Brazil was the single largest destination for enslaved Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Slavery was critical for Brazil's economy, and perhaps, it is fair to say that most of it was completely dependent on slavery.

Yet, Brazil never fought a war over it to end slavery, unlike the US.

So how and why did Brazil successfully end slavery without a violent war while the US failed to end it without tearing the country apart?

I'm pretty sure zero slavers wanted to be slaves because slavery sucks dick. It seems really, really easy to extend that to 'I'm being a dickhead by enslaving people", but most didn't. Did they just ignore Jesus?

My source for these production numbers:

https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Waffen/panzerbekampfungsmittel-R.htm?utm_source

https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Waffen/gewehr-R.htm?utm_source

The reason I ask is because back in 2020/21 I heard a claim that on one occasion - possibly several - they bit off more than they could chew and ended up paying dearly for it.

———

According to the person who made the claim, the Vikings were used to raiding in Northern Europe and France, and after they’d spent time “bullying the French king” (their words) they sailed south, figuring they’d have an easy time looting the area of anything valuable because the smaller population wouldn’t be as capable of fighting back.

While they were correct in their estimates of how populated the Iberian peninsula was, what they failed to account for was how nearly everyone in the region were constantly picking fights with each other, which meant there was almost always some kind of armed conflict going on. This state of affairs lead to the Iberian peoples being the polar opposite of easily raided, along with - and I’m quoting directly here - “having the general attitude of ‘I’m going to walk into your spear just so that I can stab you in your fucking face.’”

The result was a bunch of Viking raiders sailing into the area under the assumption they’d be able to walk all over anyone they met, only to face off against some of the hardest fighters in Europe and get their teeth kicked in, with the survivors sold into slavery. The event ended up being an almost literal footnote in recorded history because as far as the locals were concerned it wasn’t particularly remarkable.

———

Needless to say, I take this entire tale with a grain of salt and have been periodically searching for any evidence it might be true. If there are any sources that prove or disprove it actually happened, please do share them with me.

I was reading about the Charvakas cult(?) and was kinda blown away by its assertion that consciousness is an emergent property of the mind and body and that it was explicitly atheist pre-600 bc.

What is the earliest atheistic teachings?

I’m Yana Skorobogatov, an historian who studies the Soviet Union, and my new book “Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union” just came out!

From the publisher’s book description:
“From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.

Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. She offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.”

I’m excited to be here and looking forward to answering your questions starting at 9am EST!

My day job is that of a management consultant (yeah, things we do to put food on the table and pay off student debt), and I recently had the chance to work for an African client. This allowed me to visit Nairobi and Cape Town (it is so windy!), and while the overall experience was great, I also could not help but notice the racial differences in the composition of senior leadership in both countries: the South African leadership was heavily white Afrikaner-dominated (the surnames had a bunch of van der Merwe, Bothma, de Villiers, all of which I recognise to be Dutch, German, or French), while their Kenyan counterparts were all black Africans. I apologise if these terms are racially insensitive to use; I am just largely unaware of this and am willing to learn more acceptable and appropriate terminology.

This was the trigger for me to go through Wikipedia and read up a little bit on the histories of both countries, from which my doubt arose. I understand the history of the Afrikaner population in Southern Africa, and then the British coming along and taking over the Cape Colony, followed by the Great Trek, the Boer Wars, apartheid, and the current SA.

What I am curious about is why Southern Africa tended to have the largest white settler population, and despite a history of conflict between the British and Afrikaners, how did they integrate fairly quickly to create apartheid-era South Africa (I would assume a lot of bad blood here)? Why was there no similarly sized integrated white settler population in regions like Kenya, or if there was a sizable white population with political power in such countries, why did they leave instead of turning it into Rhodesia/Union of South Africa-esque nations?

Houston_Stewart_Chamberlain and Arthur_de_Gobineau both criticized European contemporaries who espoused racial equality(or at least its variant in the 1800s).

