidence and argues for Steppe origins (a modified "Kurgan Hypothesis"). Both very interesting and useful for specialists and general readers, and I haven't seen a good argument as to why one is definitely better than the other. One book that's never on these lists in Charles Tilly's *Coercion, Capital, and European States, 990-1992*. It's an amazing book that brings you from the post-Roman feudal order to the modern welfare state, written by the single most historical sociologist (period). It is basically the beginning of all discussions of state-making, and quite frankly the end to many of them as well. It's read by most sociologists, but has made no impression on general readers (though European historians are also know to cite it and love it).
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I very much enjoyed Ian Morris' *Why the West Rules* (and also *War - What is it good for?*). It is also an exploration of geographic determinism as per Diamond's arguments in GGS however it does have numerous issues as one would expect from any book attempting to tackle such a complex and comprehensive topic as the sum total of human development. I feel the major difference between the two is that Morris seems far more open about the failings of his own writing and actually recognises that key developments in history were undoubtedly driven more by the actions of individual humans. edit: Got the book title wrong! 2nd edit: In response to a presumably deleted reply - By actions of individual humans I mean more in the sense that there seems to be far more awareness that things *could* have turned out differently than some sort of espousal of the Great Man theory. As an example, he spends quite some time exploring why China turned inwards rather than outwards (i.e. the rise and fall of the Treasure Fleets) with far more reference to politics and human geography than Diamond would apply in my opinion.
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FDR is always rated as one of the best presidents in the country, so why was the 22nd amendment (limiting terms in office to two) passed?
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At the time the 22nd Amendment was ratified, it was a partisan issue, although quite obviously not a particularly contentious one. The two term limit was set as tradition with George Washington, but it was always a custom and never a law, despite calls by Thomas Jefferson and others for presidential tenure to be addressed Constitutionally. A March 17, 1940, article in the *Washington Post* tallied up fifteen serious attempts by one or the other houses of Congress to limit presidential tenure since the adoption of the Constitution. For the first hundred years of the country, the issue was one that would be brought up in Congress every now and again, but it never got much traction mostly due to the issue never really arising. Jefferson and Jackson had both publicly come out against third terms, nor did Madison or Monroe seek one either. That changed in 1880, when Ulysses S. Grant sought the Republican nomination for an unprecedented third (non-consecutive) term. But that worked itself out when he didn't win the nomination and didn't run in the general election. Same thing happened in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt had served most of McKinley's second term, then a full term of his own, then stepped down, then sought to win the nomination of the Republican Party from his successor William Howard Taft. He lost the nomination, ran as a third party, and lost again. Woodrow Wilson was elected president, and when he was asked to weigh in on the issue, he said that presidents shouldn't serve for more than two terms, but that it shouldn't be made part of the Constitution, either. Let the people decide at the polls. The biggest threat of a possible third presidential term in at least a hundred years was with Calvin Coolidge. He had served most of Harding's term, won his own, and if he had run for another term, a lot of Republicans would have loved to nominate him. And, seeing as fellow Republican Herbert Hoover won that election, it was very conceivable that he would have won a third term. But the issue was averted when Coolidge declared in the late summer of 1927 that he did not "choose to run for President in 1928". The wording was curious since it surely implied that Coolidge felt he had the option to do so if he wanted, and that the social custom of two terms was, by the 1920s, not well respected anymore. Despite Coolidge's statement, there were efforts to draft him, while others in his own party sought to stop that from happening. The leading opponent of third terms was Coolidge's fellow Republican, Senator Robert La Follette, Jr., from Wisconsin. This was a different time for Republicans, remember, and La Follette was also the co-founder of the Wisconsin Progressive Party, and the son of the late Robert La Follette, Sr., who had just run against Coolidge in 1924 on the Progressive Party ticket and won the electoral votes of his home state of Wisconsin. Senator La Follette, Jr., was philosophically opposed to third terms, and drafted a Senate resolution in February 1927 against them to warn Coolidge off of running again. Coolidge decided against running for his own personal reasons, but after his statement, there continued to be efforts to draft him, which he had at least given some private indication he wasn't entirely opposed to it. La Follette then revived his anti-third term resolution, quoted in the February 11, 1928, *Atlanta Constitution* as saying he was worried that Coolidge-ally and former RNC chairman Charles Hilles of New York "and other powerful factors in the party" were seeking to draft Coolidge and that it had become "apparent from statements by [Coolidge's] friends here that the President has not foreclosed his renomination". To prevent this, on February 10, 1928, the Senate passed the La Follette Resolution which stated "that it is the sense of the Senate that the precedent established by Washington and other Presidents of the United States in retiring from the Presidential office after their second term has become by universal concurrence, a part of our republican system of government, and that any departure from this time-honored custom would be unwise, unpatriotic and fraught with peril to our free institutions." The resolution passed 56-26 (more than two-thirds). The Democrats, not wanting to see a third Coolidge term, voted overwhelming in favor, 37-4. The Republicans were split, 18 voted in favor with La Follette, and 22 voting against. This put an end to any reconsiderations that Coolidge had to his "I do not choose" statement. A month later, the Wyoming Republican Party tried formally to draft him, but he publicly turned it down. Others in the party then began to seek the nomination, no doubt at least one or two of the La Follette Resolution supporters among them. The issue remained dormant until 1940, when all signs pointed to FDR running for a third term. The same progressive faction of the Republican Party was the first to rail against it, and this time, they were able to get all the Republican Party to support the policy. But of course, this time, the Democrats were uniformly against it. As a March 9, 1940, letter to the *Hartford Courant* put it: > "From the tenor of the letters in today's Forum it is very evident that the Republicans are deeply worried about the forthcoming elections even at this early date. However, the Republicans are still handing out the same brand of nonsense they dished out at the outset of the Roosevelt Administration. [A Republican letter writer] still thinks we are about to be engulfed by a dictatorship. To avoid this so-called dictatorship, he suggests an amendment to the Constitution restricting the President's term of office to two terms of four years each. A noble suggestion, but why restrict the third term issue to the presidency [and not include other elected offices]?...What the Republicans are deeply worried over is the fact that President Roosevelt will undoubtedly be reelected if he runs next November...It is interesting to note to what extent these politicians will go to defeat President Roosevelt." In other words, even among opponents of presidential term limits at that time, they could recognize the wisdom in it as a "noble suggestion", but opposed it in 1940 in part due to the curious timing of reviving the issue. Nevertheless, the Republican Party made presidential term limits a plank in their 1940 campaign platform. They lost, FDR was reelected, and the Republicans kept it in their platform for the 1944 election as well. Once again, they lost, and FDR was reelected. After his death and the end of World War II, the Republicans finally got control back of Congress (though not the Presidency) in 1946. Still running on that 1944 platform, one of their highest priorities was the passage of the 22nd Amendment as they came into power with the 80th Congress in 1947. Rep. Charles La Follette, Republican of Indiana (a third cousin of Robert Jr.'s), wrote an opinion piece in the *Christian Science Monitor* published before the election, on January 6, 1946, under the title "I Favor Restricting The President To Two Terms". He gave several reasons why this was a good idea, starting with: > "I believe that a tenure in excess of eight consecutive years is harmful to the development of a dynamic democratic society and potentially endangers its future maintenance." He goes on to headline other points with "Fluidity of Leadership Will Be Encouraged" and "The Dangerous 'Leader-Complex' Will Be Checked". A front page article in the *New York Times* from February 7, 1947, after the Amendment had been passed in the House, gave the reasoning from a couple others in the Republican leadership: > Representative Earl C. Michener, of Michigan, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, saw a long tenure as enabling the Chief Executive to get too firm a grip on the government machinery, leading to "irresponsible bureaucracy" and "over-concentration of power." A long-term President can gain influence over Congress and the judiciary as well, he maintained. > > Representative Charles A. Halleck, of Indiana, majority leader, asserted the only object was to place "an unwritten law of the country firmly into the Constitution." Opponents of the amendment, mostly Democrats, were characterized in the same article: > The Democrats argued generally that an amendment would shackle future generations, who in the event of another emergency might find it necessary to continue a President in office for more than two terms. They contended, moreover, that the issue had already been decided by the people when they had elected Franklin D. Roosevelt to a third and a fourth term. Senator Scott W. Lucas summed up the Democratic opposition's point of view more succinctly, as quoted in the March 8, 1947, edition of the *Chicago Tribune*: > "Some people can't leave the dead alone! This is a slap at the ghost of Franklin D. Roosevelt because the people reelected him to a third and fourth term. It is an effort to repudiate his memory, his work, and his immortal services." But the Democrats were split. Senators O'Connor, Overton, and McClellan supported the amendment because: > "...the office of the President had become so powerful that the incumbent could establish a dynasty if not restricted to two terms." On February 4, 1947, the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee along with the votes of "conservative Democrats", according to the *New York Times*, brought the amendment to the House floor on a vote of 20-6. On February 6, the full House voted in favor of the amendment 285-121. (...cont'd...)
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2 terms limits had generally been an "unwritten rule" since Washington. More importantly though, it appears that Americans had grown wary of long-term leadership after experiences fighting dictatorships in WWII. Link to previous reddit discussion in this topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4c5nlh/why_was_the_22nd_amendment_passed/
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This may sound dumb, but were there trees near/around castles?
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In the middle ages they practiced siege warfare. What this would mean is that a nobleman and his people would all retreat to his best fortified cities. When the pursuing army arrived they would try to surround the city, if they were big enough, to cut off supplies. Then each side would mostly wait and hope the other side ran out of supplies, or became riddled with disease. Most fortified castles would have neighborhoods on the outside of their walls, in French "bourgs". These would be abandoned first and then would see most of the fighting because of the cover they supplied. Generally, they would end up being burned by one side or the other, but they could be used effectively for cover by the attacking army. What is important to consider is the reason the attacking army would want cover. Unlike WWII where a rifleman with cover could cause casualties in a fort, the best soldiers of this time had were crossbows and the soldiers on the city walls would have had a huge advantage using them. The attacking soldiers wanted to get to the base of the castle's walls to dig under them and disrupt the foundation so that they would be more vulnerable to catapult attacks and hopefully fall because of them. Even if you have tree cover until you get 10 feet from the castle wall, you are still a very easy target once you get there. Additionally, moats were dug around castles to prevent the enemy from reaching the foundations; I would imagine that between the moat and the fortifications trees would be a disadvantage, but they were not of the same concern they were once guns came into use.
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Most often, no, for the simple reason that lumber and firewood are both important to the proper functioning of a castle, and the tendency is to go for the easiest (ie, closest) source first. Secondly, castles were used either to protect farmland, or protect a strategic location. Farms most often surrounded the castle.
