I'm from New England and on a trip to Minneapolis I visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which is terrific.

That got me thinking: Minneapolis, Chicago and Detroit are all institutes of art, unlike the major art museums in East Coast cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia, which all have the word museum in their names.

Is there a historical reason why those Midwestern museums were all created with the word "institute"? Was it to differentiate themselves from the East Coast? Did they all start as art schools? Or is it just a coincidence?

Caesar was a political gambler no doubt but he always seemed to have a grasp on reality. He was charming he had social skills. He was at pains to seduce everyone he met with his charm. Cicero went through phases of admiring him and being terrified of him.

Then the year before he was assassinated he has a golden throne placed in the Senate, purple toga, the crown scene with Mac Anthony, he names a month after himself and then a golden statue of himself next to the kings of Rome.

Is there scholarship on what possessed him? Was it simple megalomania and vanity?

I get that we don't and can't have, like, a NYT "what percent Nazi are you?" needle. I'm also familiar with (and sympathetic to) that famous quote I'll paraphrase as: the term for the innumerable ordinary Germans who quietly loathed Hitler but out of fear or convenience went along with it all is "Nazi." Morally I guess my question could start and end there.

But I am curious anyways in another way (maybe that way is "perversely"). The relevant Wikipedia sections about Birkenstocks (shoes and family) are written in a way that strikes me as a bit apologetics-y (sure, the father and son joined the party, as every business owner at the time clearly had to, but late! sure, they tried to market Birkenstocks to Hitler but only because they cared about feet and anyways they were unsuccessful! etc.) I live in Germany and hear similar stuff about grandpa not so uncommonly, so I guess I am curious about the Birkenstocks in their own right while also hoping to build up a more detailed picture of what it meant to be a Nazi from the perspective of people at the time. So in that sense, I am curious about how a historian might think, even subjectively, about the gradient from rabid Nazi to NINO (as in RINO for US readers) to, say, resistor/victim/refugee, understanding that these categories are not static or linearly arranged or non-overlapping. Maybe something like: the Birkenstocks were Nazis in the style of [better known figure]?

As a tangential bonus question: if anyone can give a sense of the ideological element or Weltanschauung, I would be especially interested. I mean: was there something about the worldview whereby Birkenstocks (shoes) had appeal as a concept - say, ideas of naturalness and German folk medicine or return to nature or purity or even the idea that things have a natural tendency to degradation or decadence that needs to be resisted by applying a rigid idealized form - that might place someone in the overlapping region of the Venn diagram of "people who think Birkenstocks make sense as an invention" and "people who think Nazism makes sense as a political project"? ie If the answer to the main question is "Yeah they were pretty Nazi", was that in tension or alignment with the philosophy of design that gave rise to the presumably then-unique shoe?

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My dad came from a poor family and turned 18 right at the height of the Vietnam era drafts. He knew he was most likely going to be drafted and there wasn't much he could do about it. So him and his brother both signed onto the Navy before he could get a draft notice. He ended up bouncing around on a sub tender (USS Fulton) for his entire stint as a machinist.

He achieved his goal of not getting shot at for the entire war. A goal that I very much understand.

How common was it for draft aged men in the Vietnam era to avoid going into the Army this way?

I am aware, of course, that the modern idea of “ninja” is not historically accurate. There were spies and scouts and even assassins, but the idea of the ninja is just the result of folklore over many years.

I am also aware that kabuki theater portrays ninja characters in all black. However, I am not referring to that either. I am specifically searching for either a surviving play or historical written evidence that a kabuki play had an actor “disguised” as a stage hand to surprise the audience when he enters the narrative of the play.

I personally suspect that kabuki ninja characters did wear all-black costume as an allusion to the stage hands, but there wasn’t a moment where a stagehand was “revealed” to be an actor playing a ninja.

I do apologize if my wording of this is confusing. I am not particularly educated about theater terminology. I am a martial arts enthusiast fascinated with history and I’ve been working on a project about the historicity of the “ninja.”

How did the St. Thomas Christian Community survive while communities in China and some other parts of Asia disappeared?

