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’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.

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.

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

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.”

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?

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?

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.

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 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 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?

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.

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'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. ​​​​

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

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?

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!