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I believe there's an ancient archaeological site in Bolivia at an elevation of over 12,000 ft that shows unequivocal evidence of a technological sophistication that, put in the context of when and where it was built, rivals our own accomplishments today...is this an exaggeration?
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Are you going to post this conspiracy shit in every subreddit in the hopes of finding at least a single person who subscribes to your world view? r/askhistory - r/skeptic - r/cospiracy My reply from the first one: > If the pre-Incan culture that built Tiwanaku was more sophisticated than the Incas themselves, then it seems entirely possible that whoever made the stones at Puma Punku were more advanced than the recognized culture at Tiwanaku, and therefore much older as well. > Emphasis mine: This claim doesn't follow logically. > Ironically enough, pre-Columbian civilizations were supposed to be ignorant of the wheel (a long-standing belief by mainstream academia that is finally beginning to be overturned). > Can you cite actual academic sources claiming pre-Columbian civilizations were ignorant of the wheel? Never read anything like that. > although a Northern "land bridge" migration probably occurred, the Americas had long before been populated, as the oldest sites are to be found in South America, inconsistent with a slow North to South migration. > Just because the first building appeared in the south, doesn't mean that there weren't non-building peoples in the north first. > many disagree with this conclusion, and some have suggested that the original site could indeed be far older than a mere 1,500 years. > Source? The very wiki article you linked tells us about a radio-carbon dating 1510 ±25 B.P. C14 (AD 440; calibrated, AD 536–600). > I could go on, but this just seems like a nutjob case. > Edit: After a quick look at the OP's posting history, this is definitely the case. Dang, wasted my time.
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One thing that immediately comes to mind is the question of the time-scale required to produce these artifacts. They would be a lot more indicative of highly advanced technological methods if each block was produced in say, a matter of weeks, and a lot less technologically impressive if they were constructed by hundreds of master craftsmen trained from an early age and produced through lifetimes of labor. When we see very regular shapes like this, our first instinct might be to assume that advanced methods would be required, because advanced methods that we now have could very easily, more or less, produce them. But then, I think, you would be underestimating the patience, expertise and artistry that humans are capable of. The sculpture of ancient Greece is incredibly complex, but we don't cite this as proof of highly advanced technological methods because we know that given a chisel (and some other simple tools) and enough time, a highly gifted/experienced artist can do it. Here's a more illustrative example of this sort of fallacy: In the future, if 3D printing technology were to become highly prevalent for a relatively long period of time, a person from that time might be incredulous that the sculpture of ancient Greece could have been produced manually, but the only reason they would think this would be because their own imagination of what is possible was being restricted by their over-familiarity with 3D printing technology. Even if these artifacts were produced thousands of years earlier than we would have predicted to be possible, I think this doesn't imply advanced technological methods, but more likely implies that the society that created them was more highly advanced/organized, such that individuals had the time and motivation to undergo the highly specialized training required to produce these artifacts with fairly simple tools.
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2021 saw an unexpected wave of sea shanty revivalism, but how popular were songs like 'Wellerman', 'Old Maui', and other sea songs and shanties in practice among Whaling and other vessels?
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Traditional maritime music is a broad category that is often cross pollinated with other folk music of the times. For this explanation we're just going to divide it into three groups. First we have actual sea shanties. These are songs that were sung by sailors while they were doing work on ships ( or next to them for the purpose of loading). These were not songs that were sung for enjoyment but to keep everyone in time, they weren't sung off ships and in fact some sailors found it bad luck to sing them off of ships. All these songs would be sung acapella, many of them featuring call and response. The shanties are then further divided depending on the length and nature of the task. So we have shanties for hauling, heaving, the capstan, the windlass, the pumps and so on. As shanties could vary in length depending on how long it took to complete the task, the verses tended to be modular. This meant that verses from one shanty may show up in another shanty depending on if you need to extend the song. It also meant that there was no set order for how the verses should go, as the song wasn't really about telling the story it was about maximizing efficiency on the ship, and keeping everyone in time. These songs were also developed organically from sailors on maritime vessels and would be shared through an oral process. Often they would be written down by other people. Second, we have songs that are sung off-watch. These songs are called forebitters or fo'c'sle songs. These are songs that sailors would sing for their own enjoyment. Many of these songs would also be popular songs of the day that sailors would learn when they were in port. Unlike shanty's these songs could often have musical accompaniment. Finally, we have just generic sea songs. These are songs that were written about various maritime subjects but they were written and performed on land for audiences there. Now other songs you specifically brought up, Old Maui was most definitely sung on ships. According to Gale Huntington in his book "***Songs the Whaleman Sang***" there is a version called "*Rolling Down to Old Mohee*" from a journal that was written aboard the vessel Atkins Adams in 1858. Starting in the 1820s Maui, and the Hawaiian islands as a whole, were utilized as home bases for Yankee whaling fleets. Now this song was most definitely a forebitter sung while the sailors were relaxing. There is a narrative structure in the lyrics that necessitates a certain order as well as the general rhythm of the song not being conducive to work. The most popular version of this song uses the melody that originates from "*The Miller of Dee*". That song originated in the 1762 ballad opera "Love in the Village" by Isaac Bickerstaffe and became popular in Northwest England. The Wellermen is a sea ballad that comes from New Zealand. Now the lyrics tell a story as well as the different melodies of the song this isn't really conducive to being sung as a shanty. If we look at the subject matter as well as the context it helps give us an idea. According to "***Folksongs of New Zealand***" by Neil Colquhuin, New Zealand whalers practice shore whaling ( also known as bay whaling). This was something that was common in New England in the early colonial days. First they would go out on small boats, kill the whale and then bring it back to shore for processing. These whalers were not paid wages and therefore were paid "stake". This would include ready-made goods such as tobacco, liquor or clothing. These goods of course would be supplied to their workstations via supply ships run by the Weller Brothers. The trading agents on these ships were referred to as "Wellermen". Now the song does describe tall ship whaling, going after an elusive right whale, but this seems to be a fictional creation as opposed to something drawn from their own experience. No we can't say for sure this was never sung on a ship as say a forebitter. But what we do know is the first time it was collected was in the 1960s by Neil Colquhuin in New Zealand. The song does not show up in collections from other maritime nations. So even if it was sung on ships as a forebitter in that area, the song might not have caught on with crews from other parts of the world. I do want to end this with a little side note. That sometimes The crew of a whaling ship may be forbidden to sing on their off time depending on the captain who was king. Of course it varied from ship to ship. I highly recommend "***Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America***" by Eric Jay Dolin. Of course it's focus is the development of that industry in America, not really focusing on the music aboard these ships. That said it is a very well researched book that can fill you in not just about the life of the whalers themselves but their place in the world economy at the time. Also I will summon u/JBSongman who has done much study on maritime music.
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I answered a similar question here. I quoted Robert Adams' 1879 memoir, *On Board the Rocket* , where he described pretty exactly how shanties would be used. And I'll quote him again: >THE songs of the sea offer a field for research, and one who could trace the origin and use of some of them would doubtless discover interesting, romantic histories. No information can be obtained from sailors themselves on this point. No one knows who their favorite "Reuben Ranzo" was, or whether "Johnny Boker" ever did what he is so often requested to "do," nor can any one say more concerning the virtues and vices of "Sally Brown" than is declared in song. >Sailors' songs may be divided into two classes. First, are the sentimental songs sung in the forecastle, or on the deck in the leisure hours of the dog-watch, when the crew assemble around the fore-hatch to indulge in yarns and music. Dibdin's songs, which the orthodox sailor of the last half century was supposed to adhere to as closely as the Scotch Presbyterian to his Psalter, are falling into disuse, and the negro melodies and the popular shore songs of the day are now most frequently heard. The second class of songs is used at work, and they form so interesting a feature of life at sea, that a sketch of that life would be incomplete without some allusion to them. These working songs may be divided into three sets: >First, those used where a few strong pulls are needed, as in boarding a tack, hauling aft a sheet, or tautening a weather-brace. "Haul the Bowline," is a favorite for this purpose. The shantyman, as the solo singer is called, standing up "beforehand," as high above the rest of the crew as he can reach, sings with as many quirks, variations and quavers as his ingenuity and ability can attempt, "Haul the bow-line, Kitty is my darling;" then all hands join in the chorus, "Haul the bow-line, the bow-line haul," shouting the last word with great energy and suiting action to it by a combined pull, which must once be witnessed by one who desires an exemplification of "a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull altogether." This seldom fails to make the ropes "come home."... The second kind of shanty, says Adams, is used for a long series of moderate pulls, like for the topsail halyards. The third kind is for a continuous pull or push where it's useful to have the crew keep in step: like using the capstan to raise the anchor. Dibdin would be Charles Dibdin (1745-1815) an extraordinarily prolific English composer, singer, actor, playwright, and novelist. It's hard to say someone who knocked out over 1,000 works in his lifetime specialized in sailors' songs, but he wrote many. You likely haven't heard one in a pub recently.... >THE WANDERING SAILOR. >Undaunted braves the stormy seas, To find, at last, content and ease: In hopes, when to land danger's o'er, To anchor on his native shore. When winds blow hard, and mountains roll, And thunders shake from pole to pole; Tho' dreadful wares surrounding foam, Still flatt'ring fancy wafts him home; In hopes, when toil and danger's o'er, To anchor on his native shore. When round the bowl, the jovial crew, The early scenes of youth renew; Tho' each his fav'rite fair will boast, This is the universal toast— >*chorus* THE wand'ring sailor ploughs the main, A competence in life to gain Not to be judgmental, here, but just as Moore's "Sublime Was The Voice With Which Liberty Spoke" hasn't been revived, it is safe to say that few musicians would be singing this now, and it's easy agree with Adams: even by 1879 Dibdin's very 18th c. poetic style would have given way to more straightforward popular songs, like "Old Mohee" , first mentioned ( though not transcribed) in a whaler's journal in 1858. >Rolling down to Old Maui, me boys Rolling down to Old Maui We're homeward bound from the Arctic Ground Rolling down to Old Maui Atkins Adams (Bark) whaling vessel, out of Fairhaven, Mass., mastered by William Wilson, kept by William A. Abbe, on voyage 8 Oct. 1858-16 June 1863 to the North Atlantic, Archer, Offshore, Galapagos, and Massafuera whaling grounds Dibdin, Charles. Dibdin's Museum Evans' Early American Imprints Adams, Robert. ( 1879) [*On Board the Rocket*, ch.12] (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64171/64171-h/64171-h.htm#CHAPTER_XII)
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Why did so many Germans choose to move to Argentina after World War II?