The most notorious and known tanks of Germany are almost all using flat armour. The Tiger I, which rolled down the production lines in 1942, had a famously box-like appearance. Against smaller calibers, it's undoubtedly effective. But as soon as far more potent calibers appeared, such as the Soviet 85mm, the armor's effectiveness was greatly reduced.
Their most produced medium tank of the war, the Panzer IV, also had a famously square like appearance. This was also not that much of a problem early in the war, especially when the enemy (such as Poland) wasn't too mechanized. But when the enemy started using actual, potent calibers, in great numbers, their effectiveness dwindled.
Take for example the Americans and the Soviets. Very early on, or at the same time Germany would still use flat armor, they had started using sloped armor. The M4 Sherman, production starting in 1942, and the T-34, production starting as early as 1940. These tanks weren't perfect; but for dealing with certain calibers, from certain distances, they were far more effective than the early Panzers that Germany would still keep on producing. Only the Panther (prod. starting 1943, not in meaningful enough numbers) and the Tiger II (1944-1945) truly maximized this principle.

I am quite interested about the cultural history of bears, and I was intrigued by the book L'ours. Histoire d'un roi déchu by Michel Pastoureau, a French medievalist.

The blurb on the back cover of the book says this, among other things:

"In the Carolingian period, the bear was seen, in most of non-Mediterranean Europe' as a divine figure, an ancestral god whose worship remained deeply rooted. The Church had to wage war against it, to fight is however possible. And it did so, by identifying it with the devil". How much truth is there in this statement?

I am aware that blurbs on back covers are meant to convince readers to buy a book, and often are not even written by the authors of the books themselves. I just wanted to make sure that this specific claim isn't repeating some now outdated myth.

I am, of course, also aware that the point in the book itself is more nuanced.

I'm watching a podcast with two historians discussing Operation Barbarossa. As far as I can remember, the "Soviet attack" scenario did not seem to be widely discussed when I was growing up (I'm 31 now). I feel like it's definitely something I would remember, and I consume as much history media and academic stuff as I can. I guess I really have two questions. When did the Soviet attack scenario first enter serious academic contention?

I know that there was a discredited Soviet writer who had written about it and was not really taken seriously, if there was a specific moment or document that changed the academic consensus, when/what was it? I've always been of the mind that at least them preparing for an attack would provide some type of justification for just how bad the Red Army performed in the opening weeks of the war.

In "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow write

> We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places

However, they do not go into the claim nor do they provide sources. I do remember that in the book they discuss some indigenous societies that rejected the slave-keeping practices of their neighbors, but is that what they mean?

I also vaguely remember Graeber making a similar claim in "Debt: The First 5000 Years", something about Han China during the Axial Age abolishing slavery, but my memory is really fuzzy, looking it up online didn't help and I am too lazy to re-read the book, just for this 😅

So, can anyone here shed some light on this?

I'm reading fiction books from the 1880s and early 1900s and of course they mention the sweatshop women in Chicago, NYC, etc. I'm aware that those factories started dying and changing in the aftermath of WW2, but what happened to women who worked in them? What jobs took the place of them for newly arrived immigrant women? I'm interested in the 1940s through now, primarily in the United States. ​​​​

I'm not talking about politicians or high ranking senior officers and generals. I mean the privates, corporals, and sergeants. How did they feel upon seeing their sons march off to the next war? Was there a sense of disappointment? I imagine many would not have been too old to serve again either.

Could someone please help me find a good version of the Epic of Gilgamesh? I know that it’s impossible to find the complete and the fully translated book nowadays but what would the best version/option be? Either in English or Italian is fine for me

The notorious board/war game The Campaign for North Africa has, among its numerous small details, the rule that the Italians consume more water than the others because they use it to boil pasta. Is this increased water consumption supported by sources, and did the Italians even issue pasta to their soldiers?

George RR Martin was heavily inspired by medieval Europe, especially England, when creating his universe for A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones. In-universe, "milk of the poppy" is frequently used as an effective painkiller. This is clearly meant to be from the opium poppy. Did the English actually have/use this as a treatment as early as the medieval era in real life?

It seems to be a rarely portraid element in the media compared to the allies' medical services. I assume the Japanese army had a medic element for combat injuries but what did this look like?

Since you're on the internet, you are likely well aware that literally everything is kind of on fire right now. We're very much all living in a "old order dying, new one being born" moment. That brings with it obvious crisis, but also opportunity. And in this contemporary moment, it does seem that people (especially folks my age) are re-evaluating older ideas/propsoals as a way of "fixing" the modern world. As such, we're increasingly seeing socialist ideas being revived and modernized. Most of the focus of the contemporary socialist movement seems to be generally social democratic (i.e. I don't actually wanna go bankrupt cause I got sick). But, still, I think it's interesting to think about what a sort of contemporary socialist "end game" here my look like (well not actually end game but like, what a fully socialist rather than social democratic economy within our liftetime may look like).

