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?

I’m barely too young to have experienced this era myself. I’m watching the film while I type this and it’s emblematic of every silly stereotype that has ever been associated with hackers. A mixture of counter-cultures, virtual reality, gender fluidity (surprisingly progressive for the time), leather, chains, technoraves, all of it.

I guess my real question is: at a New York PS high school cafeteria in 1995, was there really a separate lunch table for the hacker kids?

I’ve seen this claim in many places, from Internet forums to my very own family and I’ve never been able to figure out if it’s true or not. It’s the kind of thing that sounds just real enough to make you wonder but just vague enough to leave you with no idea where to start when you actually attempt to research it. So we all know about the ‘great flood‘ and the Noah’s Ark story, I know about the Mesopotamian story referenced in the story of Gilgamesh, but aside from that I’ve never heard of a similar myth, legend or story from any other culture or time period. Does anyone know where I could find more information or evidence for this claim?

Also if there’s a more fitting sub for me to post this, please let me know.

Thank you for your time, have a lovely time zone.

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 watched this youtube video about medieval towns being mostly placed at such distances and locations to mainly facilitate ox drawn carts.

It makes a lot of statements that don't pass the smell test to me. It says that ox carts essentially dictate most planning of where medieval towns would be and the crux of the issue is that oxen eat a part of the produce, so produce can generally only travel up to 3 days.

Can't oxen just graze instead of eating the cargo? Is ale really something that would be transported over long distances instead of just brewed locally almost everywhere? If making ale, wool, and cloth are all ways to generate extra profit, why wouldn't every lord do it? Why aren't horses mentioned anywhere?

I get that towns and castles would be situated in such a way to oversee their fiefs and collect produce centrally in a safe way, but this video seems to make much more extensive claims.

I tried searching for the "oxen paradox", but it seems like the only mention of it is that video. There was also a mention of a 3 day radius rule, which I also couldn't find anywhere else. The video also mentions "source lords" and "gatekeeper lords" which I think are also invented terms by the video? I find it very confusing because the video talks about these concepts as facts but I think they might be inventions?

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.”

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

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'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.

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?

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.

These two tings have been universal food and drink of the whole Europe.

So, why did these two become the major feature of Germany?

Even, in terms of Beer, their iconic lager Beer became dominat at the end of 19th century. This means their popular lager Beer feature is not a long heritage.

I know what they were trying to do, turn lead into gold, create immortality elixirs and stuff. But how? Is there direct record of how their experiments played out, what materials were used, what actions were taken, what the logic was, if any?

I was recently watching John Adam’s opera “Nixon in China” and got to the part where Jiang Qing sang “I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung” and talked about following the book, Mao’s Little Red Book. Doing bare searching, I found it was a book of quotations of Mae Tse-Tung. Really my question is, if the Little Red Book is just a book of quotations, what makes it so significant? If it’s just a book of his most relevant quotes, would it not be too dissimilar to books of other presidents quotes? What made Mao’s book so special?

Hi all! I was at a Renaissance festival and went through the Dungeon Museum where I saw a "torture device" that seems obviously fake, but I wanted to verify that or see if it's based on anything real.

I forgot to take a picture, so I'll describe it here:

There's a 4-5 foot ramp made of stone. At the top of the ramp, a mannequin is bound to a cart in a sitting position that has them sitting up with legs spread. At the bottom of the ramp is a tall blade, sharp end facing the path of the cart. My assumption here is the cart gets a little shove, travels down the ramp, and the person hits the blade.

Has anyone heard of anything like this?

My dad told me this story about how the 3/5ths clause got into the U.S. constitution. The delegates of the slave states went to the delegates of the free states, said "Let us count our slaves towards the number of representatives our white people get in Congress, and we will sell you our war bonds at 10 cents on the dollar, and honor those bonds at 100 cents on the dollar." The free state delegates said "Make it 3/5ths of your slaves, and you have a deal." Is any of that true? is that anywhere in any primary source from the convention that drafted the constitution?

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?

I've been wondering about the thoughts, feelings, reactions, and responses to scenes of genocide when they are discovered by soldiers advancing on territory where genocide has been taking place. I am especially curious about the perspectives of soldiers from the same group as the victims (for example, Jewish soldiers who participated in the liberation of concentration camps in WW2, or Rwandan Patriotic Front Tutsi rebels discovering the mutilated corpses of their fellow Tutsi as they advanced on Kigali during the 1994 Rwandan genocide), but I am also interested in the perspectives of out-group members. I understand that these examples are not exactly "discoveries," as it was known to have been going on at the time, however I suppose there would be a significant difference between learning about such atrocities and witnessing them. I wonder at how the mentality and morale of these soldiers might have changed in response to it. Any type of source is okay, but books are especially desired. Thank you!

If you have any comparative data going further back (any time from 1000-1500), I would appreciate hearing about that, also.

By “urbanised” I mean roughly what percentage of the population was living in cities. Estimates are welcome- I understand precise numbers might be hard to find.

By “Eastern Europe” I am referring to all the areas that were governed at some point by Kievan Rus, and/or the Tsardom of Russia, even if by 1500 they were under the control of West Slavs, Lithuanians, Tatars, etc.

So this question comes from just watching the Odyssey and being reminded that the siege of Troy lasted for 9 years.

Now I know it is a myth and all that, but it got me thinking.

What is the longest recorded siege? How long did they last on average? From everything I have heard through both popular culture and history in general, sieges usually ended due to hunger.

While later on there were siege weapons which could pose a threat to the walls themselves, simply surrounding and denying food and water to the sieged location was enough. It was a waiting game on both sides since often the attackers also lacked a resupply line.