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A couple of reasons. Juan Perón, who was very powerful in the Argentine government from 1943 and became president in 1946, was very sympathetic to the Nazis. (I've heard he helped some get there through the postwar ratlines, but I can't give you a source for that.) Also, there was already a significant population of German speakers living in Argentina from migrations starting in the late nineteenth century, which meant that escaping Nazis had a community to go to, and would be better able to blend in and hide there. Nazis did escape to many other countries than Argentina, however, including other South American countries. Mengele spent time in Paraguay, and died in Brazil. Klaus Barbie emigrated to Bolivia (admittedly, he was working with various Allied governments at the time, so something of a different case). Otto Skorzeny ended up taking refuge in Franco Spain.
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pocket piglet's answer is good, but there is also tradition. Argentina is really a settler colony. there were very few natives in the area, so the population was almost entirely filled by european immigrant stock, much of it from southern europe, but also substantial numbers of germans. In fact, at the turn of the century, it was about as wealthy as the US.
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Why did the US Government abandon the US Army Camel Corps program when by all accounts the animals out performed mules in every way and the army suggested the purchase of a 1000 new animals?
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In short, the US government had a slightly bigger problem on its hands, with the whole 'engulfed in Civil War' thing going on, and it pushed any opportunity for the continuation of the U.S Camel Corps to the wayside, although to be sure, there wasn't much momentum behind it to begin with. The small successes up to then demonstrated, especially the expedition under Ed Beale, might have proved their value, but it was nothing more than a proof of concept. The suggestion to "purchase 1000 camels" which you reference wasn't exactly being acted upon. Beale had advocated strongly in favor of more camels in his 1858 report, and John B. Floyd, then the Sec. War, made that proposal to Congress, but it was fairly well ignored, despite being repeated again by Floyd in 1859 and 1860. Beale continued to utilize the animals in surveying out in California, but that was the extent of things by 1861, and then whatever chances there might have been to turn Congress around vanished with secession. The exigencies of wartime thus put a hard stop on further expansion of the program, and even the best advocates of the program - Beale, and Maj. Henry C. Wayne who oversaw the initial acquisition and got the program rolling - were hard-pressed to give it their attention (and also Jeff Davis, no longer giving his allegiance to the US at all!). For the existing camels, they had a mixed fate. Despite the praise of Beale, who was quite right that *well cared for*, camels could be excellent tools, it wasn't the universal experience. An 1860 attempt to use camels between LA and Fort Mojave was a disaster - the camel ridden by Capt. Hancock to test the route died of exhaustion - and likely put a damper on interest by those not already converted to their merits. For the camels which had previously been part of the Beale expedition, in 1861 they were moved to San Pedro, CA where they were used, for a time, to carry cargo to nearby Los Angeles, but not much else. Beale in that time did attempt to push the government into using the animals more effectively, and even offered to take possession of them under bond, but for whatever reason, the government wasn't interested in his offer. In 1863, there was one final attempt to utilize this group as long-distance transportation, traveling to Tucson, AZ, but the results were unsatisfactory, and the next year they found themselves auctioned off, purchased by Samuel McLaughlin, who had been their caretaker at that point. He used some to haul freight between California and Nevada, but others he apparently sold off individually, mostly as curiosities. Those camels based in Texas however fell into Confederate hands - another impediment at continued use by the US Army of course - but for the most part there was little interest in the animals by the Rebs, who knew nothing about their use or care. Many escaped and wandered aimlessly - some to be recaptured by the Union, but wild camels would continue to be spotted for the next half-century - and those that didn't were often ignored and neglected. Very few seem to have actually been used as pack animals, and then, mostly on personal initiative, by random soldiers, although at least a few were used to transport cotton south to Mexico to evade the blockade. The Union recaptured the remaining stock in 1865, and they too were auctioned off. Whatever lessons might have been learned in the pre-war years about the camels' utility was apparently lost, and a Col. Coopwood bought the animals at 31 dollars a piece, taking them into Mexico a year later as part of an unsuccessful venture at carrying mail between there and the US. Reports seem to be that they mostly ended up in circuses. *Uncle Sam's camels; the journal of May Humphreys Stacey supplemented by the report of Edward Fitzgerald Beale (1857-1858)* edited by Lewis Burt Lesley *The Last Camel Charge: The Untold Story of America's Desert Military Experiment* by Forrest Bryant Johnson Perinne, Fred. "Uncle Sam's Camel Corps". *New Mexico Historical Review*, Vol. 1, No. 4 1926 434-445 As an additional note, it doesn't seem to be digitized, or at least my library doesn't make it so available, but "The U.S. Camel Corps : an Army experiment" by Odie B. Faulk seems to be the most in-depth treatment of the topic, and certainly is well reviewed based on what I did turn up: Greever, William S. Pacific Historical Review 46, no. 3 (1977): 502-03. doi:10.2307/3637519. Kroeker, Marvin E. The Journal of American History 63, no. 3 (1976): 728-29. doi:10.2307/1887406. Edit: Formatting Edit II: FYI it is passed my bedtime, but I'll try to answer follow-ups tomorrow.
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How, why and when did India change from a culture that produced the Kama Sutra and even had carvings of sex positions on temples, to one in which sex is such a huge taboo to the point where it is so repressed?
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So there are several things wrong with this question to begin with: the assumption of a monolithic cultural in both periods and the assumption that "sexuality is so repressed." I think it is far to assume a certain level of repression and freedom in every given cultural setting though the ways and avenues for this to take place may be different. I think India stands as an example where same sex relationships and gender variance are permitted through culturally prescribed avenues (such as "hijra" traditions or the traditions of ritualized male friendships or "miths"). India is a good example where there is sexual freedom to the extent that this behavior/discussion does not extent that it does not interfere with public duties, enter into discourse, or take the shape of subjective and fixed identities (with perhaps exception of Hijras). There is a large percentage of men in India who have had same sex relationships; the difference between India, and say America, is that in India this is acceptable so long as these men do not identify publicly and, perhaps more importantly, politically as "gay men." Indeed, the term "men who have sex with men" arose because many of these men reject such labeling, which comes from Eurocentric understanding of sexuality as fixed and limited to a set of prescribed behaviors concerning attraction to certain genders. Men often describe their relationships to other men not necessarily as sexual but as "masti," meaning fun, that serves to help "release" the build of male sexual energy, something that is also consider "natural" to men's sexuality. Comments concerning the impact of colonialism are important in this discussion. The British Raj did indeed impose Victorian standards of sexuality through law, policy, etc. and this no doubt has left an impact on the nation. However, to say that this completely overwrote or replaced older, pre-colonial understandings of sexuality is an overstatement. The current statute outlawing sodomy was gifted to India by none other than the British. Portrayals of Indian men, by the British and by Gandhi, also to some extent also emasculated the imagine of the Indian man and the reaction to which can be seen in hyper-masculinized Hindu nationalist portrayals of the nation, of Ram, of Hinduism, etc. Additionally, imaging the production of the Kama Sutra with a cultural that is "sexually liberal" enough to have carvings of sex is also problematic. Tantric and the antinomian traditions that were developing around the same time weren't not necessarily wide spread teachings that represented or even concerned the majority of population at the time. Indeed, even the fact that the Sutra was a sutra (that is to suggest a text to be read) suggests the amount of people who had access to it were far less than the majority of the population (since they would have to be literate.) Many tantric practices were esoteric, secret, and while they did affect and change many cultures, rituals, etc. it's not fair to assume that any given text represents the entire continent of India's understanding of sexuality at that time. Source - I am a researcher who studies sexual and gender minorities in South Asia. Edit - A lot of people are getting crabby about the sources. The stuff about same sex sexuality can be sourced to a lot of different literature. Try starting with Shivananda Khan's work, Paul Boyce, Akshay Khan, Subir Kole, Wendy Doniger (for Hinduism)... A lot of this is also supported by my own field work.
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First of all, one would have to determine at which level the Hindu culture is or isn't prudish or repressed about sexual maters. The Kama Sutra and the Khajuharo carvings where products of the Hindu culture, is the Hindu culture that different now than it was in 1000 AD when the carvings where made or in 300 BC when the Kama was writen? Probably different but i would like to know at which extend. If we can prove that the relation to sexual maters have changed significantly over the course of the last 2000 years, and at which point did it changed the most, i guess our best bet would be during the 16th century with the Mughal conquest. The Mughals Emperors ruled over India from the 16th century until the United-Kingdom took their place in the 19th century. They where Muslim rulers and their culture changed the whole land forever as proved by the Taj Mahal, a perfect example of Mughal architecture, being the most known landmark in India. A stricter Muslim approach must have an influence on the sexual behaviors of the Hindu majority. That would explain the change of attitude over those few centuries. Then again, some of the extreme sexual taboos and traditions of India are from the Muslim Indians, in which case the parallel to the Kama and the Khajuharo carvings is not very relevant since they are from Hindu culture.
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Has there ever been an example of a pre-modern army or nation going to war primarily for humanitarian reasons?
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The humanitarian intervention literature usually only refers to some of the post-Cold War interventions as being motivated *primarily* by humanitarian intent. The oldest humanitarian intervention (defined here as interventions influenced by humanitarianism) that the humanitarian intervention literature usually covers is the intervention by the UK, France and Russia in the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832) to stop the Ottomans from massacring Christians. While "it would be hard to argue that humanitarian considerations were decisive in this intervention" (Martha Finnemore ), humanitarian claims were used. Other examples of interference and intervention that were at the very least *influenced by humanitarian claims* (note that they were all about saving Christians under non-Christian rule) although geostrategic concerns were overriding: * French intervention in Lebanon in 1860-1861 * "Interference" by Austria, France, Italy, Prussia, and Russia during the Cretan Revolt 1866-1869 * Intervention in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria during the Bulgarian Agitation 1876-1878 * "Interference" in favor of the Christian Macedonian population of the Ottoman Empire in 1903-1908
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Note: This is not a historical answer but important clarification for understanding the question. You have to be very careful with the term humanitarian, which has a very specific meaning in post WWII politics that is tied directly to the idea of universalism, which has its own complicated history but its roots are generally traced to the enlightenment period. Why is this important? Well, it means that describing a pre-modern conflict has "humanitarian" is anachronistic. Even if a conflict can be reinterpreted as being humanitarian when view through modern lenses, we are still discussing it in a framework that did not exist. In fact, the idea of humanitarian conflict is antithetical to most Western/European conceptions of politics post-Westphalia. So while there may be some examples of warfare that looks "humanitarian." They generally only look humanitarian to us, or through modern reinterpretation, rather than being considered humanitarian at the time. That being said proving the nonexistence of an even is hard, so watch someone come in and give a perfect example.