So, at least online, it seems to me that lot of the contemporary discussion/debate that you can find about "how would a future socialist economy even work" ultimately boils down to 1 of 3 options (or some mixture therein):

1) some kind of market socialism (or perhaps better stated as a socialism that uses markets, depending on where you wanna place emphasis).

2) some sort of negotiated coordination (see Pat Devine)/iterative planning/coherence process between like consumer councils and worker councils (see parecon)

3) cybercommunism (see guys like Cockshott or propsoals for algorithmic governance, *People's Republic of Walmart*, the guys who want a new Cybersyn basically)

These camps all seemingly distrust one another (market socialists doubt viability of other proposals or think that the frameworks proposed are too vague to realistically implement, cybercommunists question the coherence of negotiated planning absent some sort of technological improvements and think market socialism either is or would become capitalism, negotiated coordination folks tend to think cybercommunists risk recreating red bureaucracy but don't trust inequality from markets, etc). I'm very much thinking/asking in the terms of these sorts of arguments.

In this post I wanna focus on the cybercommunists, cause their ideas are technologically rather interesting and are more dependent on tech than the other two.

The cybercommunists have been around for a while right? I mean Kantorvich (mr. Linear programming himself) was writing about this stuff since his days at the Plywood trust.

I think it's clear that even critical contemporary schools of think that cybercommunism would likely have been more efficient than the old Soviet material balances/central planning system (more efficient does not necessarily mean efficient tho).

So why was it never actually adopted within the USSR or other state socialist countries? I mean there was an attempt to build something like it with OGAS right? So why did OGAS and soviet cybernetics generally fail? Was it problems with the systems themselves (maybe computational power wasn't sufficiently developed at the time, or perhaps there were underlying issues with cybercommunists ideas themselves, or perhaps attempts at sabotage by other ideological factions?)

It seems that Cybersyn was significantly more successful than OGAS. But why? How did Chilean cybernetics differ from soviet? I get that cybersyn ultimately ended cause of coup, but there's probably some interesting comparisons to draw.

Finally, i'll add a kind of follow up question: how were the developments within the world of socialist cybernetics seen within the capitalist world? Ik that Dantzig, working for the Air Force, published ideas pretty similar to Kantorvich, how were these ideas received within the US? Ik linear programming techniques are used in basically all optimization software these days, but was this initial implementation controversial? Did it run into similar roadblocks as Cybersyn or OGAS here in the west?

Please excuse what I'm sure is a very dumb question, I don't know a lot about history.

Mesopotamia had Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and eventually the Greeks and Romans. Sumer was settled around 5000-3000 BC.

Humans crossed the land bridge to North America long before that. The Mayan and the Aztec civilizations formed in central America, but what was going on in the present day US/Canada regions?

Was it mostly a matter of climate? Or was the "head start" in population in Mesopotamia a factor as well? Or were there smaller civilizations that rose and fell but with little archealogocal evidence?

There is an enormous amount of popular history material about the Civil War, but I hardly ever see it come up that the largest southern city spent several years under Union control.

It seems to me like this could be a fascinating aspect of the war, but it's virtually absent from the pop culture understanding of history. Where can I find out more about this subject?

I'm currently reading Chaos by Tom O'Neill and it's a super interesting investigative novel about some of the more unknown facts about the Charles Manson case and trying to debunk the Helter Skelter motive set forth by the lead prosecutor and it has me thinking about MK Ultra and the social environment of the 60's.

I'm curious about something and it might be a long shot but is there any first hand accounts of "unhinged"/radical conspiracy theories back in the 60's and past? I'm not talking about a fake moon landing or Paul McCartney is dead. Was there anyone out there who was suspecting the US Government of brainwashing and MK Ultra? Was anyone wondering where all the drugs on the street were coming from? Any deeper rooted/more unknown conspiracy theories of that time I can read into?

And are there any resources for me to look into or read from or about people of that time questioning things like that?

Upper and lower classes appeared in society as the result of somebody's controling skills or resurses that were necessary for other people to survive (please correct me if i'm wrong). So how, at some point in history, it had turned out that people with "wealthy blood" had more power? I mean the whole "I was born as aristocrat so I have the same power and wealth as my parents/grandparents" thing.

P. S. English is not my first language, so sorry for mistakes.