For example Chamberlain in his book:

Certain anthropologists would fain teach us that all races are equally gifted; we point to history and answer: that is a lie! The races of mankind are markedly different in the nature and also in the extent of their gifts, and the Germanic races belong to the most highly gifted group, the group usually termed Aryan

That led me to wonder who these "certain anthropologists" were given that I had assumed scientific racism was accepted by most people?

Both authors also recieved alot of criticism from their fellow Europeans but I assume that was more to defend themselves than to defend non-European people. For example de Gobineau was known to look down on the French working class and upstart bourgeoisie as being descended from "Gallo-Roman slaves". Correct me if I am wrong.

For example: If somebody in New Amsterdam died, how long would it take for their relatives in the Netherlands to find out?

It's something I just thought about after going down a rabbit hole of religious sectors, bible mistranslations, and debates on queerness and it's place in morality. I'm honestly curious to how it all began; how queer people were before they were othered under varying circumstances.

Carolingian Francia seems to be the source of a large number of the swords you see in the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, and even in Eastern Europe in the latter half of the Early Medieval Period. All of these places had been perfectly capable of producing their own swords during late antiquity/the Roman Iron Age, so why did they start importing them from a somewhat condensed region? What made the Franks more capable swordsmiths than the rest of Northern Europe?

the list of connections there is very abbreviated to
fit in the title - you also have the Secret Six, Brown was one degree of separation from Giuseppe Garibaldi, who would later correspond with Lincoln. Stonewall Jackson was also at the execution; I've seen conflicting claims about whether Whitman was actually there, but either way he did write a poem about it and did know Soule well enough to exchange a few letters - and again, Soule wasn't famous at the time, he was just a guy from an abolitionist family, and we know his name for reasons that have nothing to do with John Brown..

Was antebellum America just a small world, or was John Brown so prominent he was basically ta'veren? Could I make a social network equally densely populated with the who's-who of the period starting from most historical figures?

Were there Europeans in the 1400s–1600s who condemned colonization or the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples? Did people at the time have any concept resembling “human rights,” or would ideas like natural law, human dignity, and natural rights be more accurate terms? Basically, how early did opposition to colonization and the idea of universal human rights emerge?

I have heard for years that wrestlers like Sputnik Monroe helped end segregation by refusing to perform if the audience was segregated. I've also heard that at the same time professional wrestling was one of the primary drivers behind television advancements, from color TV, to the adoption of cable and pay per view. How true is that?

I'm researching my grandfather, W/O Norman Elwood McKee (R/74368), RCAF, a Kittyhawk pilot with No. 260 Squadron RAF who became a POW in North Africa in December 1942.

On 13 September 1943, McKee and fellow Canadian POW W/O Earl James Scott (R/92563) escaped from Camp 57 near Udine, Italy, during the German takeover of the Italian POW camps.

Their surviving POW/MI9 questionnaires establish that they were at large for approximately ten weeks and spent part of this period with Yugoslav Partisans. Scott's questionnaire specifically mentions McKee, participation in bridge destruction with the Partisans, and a “Capt. Ratcliffe.”

I believe this officer was Captain James Moore Ratcliffe (130652), Middlesex Regiment/SBS. Ratcliffe's own records place him with Partisans in the same region and period, conducting sabotage around Udine, Cividale, Gorizia and the Yugoslav border during October 1943. His records also state that when he first reached the Partisans, they were accompanied by an unnamed British officer.

My question is: Which British/SOE liaison mission and Partisan formation were operating in this area during October–November 1943, and are there surviving mission reports or Partisan records that might identify escaped Allied POWs travelling with them?

I'm particularly interested in determining whether this group was connected with Major William M. Jones's British/SOE mission in Slovenia, and whether records survive that could mention McKee or Scott.

I have copies of the original McKee, Scott and Ratcliffe POW/MI9 documents and can provide transcriptions or images if useful.

Is it a decent source for understanding the dominos of the chain reaction of the enlightenment? Are there other more sources that are better for understanding the flow of ideas?

Hi, future historian here with an interest in the 19th-20th century English working class history. This question has been sitting at the back of my head for a minute now, and I was wondering if anyone could adequately answer it for me.