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What is the current, most heated debate on a topic in your specific field of study that people are not aware of?
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It’s not my field per say, but it’s field adjacent for me. I’ve been reading a whole bunch on the Vietnam War and in the last 10-15 years there has been a lot of movement reassessing and recontextualizing the war. Part of it is rereading old American sources without the partisan lens that infected so much of earlier histories. Old histories of the American War typical fall into one of two categories, the Orthodox school which adopts the views of (and also lionizes) the ‘68ers and the peace movement. The revisionist school, on the other hand, tries to tear down the ‘68ers. Mark Moyar’s *Triumph Forsaken* should tell you everything you need to know about the revisionists. But even more ‘neutral’ histories, such as HR McMaster’s *Dereliction of Duty* or Lewis Sorely’s *Westmoreland* lean into alternating patterns of villainization and heroization. More recent works have moved past this binary, and have present a far more neutral view of the American war effort. A better understanding of what decisions were made when and by whom of course better fill out the narratives and undermine a lot of the claims of older scholarship. More interesting, on the military side, is the work of Gregory Daddis. Old revisionist arguments were that William Westmoreland was a huge disaster, focusing on the body count and search and destroy even tho it didn’t work. His replacement, Creighton Abrams, came in and radically changed the war effort by shifting from search and destroy to pacification. This, they argue, worked and would have won the war but for the peaceniks who torpedoed the whole thing. You can also read shades of the Iraq war into this scholarship where the publication dates overlap. But in a pseudo-2 Vol history of the war, Daddis demonstrates that Westmoreland wasn’t as stupid or dull as many people say he was. Indeed his strategy was effective, and was deeper than just body counts. His aim was to establish security in the mountains so that ARVN and South Vietnam could build up the population centers (with American aid) on their own. Far from charting out a ‘better war,’ Abrams maintained many of the Westmoreland era policies. Abrams implemented US pacification in 1969, which was an expansion of a program begun by the US Marines and which Westmoreland wanted to spin out before Tet interrupted everything. Many revisionist scholars latch onto pacification, but then ignore that most US units stayed focused on fighting big unit battles and search and destroy missions. Another complication, Andrew Birtle shows that Abrams was far more creative at cooking statistics than implementing new strategies. This subtle data manipulation made it look like the war had changed and things were looking up while things didn’t actually change. What did change, as Daddis argues in his second book, is media coverage. On day one, before Abrams had even issued his first order, the AP ran a story about how Abrams changed the war and how things in Vietnam were better than ever. This continued through Abrams tenure, where the media had been suspicious of Westmorelands every word, they accepted Abrams and his funny data without question. According to Daddis this is the real origin of the Better War myth. Further adding to this conversation is the new ‘internationalist’ school of scholarship. These bring in Polish sources, Chinese, and Soviet to show how those countries interacted with North Vietnamese and American actors. But even more exciting is the Vietnamese scholarship now being produced. For so long the story of the war, articulated by both the orthodox and revisionist schools, was that the war was an American tragedy. The emphasis is in American actions and American failure. But ultimately Vietnam was a civil war between two competing visions. Even without western backing, both sides would have at some point had to reconcile their futures. Scholarship on North Vietnam is much better developed, interestingly Vietnam is more free with their records than one might think. It’s possible of course to publish something that refutes the party line and gets a scholar banned, as apparently happened to Alec Holcombe when he published on the failure of collectivization and the famines of the late 1950s. There is too much to mention here, but incorporating North Vietnamese sources really changes our understanding of the war. In the west it was common to hear that the Vietnamese drove their strategy for western audiences, they fought battles to break public support in the US and fuel the peace movement. This is reinforced by the statement of a General like Giap, who we tend to see as the architect of the Vietnamese war, or the actions of North Vietnams own propaganda agencies. But really scholarship such as that by Pierre Asselin and Lien Hang Nguyen highlights that strategy in Hanoi wasn’t driven by a reading of western media, and sometimes not even battlefield realities, but by the dynamics of internal politics within the Communist party. Giap himself spent much of the war in semi-exile having been purged during the rise of Le Duan. These internal struggles tend to correspond well to renewed offensive. Really you cannot understand the war without understanding politics in the north. The last great gap in scholarship is with the South. One unfortunate tendency of recent scholarship is to overbalance the US and North Vietnamese positions and to say “well the weak link must be South Vietnam, they lost the war.” But in my opinion that’s more of a cop out, a limitation of scholars aperture, rather than the reality. Interestingly most of the South Vietnamese archives were captured in 1975 intact. AFAIK they were moved to Hanoi but otherwise have been unchanged and, mostly, unused. Some of these records are quite detailed regarding political organization and internal assessments of the war effort. While poorly explored and understood, the little I’ve read that has come out of these archives really contradicts many American narratives of South Vietnam and ARVN. Some documents highlight that the GVN was far more popular, especially after Tet, than previously thought. Tet and the battle of Hue, specifically the mass murders and executions carried out amongst Southern student activists during the first days of the battle, galvanized support *against* the Communists. It helps to explain why the southern arm of the Vietcong was destroyed and never rebuilt (with southern manpower) after Tet. People didn’t want them to win. The sole author I know of who has made extensive use of these sources is George Veith, whose two most recent books focus heavily on the southern government. The conventional narrative here is that the South after Diem was a carousel of dictators, none enjoying popular support and all embracing corruption. This filtered down to ARVN which was too corrupt and disillusioned to fight hard for the regime. That’s true before Tet, but Veith and others highlight that, basically, Vietnamization worked. As ARVN replaced US troops, they were forced to adjust into a more traditional and professional military. And Nguyen Van Thieu provided stability in the political realm, eh controlled the system for almost eight years and worked hard to protect his, basically, dictatorial regime. All this culminates in the mid 1970s. In 1972 the Easter Offensive (I believe 50 years this month actually) badly shook ARVN, but it also forced many of the political generals to resign and for soldiers to take over. There are also interesting conclusions that the field out to be taking note of regarding the changing nature of the war that I think, to this point, has been ignored.That offensive revealed that, when backed up by US air power, ARVN fought well and fought hard. Vieth argues that after ‘72 South Vietnam was in a pretty strong military position, with air power it could stop an NVA offensive on the ground by itself. It was dependent, though, on US aid. The Paris Peace Accords ended the U.S. war, but did little to stop the war in Vietnam (Asselin’s book in the Accords also reevaluates the role of strategic bombing in drafting the accords and suggests the Christmas attacks were probably more effective and decisive than we give credit). What the Peace Accords did though was let Washington forget about Vietnam. The first thing cut from the budget in the era of the ‘Peace Dividend’ was material aid to ARVN. First domestic air power was cut and the transfer of fighters canceled, then even basic necessities like artillery shells and bullets were restricted. This had tangible effects on ARVN battlefield performance, several NVA offensives in the Delta region obtained far more success than Saigon wanted, or Hanoi expected, and according to Veith was the result of ammunition shortages more than battlefield failure. They also emboldened Hanoi to try another knockout blow. By 1975 ARVN basically had nothing in reserve, it had been sucked dry already fighting off smaller incursions. What they had, they employed aggressively and successfully. Probably with material support and bombings ‘75 would have went the same way as ‘72. But US support never came, and after two periods of intense resistance ARVN collapsed. But this narrative is so provocative because it totally upends our understanding of when and why the war was lost. If it’s really the case that ARVN just needed material support and air power, what does that say about the successes and failures of what came before? I think one could draw a very interesting parallel here to the US war for Iraq, which is why the comparison with Afghanistan recently has frustrated me.
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I don't know if this will be an acceptable answer, but it goes. My field is World History history with an interest in Military history; during my Master's, I found two small but related debates about 'Military Revolutions.' A 'Military Revolution' is the idea that there was a rapid growth of military technology and tactics, which played an essential role in development. 'Military revolution' usually applies to the period between 1400- and 1800, when Europe rapidly developed its military technology and tactics in a series of large and small wars. Most Military historians like using this term, as it best describes what happened during those centuries. But there is a growing debate about whether or not that term is entirely correct. The idea is that it may have been a series of more minor revolutions, or it wasn't a revolution. The second small debate is about whether or not Asia (China, Japan, India, etc.) had a 'Military Revolution' during the same period. Historian Peter Lorge believes it did, but his argument has many critics from both Military and World historians.
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How true is this claim: "...in 1789, 50 percent of the French people did not speak [French] at all, and only 12 to 13 percent spoke it fairly well"?
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Follow-up question: What about North-American French? In 1789 France had just given away New-France as a result of being defeated in the 7 years war but places like Quebec had a strong Frenchman majority still. What language(s) did they speak? Édit: i know they spoke a variance of French that evolved into today’s Québécois. It’s my first language. I’m looking for something a bit more in detail.
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What languages did they speak?
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How can we explain the shortages and poor quality goods in the Soviet Russia?
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The issue you're referring to is similar to what János Kornai, a Hungarian economist from the communist era, referred to as the "shortage economy". He wrote an entire book about this phenomenon, but the tl;dr version is that command economies simply aren't built to respond to the shifts in supply and demand of consumer products because they don't react naturally to those changes in the way that a market economy would. Since the amount of a good produced and the price of that good are centrally controlled, you can have adequate supply of a product and still end up with a shortage because the demand for that product outstrips the demand at that particular price (i.e. people buy more of the good because it's cheaper inducing a shortage). Often, by the time the central planners responded to the shift in demand, either by producing more of that good or altering the price, the demand was no longer present, so you went from having a shortage of the good to a surplus of it. This cycle of shortage and surplus has effects on the consumer beyond simply not being able to get a product that they want. They may have to resort to what Kornai called "forced substitution", i.e. buying a product that isn't really what they wanted because it's the closest available thing to the product they wanted. If there isn't a substitute available, they may end up with "forced savings", where they don't spend that money at all. Because the planned economy doesn't correct itself for these problems, the planners are essentially playing a game of whack-a-mole, trying to either react to existing shortages or predict where consumer demand will go next, which is hard to do under any circumstances. Kornai was primarily writing about Hungary under János Kádár, but the shortage economy was common throughout the Eastern Bloc, and other countries (including Poland and Romania) went through the same sort of economic stagnation that Hungary did in the 1970s and 1980s; in fact, most countries were worse off, since Hungary was generally considered to have one of the higher standards of living in the Eastern Bloc during that time. The efforts of the politicians to resolve these issues and provide more and better quality consumer goods, such as the economic reforms in Poland under Edward Gierek in the 1970s, were ultimately undermined due to the systemic shortcomings that Kornai identified. Of course, there were cases where the issues went beyond the structural shortcomings of communist economics and were instead the direct result of policy choices by the countries' leaders. Romania is a good example of this. The Romanian economy had already experienced stagnation in the late 1970s, accompanied by a large increase in the national debt. In the 1980s, Ceaușescu decided that Romania should pay down its entire national debt (about $10 billion as of 1981) by the end of the decade through a crash program of fiscal austerity. As a result, for most of the 1980s, Romania exported large amounts of food, oil, and other products, while Romanians endured severe shortages and strict rationing of even the most basic goods. Romania did pay down its entire debt by 1988, but by that point, a decade of suffering due to Ceaușescu's austerity policies had already sown the seeds of the communist regime's demise. I realize that wasn't really what you were asking about, but I thought it was helpful to note that there were both structural and policy issues that caused the Eastern Bloc command economies to struggle in distributing consumer goods in an adequate manner. Source: Kornai's book, *Economics of Shortage* (North Holland, 1980), is worth reading if you're interested in a deep dive on postwar communist economics, but it's pretty dense.
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Most resources were allocated towards “strategic” production - defense and heavy industries - which were seen as critical for country’s survival. Then there was the very real and very serious problem with the lack of housing. Trying to solve that used up much of the funding left over from the “real” industry. The consumer goods were almost an afterthought and the amount of resources allocated to their production was insufficient. Also the 5-year plans greatly emphasized quantity over quality. If you were a plant manager, the expectation was that you would not just meet but exceed the (already unrealistic) plan targets. Any real QA would just get in the way of numbers. Basically when it came to consumer goods, poor quality got you a slap on the wrist, not meeting quantity targets got you demoted. Poor quality but exceeding targets = praise and bonuses. In really simple terms, quality is not an easily quantifiable metric, and can’t be used to effectively measure performance according to the Plan. And exceeding Plan targets benefited everyone from the lowly worker to the Party secretary responsible for your plant. Finally there was very little that the plant management could do to punish the workers who continually failed to meet quality standards. They could not be fired, their base salary could not be slashed, and if they met the plan, they expected bonuses. In short, the entire system was not conducive to quality.
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Was 'England' as we define it today ever sovereign?
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If you don't want to count the Kingdom of Wessex, Aethelstan around 930 unified England but not Scotland or Wales and was crowned as the King of England. His nephew Eadred lost Northumbria (to independence) and then Eadwig, the successor, once again had the country split from under him, although nominally it was a unified country until 1013 when the Danes came in again. A great problem with early English kings (pre-Norman conquest) was that there were a lot of disputes in the succession and Edward the Martyr, Aethelred the Unready, and later, Edward the Confessor. So political unity wasn't something that was maintained. I can't really answer about the Welsh/Cornish issue. I have a copy of John Davies' History of Wales sitting on my shelf, but I haven't had time to read it yet. However, the idea of England exists because historically it's a rather major separate political entity from the rest of Britain and a dominant force in European politics and trade since the Norman invasion. The idea of England definitely predates the Norman invasion by hundreds of years. Britain as a political entity didn't really exist until James VI/I but that was only a personal union instead of an actual union of the kingdoms. You know when the actual actual union occurred, of course.
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A few things: I believe, but haven't verified, that England as we know it was pretty much unified after the second Danish dynasty- Cnut and his heirs. Edward the Confessor I think got a fully-fledged England from them. As for the differing fates of Wales and Cornwall, there were two big causes I see. The biggest one is that Wales resisted conquest for much longer than Cornwall. I think the last independent ruler of Cornwall was killed in the 9th century, whereas Wales retained a high degree of independence until what, the 12th or 13th century. There's also the matter of political legitimacy. The rulers of Cornwall were just rulers of Cornwall, whereas the ruler of Wales was usually able to claim the title King of the Britons, with theoretical authority over the non-Germanic peoples of Britain. Also other petty Brythonic kingdoms were absorbed by England, not just Cornwall. Dumnonia became part of England, and parts of Strathclyde, too. Wales is more the exception to the rule, with Cornwall being closer to the norm. If Cornwall is unusual, it's because it retained its Brythonic culture, unlike the more centrally located British kingdoms, which became culturally English. EDIT: MY grammar was utter shit initially.
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Were the bombers that dropped the atomic bombs over Hiroshima/Nagasaki uncontested?
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Japanese air defences had been ground down from the start of the US strategic bombing campaign in November 1944. In common with the strategy employed against Germany the Japanese aircraft industry was targeted from the beginning, and though early raids were not always accurate or successful they did force the dispersal of aircraft manufacture, and production fell as raids continued with increasing intensity (*The Strategic Air War Against Germany and Japan: A Memoir*, Haywood S. Hansell, Jr; he includes [a Strategic Bombing Survey graph of aircraft production] (http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/Hansell/img/p226.jpg)). The high altitude and strong defences of the B-29 made them a challenging target for Japanese fighters even at the height of Japanese air strength. The capture of Iwo Jima in March 1945 allowed long range fighters to escort the B-29s, but by this time the attrition suffered both in home defence and across the Pacific and CBI theatres had severely weakened the Japanese air forces; "... by late spring and summer Japanese air strength in the home islands deteriorated so rapidly that bomber formations again went out unescorted" (*The Army Air Forces in World War II: Volume V*). Unable to sustain the losses, resources were husbanded to prepare for the expected invasion of mainland Japan: "After June 26, Japanese fighters were rarely encountered in numbers (...) The JAAF was virtually powerless to react against the invaders, and it was told to keep its remaining aircraft in reserve for the final battle, expected in the autumn. Japan's industrial power had been weakened, and the means to defend its airspace was lacking." (*B-29 Hunters of the JAAF*, Takaki & Sakaida). In terms of anti-aircraft artillery the Japanese armed forces placed little emphasis on defence of the Home Islands until the Doolittle raid of April 1942, and though this prompted an expansion of air defences they were still not strong by the time of the B-29 raids. The most common weapon was the Type 88 7.5cm gun with a practical ceiling of around 15,000ft, half the altitude that B-29s could attack from. The 8.8cm Type 29 and 12cm Type 3 were more of a threat but were in short supply, especially the latter, with only 154 produced during the war. Fire control was also lacking with a shortage of radar sets meaning many batteries still relied on sound locators. (*Defense of Japan 1945*, Steven J Zaloga). The first practice missions of the 509th Composite Group, the unit formed to drop the atomic weapons, were flown in July after the JAAF had effectively stopped contesting US air attacks; there were 18 bombing sorties against targets in Japan using "pumpkin" bombs that simulated the size and weight of the Fat Man atomic bomb and the 509th suffered no losses during these missions, only one B-29 suffered minor damage.
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Here's a previous thread that covers a lot of what you were asking, it's near the bottom of the top answer. /u/eternalkerri is responsible for the answer https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2jigkz/was_there_any_concern_in_the_us_government_that/
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AITA for asking some maroon friends to help me steal from the Spanish only to accidentally spark a four-year-long scorched earth campaign against my allies?
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ESH. Well, everyone but the slaves. The Spanish sound just *terrible*, you're in this for your own selfish reasons, and you caused a *scorched earth war*? What the hell!
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NTA. Now, I normally don't support things like stealing and interfering in other people's affairs, but it sounds like good came out of it (the Maroons freeing slaves). Yes, there might have been a lot of deaths, but sounds like the end result was good and that's what's important. Sorry about your burned body, btw.
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Does anybody have stats or a general idea on how much metal would have been used to make knights armor, as well as its modern day cost?
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You may be interested in these previous answers as well as the linked answer below. I have written a lot about armourers, since they are one of my main fields of study. * Manufacturing and Supplying the Armour of Weapons of a Late Medieval Army * From Ore to Harness: The Steps of Manufacturing Plate Armour * The Importance and Illusiveness of 'Good Steel' in Medieval and Early Modern Armour * Why were Milanese armourers so successful? * The Armour Industry of Milan, contd. * Manufacturing Munition Armour * What did Royal Armour Look Like? * Two Podcast Episodes About the armour industry * The Innovators of Armouring * Commissioning and Customizing Armour * Was medieval armour made from iron or steel? * Could you sue and armourer for malpractice? * How wealthy could an armourer expect to be? Were they considered artists?
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How Much Would a Suit of Armour from 1455 – 1485 cost? by u/WARitter may be of interest
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I know Django Unchained is a typical Tarantino movie but were there really female slaves regarded as 'high class hookers', such as Sheba who appeared to even dine with her owners?
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Thomas Jefferson is widely held to have slept with and produced children with a slave. Fawn Brodie met a lot of criticism with the idea, but DNA later proved her right. One thing you must remember is that slaves were an investment. So, things like "mandingo fighting" were not really happening. It would be like throwing away money. Colonial statutory rape laws didn't apply to Indians or Black people. In most cases, it was illegal to defend yourself against your master and children born to a slave were still slaves. So, there was virtually no recourse for owners to take liberties with their female slaves. If anything, they had the added benefit of making more slaves for free. >The slave traders would buy young and able farm men and well developed young girls with fine physique to barter and sell. They would bring them to the taverns where there would be the buyers and traders, display them and offer them for sale. At one of these gatherings a colored girl, a mulatto of fine stature and good looks, was put on sale. She was of high spirits and determined disposition. At night she was taken by the trader to his room to satisfy his bestial nature. She could not be coerced or forced, so she was attacked by him. In the struggle she grabbed a knife and with it, she sterilized him and from the result of injury he died the next day. She was charged with murder. Gen. Butler, hearing of it, sent troops to Charles County [Maryland] to protect her, they brought her to to Baltimore, later she was taken to Washington where she was set free. . . This attack was the result of being goodlooking, for which many a poor girl in Charles County paid the price. There are several cases I could mention, but they are distasteful to me. . . . Another account: > On this plantation were more than 100 slaves who were mated indiscriminately and without any regard for family unions. If their master thought that a certain man and woman might have strong, healthy offspring, he forced them to have sexual relation, even though they were married to other slaves. If there seemed to be any slight reluctance on the part of either of the unfortunate ones, “Big Jim” would make them consummate this relationship in his presence. He used the same procedure if he thought a certain couple was not producing children fast enough. He enjoyed these orgies very much and often entertained his friends in this manner; quite often he and his guests would engage in these debaucheries, choosing for themselves the prettiest of the young women. Sometimes they forced the unhappy husbands and lovers of their victims to look on. Ultimately, female slaves were subjected to the worst kind of sexual exploitation. It was legal and it was profitable. It was also considered distasteful, so I'd imagine you wouldn't see these women in the house, at dinner, to serve as a reminder. Thomas Jefferson's slave girl, Sally, may have been considered to have lived a good life, but he was having sex with her when she was 14 or 15 and she was property. So, tough to say. How good can your life be when someone owns the right to beat you, rape you, or sell your children? Even if they don't... it isn't your life. It is theirs.
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This isn't my area of expertise, but I do know a little about slaves from observing colonial household structures. Slaves were generally divided in between indoor and outdoor laborers. Indoor slaves consisted of footmen, maids and other assorted junior service staff. In a particularly rich household, the major figures such as the butler, the cook and ladiesmaids would have been white. Outdoor slaves would have been agricultural laborers and would have had, generally speaking, a rougher time. As you can imagine, both roles were rather unpalatable. Moving from the United States to Brazil, there were indeed some slaves that had a good life, but their stories only became positive after obtaining freedom. A prime example is Chica da Silva, the slave wife of a Portuguese aristocrat. Her sons later immigrated to Portugal after her death and all of them were ennobled by the Crown. Therefore, there were slaves that overcame their background after manumission. There were also slaves that had a relatively good life under their masters and did not report any considerable abuse. However, slaves generally had an awful life, and these two life paths were an exception rather than a rule.
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Where did the idea of Satan ruling over Hell in Christian beliefs come from?
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The short answer is, early Christian culture was predominantly Greek, and the idea of an underground land of the dead ruled over by a god comes directly from the Greek Hades. (Confusingly, both the god and his domain were named Hades. In turn, the English "Hell" comes from the name of the god of death in pre-Christian Norse mythology.) A bit more complicated is why Christian Hell is a separate place of torment for bad people. Greek Hades assigned rewards and punishments, and the Vikings had their famous VIP area for warriors, Valhalla, but neither arrangement is quite like Hell. And in Judaism, God doesn't allow naughty souls into the afterlife at all--they're totally destroyed after judgement. The missing piece here is the character of Satan. Even though his name is Hebrew ("Adversary"), his origin is in Zoroastrianism, the religion of ancient Persia--sort of the Fifth Beatle of Western culture. While Zoroastrianism isn't technically "Abrahamic" (that is, unlike Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, its theology doesn't include the Biblical character of Abraham), the contact between ancient Israel and Persia introduced some key Zoroastrian concepts into Judaism, part of the brewing schism which eventually produced Christianity and Islam. Like Abrahamic religions, Zoroastrianism has one god, Ahura Mazda. But he's split into two incarnations at war with each other: his good aspect is Spenta Mainyu (Jehovah), who lives in Vahishta Ahu (Heaven) with an army of yazatas (angels). His evil aspect is Angra Mainyu (Satan), who lives in Achista Ahu (Hell) with an army of devas (devils). Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu will battle over the world until the coming of the Saoshyant (Messiah), who will make peace between them. The last standardized version of the Hebrew Torah was written around 400 BCE; the Greek Septuagint (the proto-Christian Old Testament, largely translated from the Torah but with some bits changed) was written around 200 BCE. And the Latin Vulgate translation of the Septuagint, the Catholic Old Testament, was written in 382 CE. Comparing the differences between the three neatly illustrates the expansion of Zoroastrian ideas in Christianity and Judaism during the 1000-year gap. For example, the Torah version of the Book of Job begins with a conversation between God and "a devil." ("Now there was a day when the sons of God [angels] came to present themselves before the Lord, and a devil came also among them.") But the Latin Vulgate version has the conversation taking place between God and "Satan"--no longer an employee but a cosmic rival, if not quite as powerful as his Zoroastrian ancestor. (**Update:** As /u/koine_lingua points out, while some changes in the Christian Old Testament were already apparent in its first Greek version, the transformation of "a devil" into *the* Devil happened centuries later, in the Latin.)
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While I can't comment on where it originated, I can say that it did not come from the Bible itself. 2 Peter 2:4 states that the angels that rebelled were sent to Hell and placed "in chains of darkness, to be held for judgment". The idea of Satan ruling over Hell come from later sources.
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Why is the Vietnam War so vilified in American culture, but the Korean War not?
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Well, a number of reasons. Perhaps the most notable, besides the loss/tie difference that you pointed to, is that they were sold as similar wars but were in fact very different. Korea, while unpopular, was nowhere near as catastrophic from a PR point of view as Vietnam. ~~South Korea was a legitimate state, and as such it made sense and was more understandable for the US to intervene on behalf of an endangered ally. The situation in Vietnam was totally different.~~ (Sorry about that, I don't have the sources with me to back that up, so I'll retract it, and I don't know enough about South Korea to answer off the top of my head. My reasoning was based on Diem's ultimately dying in a coup during the war, while See stayed in power afterwards, so I guess stability would be my one word answer.) It seems, at first, exactly like you described, "to protect democratic factions in the country against Communist ones," or protect the South from the North like in Korea. That's the one sentence, official answer, and the one that you're most likely to get from any simple history of the subject. However, the situation in Vietnam was totally different from that sort of ideal. In reality, there was no democratic South Vietnam. It was established after the Geneva Conference of 1954 (which followed Vietnam's war of independence from France) as a temporary state in preparation for national elections in 1956. Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, was extremely popular, representing both nationalism and successful resistance to a much more powerful foreign occupier, which is something of a recurring theme in Vietnamese history. He was a brutal autocrat, to be sure, frequently killing political opponents, by the thousands if need be. That said, he was not the agent of some larger Communist conspiracy. He played the Soviets for military support during both wars, but did not answer to them, and was a revolutionary nationalist who happened to be Communist rather than a revolutionary Communist seeking to cause the fall of Southeast Asia. In the leadup to 1956, it was clear that Ho was going to sweep the elections. He was much more popular than his Southern counterpart, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was also autocratic and led an extremely corrupt South Vietnamese (SVN) government, without popular support. By all accounts, South Vietnam should have ended in 1956, with the country unifying after Ho's inevitable victory in the national elections. However, Diep did not partake in the elections, ensuring the prolongation of the SVN state, which thereafter existed almost solely because of US aid. The question of whether the US should have intervened is an extremely loaded one, but it boils down to a set of assumptions that policy makers had. First, those in charge assumed that Ho was part of a larger Communist plot and that he thus had to be stopped to halt Soviet expansion. Now, the theory of monolithic Communism, which was also key to the domino theory of one country's fall engendering a worldwide collapse of free societies into Communist control, was demonstrably false (Here, I was pointing mainly to Tito being independent and the emergent Sino-Soviet split, which while it was later than the earliest military advisers, still was a political reality at during escalation), and many policymakers knew that. There was no real international agenda, and different countries, whether the USSR, China, Yugoslavia, or Vietnam, had their own take on how to govern and their own priorities. Second, policymakers assumed that SVN was a viable, independent and preexisting state, which was untrue. It was corrupt, lacked popular support, and should by all rights have disappeared after the 1956 elections. The continued to funnel money and supplies into the government long after they knew that none of it was being put to good use (this appears in both Appy and the Pentagon Papers. Appy says that SVN citizens were well aware of and hated the governmental corruption, and specifically that "Diem's popular support was thin, his military largely inept, his government riddled with corruption." The Pentagon papers also fully acknowledge Diem's unpopularity and inefficiency). Lastly, Americans assumed that the Vietnam situation would affect their place in international politics as a whole. The whole doctrine of "credibility" led policymakers to think that a fall of SVN to Communism would lead the USSR and the world in general to lose respect and fear for the US, which singlehandedly explains why the war dragged on as long as it did. No one wanted to be the first American president to lose a war, and so they supported the stalemate in the hopes of kicking the can further down the road. Now, to fully answer your question, basically the war was fought on false premises **AND** the American public found out about it. Journalists became more critical of American presence as they found out more about the situation. In addition, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a collection of classified documents concerning American involvement in Vietnam, turned more Americans against the war, and led to an increasingly popular sentiment that this war was being fought for thoroughly wrong reasons, was costing thousands of American lives, was being fought wrong, and that Americans had no real stake in the outcome. Combine all that, and you get the least popular conflict in American history. However, this history is being forgotten at an alarming rate, with ~~support for the Vietnam War increasing~~ the number of Americans who think intervention was a mistake decreasing later and later after the war's end (this was a statistic that I saw, must have simply misremembered it, thanks). Now, I'm only a college student, and so this likely isn't a perfect answer. I would like to keep contributing to this sub, so feedback is welcome and appreciated. In terms of sources, this is primarily in James Patterson's *Grand Expectations, The United States: 1945-1975* which is a solid general history of recent America, and Christian Appy's *Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides* which is a fascinating collection of firsthand accounts from people involved with the war, which I cannot recommend highly enough. If you're interested, I would also look into the Pentagon Papers themselves, which, once you're more acquainted with the history behind them, provide a fascinating insight into what happened, and what went wrong. **TL;DR:** War fought for wrong reasons, Americans find out about it. **EDIT:** Sweet Jesus this blew up, some great comments below, so listen to those smarter people first. I'll try to fix what I can, though there is some stuff that I don't have answers for.
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If you fell into a coma in the Middle Age, what would happen to you?
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Follow up question: was there much in the way of long-term "hospital" type care in per-enlightenment Europe, for any sort of condition? If so, what kinds of things would they be treating? Were there cases of people being under that sort of care for months or even years?
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Follow up question: are there any records of people becoming catatonic and needing care?
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What was the reaction to President Lincoln's assassination from governments and leaders outside of the US?
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The craziest thing, to me, is that it took over a week for the news to reach Europe... there wasn't a functioning transatlantic telegraph cable yet so all news was carried by boat.
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Followup, what was the reaction in the southern states who have recently returned to the U.S(both the leadership and the general population)? Did they rejoice in seeing it as the death of a tyrant? Or did they accept lincoln as their leader and mourn his death?
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What is the history of historians?
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In a small way this question falls into the wonderful world of historiography, which mostly covers what history is actually made up of and how history is influenced by the author. However, in a small way, it also studies the history of history itself. The question is challenging, and history began being recorded differently and at different times throughout the world. Most historians agree that the idea and outlook of recorded history, at least similarly to how we know it today, began in Mesopotamia. Often the Greek historian Herodotus is credited with being the first historian of Western History and lived and wrote during the fifth century BCE. His work was mostly focused on the origins of the Greco-Persian war and is credited with attempting to write history free of myth. "Attempting" is the key word there as his history is still wrought with legend and myth and a large amount of Greco bias, which would not pass for peer-reviewed history today. Yet Herodotus' study of past events from a political, social, and economic standpoint, serve as a basis for how history is studied today. In the same respect, the Hebrew Bible is also considered an early version of history, however, like Herodotus, cannot be considered the same type of history we know today. I cannot speak to the founding fathers of other areas of history and maybe others can add to that realm. Sources and further reading see: Herbert Butterfield's 1981 "The Origins of History" or for readings in Historiography, Barbara Tuchman's 1982 "Practicing History"
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The oldest known cave art comes from the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain. Hand stencils and disks made by blowing paint onto the wall in El Castillo cave were found to date back to at least 40,800 years, making them the oldest known cave art in Europe, 5–10,000 years older than previous examples from France. So I guess we have been documenting history for at least 40,800 years. However, the earliest known systematic historical thought emerged in ancient Greece, a development which would be an important influence on the writing of history elsewhere around the Mediterranean region. The earliest known critical historical works were The Histories, composed by Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 – c. 425 BCE) who later became known as the "father of history".
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Did people try and commit crimes during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl to go to jail for food and shelter?
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This question came up a while back and I think my answer from that post still stands. In particular the desire to avoid jail, which inevitably meant hard labor and left you no better off than when you went in. Here's that answer: If you were looking "3 hots and cot" during the Great Depression, getting picked up for some "small crime" might be an option, but certainly not a good one. Take vagrancy, for example, during California's "Bum Blockade" in the early 1930s those arrested were given a choice of "either leave California or serve a 180-day jail term with hard labor." Studs Terkel in *Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression* similarly records one Louis Banks talking about his run-ins with the law as a vagrant: > I was in chain gangs and been in jail all over the country. I was in a chain gang in Georgia. I had to pick cotton for four months, for just hoboin' on a train. Just for vag. They gave me thirty-five cents and pair of overalls when I got out. Just took me off the train, the guard. 1930, during the Depression, in the summertime, Yes, sir, thirty-five cents, that's what they gave me. > I knocked on people's doors. They'd say, "What do you want? I'll call the police." And they'd put you in jail for vag. They'd make you milk cows, thirty or ninety days. Up in Wisconsin, they'd do the same thing. Alabama they'd do the same thing. California, anywhere you'd go. Maybe if your situation was so dire that hard labor and terrible (if relatively) consistent food was preferable, then you might see getting arrested as an improvement. A consistent theme running through hobo stories, however, is that they were out there looking for honest work; serving a few months of hard time wouldn't leave you any better off then when you started. A better option was when various New Deal programs started setting up work camps. From *Hard Times* again, an Ed Paulsen happily recounts his time in a transient work camp: > They drive us up to an old army warehouse. They check you in, take off your clothers, run them through a de-louser, and you take a bath. It's midnight. We come out, and here's a spread with scrambled eggs, bacon, bread, coffee and toast. We ate a great meal. It was wonderful. We go upstairs to bed. Here's a double-decker, sheets, toothbrush, towels, everything. I sat down on this damn bed, I can't tell you, full of wonderment. We thought we'd gone to heaven. Hal's a young punk, he's seventeen. He said, "What the hell kind of place is this?" I said, "I don't know, but it's sure somethin' different." Studs goes on to note that Ed was assigned a job with the National Youth Administration (and eventually with UNICEF). Ed says of that: > The NYA was my salvation. I could just as easily have been in Sing Sing as with the UN. In conclusion: - Getting arrested for even a small crime meant you could look forward to jail and hard labor, which have always and will always, suck. - Getting into a New Deal labor camp meant getting a place to stay, food to eat, and a job to give you meaning. Vote FDR in '36.
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Follow up question- how were the conditions in the average prison (for an average prisoner) in the U.S. at the time?
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If Jacobitism was mostly a movement for an absolute, Catholic, divine right monarchy in England, why was it able to win such popular support?
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I'd like to add some further details to u/Malaquisto's survey if you wouldn't mind some additional context and a few extra leads. Mal is correct that Jacobitism was a long-lived movement that adapted its contours according to the fortunes and goals of those under its aegis, and that while strong political and dynastic ideologies stood at the center of the 'cause', through its century of relevance it slowly adapted to cover a broad base of disaffections with the established Williamite and Georgian governments. But I believe it is important to stress the widely international context of Jacobitism and that many different 'strains' of Jacobite sentiment existed, many of which were inextricably tied to the intricate web of European political alliances, especially through the eighteenth century. Yet it wasn't only about politics; there were economic, social, and confessional aspects to Jacobitism, and it was expressed quite differently between each of the three kingdoms in the 'Atlantic archipelago'. In England, the Anglican Church was effectively Episcopal and shared non-juring principles with a large portion of Scottish Jacobites in the north-east who in turn provided their armies with a primacy of support, despite the traditional Highland-centric slant to the memory of Jacobitism. The very core of Episcopal conviction, especially in Scotland, was thought to be incompatible with a Hanoverian succession, and this reinforces the fact that things were not drawn down the lines of Catholic versus Protestant. And it wasn't just the clergy who were non-juring, but also the congregations over which they presided. As an ever-growing threat to the government, this led to some terrible depredations in both England and Scotland that saw registers made of 'unqualified' clergy and the locking up and destruction of meeting houses reminiscent of the anti-Catholic penal laws in England and Ireland from the previous decades. In Scotland, Episcopalians were treated markedly worse than Catholics, especially in the aftermath of the Forty-five rising. While Mal focuses on the early years of Jacobitism in Ireland versus the Williamite regime shortly after the Revolution, some of its most formative years came after the Union of 1707 and was expressed under martial risings in 1715, 1719, and 1745. These all started and ended in Scotland, but English support was always going to be an absolute necessity. Tending to attract conservative aristocrats with 'country values' and flirted with by Tories but never officially committing, Jacobitism never materialized there in large enough numbers to influence the outcome. And because English Jacobites did not widely take up arms as the century wore on, the Stuarts increasingly came to lean on France for money, materiel, and martial support. By the time that James Francis Edward was done with the idea of making another attempt himself, his son Charles Edward was representing Jacobitism in a very different light and to a considerably different populace than at the end of the previous century. After the Union, Scotland was the primary target for Stuart plans, but I disagree that half of Scotland was Jacobite. The high water mark of Jacobite martial participation was only around 20,000 in 1715, and a significant chunk of that was based on opposition to the Union in a kind of patriotic, proto-nationalistic melange. By 1745, time had passed and the economic benefits of the Union had been made more apparent to many, largely cutting into the zeitgeist of Jacobitism from the previous generation, and this is borne out by relatively weak national support after the last rising kicked off. Indeed, only about 1.14% (4.4% of adult males) of Scotland's population took active part in the Forty-five, and Jacobite command had a hell of a time recruiting and keeping troops in their ranks throughout the entire campaign. I also disagree that Jacobitism was 'more of a Highlander thing', though we tend to remember it that way. Gaels were propagandized into being natural Jacobites, but only a quarter of the fifty primary clans were Catholic, they were often internally divided by allegiances and principles, and Jacobite sentiments tended to decline as chiefs drifted toward neutrality, influenced by more pragmatic concerns later in the eighteenth century. Highlanders might have been the traditional 'shock troops' of the later Jacobite armies, but Lowlanders from the north-eastern counties appear to have come out in greater numbers in 1745-6. Significant support likewise came from Lowland areas like Edinburgh and East Lothian. I do not believe that Charles Edward ever represented himself as an enlightened liberal. Charles himself was razor-focused on restoring his father, and Jacobite proclamations explicitly promised tolerance to anyone who would join their effort to reclaim the throne. The Stuarts were always tracking the bigger picture, though, which was all three kingdoms or nothing, and they always represented the conservative, traditional principles versus what they viewed as the corrupted liberality and foreign progressiveness of the Whigs and their Hanoverian head of state. Jacobites did indeed have a coherent programme of government drawn up, but it never made it past a few provisional declarations on the local level, and the Jacobite logistical networks could not have supported it in the long term. Finally, I'd like to address your question about why Jacobitism persisted beyond the active threat to the established government that it represented. The trappings of neo-Jacobitism that you identify through the Victorian era and even today hold very little in common with historical Jacobitism and really cannot be considered in the same breath. Modern Jacobites consider themselves to be regnal legitimists or Scottish nationalists, and from the historian's perspective have appropriated a lot of iconography and symbolism with little understanding behind what it meant during the long eighteenth century. As Mal suggested, the romance of the story long outlasted the movement, but the movement was, itself, extremely long-lived and one of the most dynamic and serious challenges to the British government in the early modern era. If you would like to read a bit more about some particular aspects relating to your questions, I can recommend the following sources to you: • Paul Monod, *Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788* (Cambridge, 1989). • Bruce Lenman, ‘The Scottish Episcopal Clergy and the Ideology of Jacobitism’ in Eveline Cruickshanks, ed., *Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759* (Edinburgh, 1982). • Daniel Szechi, *The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688-1788* (2nd ed., Manchester, 2019). • Allan Macinnes, *Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603-1788* (East Linton, 1996). • D. S. Layne, ‘Spines of the Thistle: The Popular Constituency of the Jacobite Rising in 1745-6’ (PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2016), pp. 58-62. Hoping this has been useful! With best wishes, Dr Darren S. Layne Creator and Curator, The Jacobite Database of 1745
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Great question. Okay so, yes King James was an absolutist divine right monarch. But that doesn't mean that Jacobitism was an absolutist divine right political movement! Jacobitism was a very broad tent, and at one time or another it reached out to pretty much everyone who had reason to be unhappy with the political status quo. And yes, that led to some pretty weird combinations sometimes. The core of Jacobitism in England was among aristocrats and the landed gentry. These were groups that had skewed hard Royalist during the Civil War. They placed a very high value on legitimacy, and at the end of the day James was pretty clearly the legitimate King. The whole notion that he had abdicated was a pretty obvious fiction, whipped up to cover a coup backed by a foreign army. True, he had been a terrible King... but still, it was never going to sit well with the gentry. James also got a lot of support from within the Church of England. Yes, it may seem weird that a Catholic ruler would find a lot of support from Protestant clerics and bishops. But remember, the King was the head of the Church of England, rather as the Pope was the head of the Catholic Church. There are a lot of Catholics today who sharply disagree with Pope Francis, and some who even consider him heretical. Now imagine that someone lands in Rome with an army, chases Francis out, and declares some other guy Pope. How are Catholics going to react? Well, some might say, great, Francis is gone and now we have a better Pope. But many will say, no matter how much we disliked Francis, we can never accept this usurper. Furthermore, some of the fiercest refusals would probably come from exactly the same stubborn traditionalists who decried Francis the loudest. So in England, a huge chunk of the clergy and a number of the bishops refused to take the oaths affirming William and Mary as monarchs. These clerics were known as "nonjurors" and there were hundreds of them. What I said about stubborn traditionalists? So, late in James' reign there was an event called the Trial of the Seven Bishops, which is exactly what it sounded like: James put seven bishops of the Church of England on trial for disobeying his instructions. The bishops stubbornly insisted on their rights and politely but firmly defied him; they were eventually acquitted. Well, just a couple of years later *five* of the Seven Bishops ended up as nonjurors. They disliked having a Catholic King and they disliked James and they refused to obey what they regarded as his unlawful order -- but they weren't going to swear loyalty to an usurper. (A bit of trivia wrt nonjurors. First, if you ever saw the musical "Hamilton"? You might remember that in Act One, Hamilton debates and defeats a Loyalist named Samuel Seabury. Samuel Seabury ended up becoming an American bishop of the new American Episcopalian Church. But to become an Anglican or Episcopalian bishop, you must be consecrated by another bishop. And in England, all the consecration oaths involved swearing loyalty to the King of England... not really acceptable for a citizen of the new American republic. So Seabury went up to Scotland, where there were still some Scottish bishops who were nonjurors. And that is why the liturgy and ritual of American Episcopalian churches includes a mixture of both Church of England and Church of Scotland influences.) Where was I... okay, so everyone who was unhappy under William and Mary at least flirted with Jacobitism. And a lot of people were unhappy under William and Mary. Remember, practically William's first act as King was to drag England and Scotland into an eight-year-long Continental war against France. This was expensive and -- after the first thrill of defying Louis XIV -- not particularly popular with much of the country. Also, William was Dutch, and many English (and some Scots) really did not like being ruled by a Dutchman. England had fought three wars against the Dutch within living memory, plus there were aggravations like commercial competition and the memory of the Amboyna Massacre. King William spoke English fluently but with a heavy Dutch accent. He did not bother to conceal his preference for his country -- he was ostentatiously happy whenever he left London for the Netherlands -- nor his preference for his countrymen. It's understandable that he would appoint trusted Dutch friends to key positions, but it was deeply irritating to the aristocrats and senior gentry who craved those positions for themselves. Also, William was a brusque man who was often harsh and sometimes rude. He was intelligent, hard-working, and efficient, but he was not someone who suffered fools gladly or who had any patience for time-servers or gossips. And of course the long war with France meant that taxes went up and trade suffered. So, with one thing and another, soon there were a lot of people with buyers remorse about trading James for William. One other small but interesting group of Jacobites: Protestant religious minorities. For complicated reasons beyond the scope of this comment, in 1687 James had extended religious tolerance to various minority Protestant groups. This was generally seen as (1) a stalking horse for extending religious tolerance to Catholics, and (2) an attempt to forge an alliance between these unconventional Protestants and the Catholic Church against the Church of England. Sort of a 17th century horseshoe theory, if you like. Anyway, while the effort failed, it left a lingering affection for James in some surprising places. Most famously, the Quaker leader William Penn was, if not an actual Jacobite, definitely Jacobite-adjacent -- friendly to a lot of Jacobites, and sympathetic to their ideas. Finally, you mentioned two particular groups, the Irish and the Scots. In the case of the Catholic native Irish, it's very easy: they supported James because he was Catholic, full stop. They had their issues with him, sure. But they believed that a victory for William would be worse for them in pretty much every way. And of course, they were completely correct. William's reign saw the Battle of the Boyne, the flight of the Wild Geese, the near complete extinction of native Irish Catholics as a political power in Ireland, and the beginning of the Protestant Ascendancy that would last for the next 200 or so years. The Scots... oh man, this gets complicated. Teal dear, late 17th century Scotland was a snake-pit of treachery, corruption, family feuds, vicious political rivalries, and conflicted loyalties, and that's before you bring the Scots Highland clans into the mix. So, nearly half of Scotland was Jacobite because the other half was Williamite. I know that sounds kind of simplistic but, really, that's pretty much how it was. The Scots Church was no help here, because it was undergoing a violent schism between Presbyterians and... you know what, never mind. Church of Scotland history is just insane. I mean, this is a church whose post-Reformation history includes stuff like "The First Secession", "The Second Secession", "The Disruption", and "The Killing Time". Let's just leave them out of this. Anyway, later on -- under the Hanoverians, when Lowland Scotland began to seriously prosper after the Act of Union -- Jacobitism would become more of a Highlander thing. But by that time, 1720s and beyond, it was morphing into a nostalgic / romantic / anti-authoritarian movement based around resentment of the Crown and those pushy Lowlanders, not about any desire to restore Catholicism or absolutism. Finally, as to ideology, Jacobite ideology morphed and evolved over time, so that by the 1740s Bonnie Prince Charlie was presenting himself as the enlightened liberal alternative to the corrupt and backwards regime of the aging George II. At all times, though, it was kind of a mess. There were certain core elements, like legitimism, that were always present. But it was mostly an ideology of opposition, not a coherent program for government. That made it easier for Jacobitism to survive -- and it survived a crazy long time; Jacobitism was a serious military threat for over 50 years. But it meant that from a modern perspective, it's often hard to make a coherent narrative about just exactly what they wanted. I hope this helps!
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How did Lafayette, Kosicuzco, Pulaski, von Steuben, and other foreign volunteers in the American Revolution feel about fighting for freedom for a slaveowning society, and the fact that Washington and other prominent patriots owned slaves?
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One biographer of the Marquis de Lafayette wrote, "On no subject perhaps did Lafayette reveal the consistency of his adherence to the principle of liberty more staunchly than on that of slavery and its related problems." However, he came to this view gradually, over the course of the Revolutionary War: "Apparently, in the war period Lafayette never questioned either the legitimacy or the morality of the institutions of slavery or the slave trade. Once he had even suggested to Washington that certain dangerous missions might be financed by the sale of slaves that he assumed could be captured." But by the end of the war, Lafayette's view had changed. In a letter written in February 1783 to George Washington, Lafayette suggested that the two of them buy farmland to be worked by slaves, with the expressed purpose of gradually emancipating them. If the experiment worked, then perhaps they could spread emancipation throughout the rest of continental North America and the Caribbean: > "Now, My dear General, that You are Going to Enjoy some Ease and Quiet, Permit me to propose a plan to you Which Might Become Greatly Beneficial to the Black part of Mankind—Let us Unite in Purchasing a small Estate Where We May try the Experiment to free the Negroes, and Use them only as tenants—Such an Example as Yours Might Render it a General Practice, and if We succeed in America, I Will chearfully devote a part of My time to Render the Method fascionable in the West Indies—if it Be a Wild scheme, I Had Rather Be Mad that Way, than to Be thought Wise on the other tack." Washington wrote back, and seemed to tentatively indulge Lafayette on the subject, but nothing was ever done about it. Lafayette did buy land in Guyana to try out this experiment, but he never followed through once his attention became focused on the French Revolution. Tadeusz Kościuszko was opposed to slavery from the outset of the war. At one point during the American Revolution, he served in North Carolina under General Nathaniel Greene, where, as one biographer put it, Kościuszko "came face to face with the worst situations of human bondage, conditions he was not averse to criticizing" before his fellow officers. For his war services, Congress granted him land in Ohio, and he also owned land in Maryland, in Washington D.C., and possibly in Virginia. It's unclear how much, if any, of these landholdings were ever cleared for cultivation, but it's fairly certain that none of them were being tended to by slaves. After the war, in 1784, Kościuszko went back to Poland (actually the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth). In Poland, there were political reforms going on that led to a new Constitution, which Kościuszko considered a European continuation of the American Revolution, i.e., a march toward freedom. In a letter in 1789, he wrote that he hoped that this progress "would not stop until all slaves, serfs, and oppressed peoples were treated as equals". He then returned to the United States in 1797, whereupon he struck up a close friendship with Vice-President Thomas Jefferson, whom he saw "almost daily". He left the United States again in 1798, a little less than a year after he'd arrived, with his American estate in the care of others. Before he left, he wrote a will, appointing Thomas Jefferson the executor of his estate. In it, he requested that the profits from selling his land be used to free and educate as many slaves as possible, including the slaves belonging to Jefferson himself. When Kościuszko died in 1817, however, Jefferson declined to fulfill his role as executor, and ultimately, none of the proceeds from the sale of Kościuszko's estate were ever used to free or educate any slaves. Jefferson cited his advancing age as a reason he wouldn't execute the will. Baron Von Steuben supported slavery, at least to some degree, because he owned at least one slave. If it's any indication as to Von Steuben's thoughts on the social order, it was once suggested to him that perhaps he renounce his "baron" title of European noblity and become simply "Citizen Von Steuben." He laughed the suggestion off, saying that somebody else would get the title anyway, and then pointed out that Americans use similar titles, if informally. (A lot of Americans in colonial times were referred to by their former military or miltia titles, or professional titles. There were a lot of "Captains" and "Colonels" as well as "Judges", "Doctors", and "Squires".) After the war, Von Steuben retired to an enormous estate in Oneida County, New York, where he owned some 16,000 acres. There, he owned at least one slave, because he freed him in his will: > "All the rest of my Effects I desire may be sold and after paying the expence of my Interment, be distrubuted amongst the Servants living with me at the time of my death—If the Negro Man Nathan is living with me at the time of my Decease he shall be then set at Liberty..." The reference to "servants" suggests he likely owned more, that these were black slaves who were not freed upon Von Steuben's death, though I don't have a source for what was actually included in his estate at the time he died. Casimir Pulaski didn't seem to leave any writings behind one way or the other on the subject of slavery. He almost certainly never owned any slaves, because he was living in Paris in 1775, and when he arrived in that city, he had no money. By early 1777, he had met the Marquis de Lafayette who recruited him to go to America and serve the Revolution. Pulaski went, and was killed in action in 1779, so he likely never had a chance to purchase any land in America. Thus, he almost definitely never owned any slaves, but what his actual thoughts on slavery were, are unknown.
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Did Lafayette have any reaction to Napoleon's reintroduction of slavery after it was abolished in France?
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How were "Non Black" Minorities viewed and treated during the segregation era of the USA?
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James Loewen's book "Mississippi Chinese" (1971) addresses this question as it relates to Chinese immigrants in the Mississippi Delta during the latter years of formal segregation. When they arrived, these immigrants were mostly seen as neither black nor white. However, since they were a mostly poor demographic that worked menial jobs (mostly owning groceries, as I remember), they started out being seen as "closer" to black. Over time, though, their liminal status actually gave them more upward mobility - especially as their businesses prospered, marriage, etc. Their increased prosperity led to them gradually being more accepted by the white community and eventually seen as being "closer" to white than black. The book also explores how the Chinese immigrants had largely never experienced racial discrimination before (in China), but only class discrimination. Loewen concludes that it was their ability to change their class status that allowed them to also change their social status.
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Follow-up: particularly in the South, where Jim Crow laws officially enforced segregation. Would a Chinese-American be considered "colored", white or something else?
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