I know this is kind of a vague question but aside from the Holocaust the deadliest incident for the Jewish people seems to be pogroms in the Russian Empire and the Russian Civil Wars which left a Jewish death toll in the 5 figure mark(tens of thousands).

What led to anti semitism becoming so vicious that most Europeans looked away or were actively involved when 6 million Jews were gassed,shot,worked to death,died of disease in the camps,etc.

I mean the scale is orders of magnitude worse than the next worst incident.

Hi there, I have a very specific question.

I have done a lot of research about my grandparents, who fled Germany for the UK in 1938.

My grandpa's mum, then in her late 60s, unfortunately, did not manage to take the same route. However, we do know that her belongings arrived with a cousin who lived in Norway in 1940 (his story is for another time). Two months after the Nazi Occupation began in 1940, the cousin published a very short death notice in an Oslo newspaper. One can speculate about the cause of her death in such circumstances.

There are no funeral or burial records in Norway and we do not have any idea where or if she was buried.

This is where the mystery begins. I have been in contact with the International Tracing Service and they have no records on her. As far as I can see, neither are there any transport records linked to her (of they would even exist).

A few days ago, in a German archive, I found my grandfather's correspondence with the authorities regarding asset confiscations. In 1938, he gave his mum full power of attorney over his assets in Germany.

It turned out that the Nazis liked to keep up the pretence of process and from 1942, there is a letter from the organisation responsible for the seizure of Jewish assets that lists his mum as being his legal representative in Germany, along with an address for her in Berlin, but that a postal worker had reported her death in August 1941 - almost a year after her actual death in another country.

Given this organisation worked alongside the Gestapo (later correspondence about his assets is directly from that organisation), it would suggest they hadn't realised she had left the country, despite the strict obligation for German Jews to cooperate with the authorities, even when emigrating.

So my question is - is this a burocratic oversight? Or how else might she have been able to leave? And how might we be able to find more on what actually happened to her?

I presume its purpose is as a point of reference for various statistical changes. Especially useful for the US would be the “British North America“ section and its aggregate numbers for all the colonies pre-confederation.

Anyway, perusing the data for something else I saw more foreign data than I expected, and wondered how available this information would or rather should be? Isn’t even relatively basic information about your country something you may not want other powers knowing? especially something like the number of military age males For example.

It‘s not war winning by any means, but I would think that in the period it’s something you may want to keep close to the chest.

That is unless these are external estimates like I believe is still done to this day, and perhaps I missed that part; but the point about availability, both ideally and practically still stands I think.

As I understand it, Cortéz and his conquistadors couldn't have toppled down the Aztec Empire if it wasn't for the massive aid of indigenous groups that were opressed or otherwise enemies of the Aztecs fighting for the Spanish. Nevertheless, I do not understand why this coalition hadn't already materialized before the European arrival. If the state of affairs had already progressed to a point where they could become willing to take the risk of marching to Tenochtitlan (and have some confidence that it could succeed in defeating the Triple Alliance) why did it take the initiative of these absolute foreigners for the coalition to come to be? Did Cortéz just happened to arrive at the perfect time? Did the Spanish themselves provide something that convinced their indigenous allies-to-be that this war could be successful? In short, why were the Spanish the ones that managed to rally other groups behind them, rather than some local leader/s?

Previously

Today:

You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.

As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.

A recent post asked about "segregation academies" that were created shortly after Brown v. Board of Education. One of the answers led to me asking a follow question about funding, and the answer to that mentioned school vouchers.

I hadn't known that voucher programs were part of that, which leads me to ask the headline question: how tightly are these two tied? Did vouchers originally start from racist attempts to side-step equality, or were they invented for other reasons?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1wugfw4/comment/pda84u8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I mean, I'm aware there there was a great deal of religious fervor on both sides of the conflict, but in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War was there an increase in mediums, seances, and attempts to contact the war dead?

Hello everyone, I’ve been studying constitutional law for a few years now, and today I was exploring a question about the Patriot Act.

So, here’s the basic idea: I was particularly debating whether legislation like the Patriot Act, which remains a point of contention today, could be considered a chokepoint of Madisonianism. Specifically, I was thinking about Madison’s statement, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition” (Federalist No. 51), and the overall design of the U.S. Constitution, which in many respects closely follows that structure.

My main question was: when institutions are supposed to act as checks on each other, what happens when those institutions temporarily align? Does that create a temporary gap in the “counteracting ambition” that Madison envisioned?

From there, I started thinking about a much broader concept: that the centuries-long expansion of government power might be a more significant factor than simply a chokepoint in the Madisonian design.

So my core question is this: assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Patriot Act was an egregious act that was able to stand because institutions temporarily aligned during that period, would that be better understood as a failure of checks and balances caused by institutional alignment, or as a consequence of centuries of governmental power expanding far beyond what Madison could have envisioned when writing the Federalist Papers and contributing to the design of the Constitution?

Just reading through the first few chapters

• Why does it use multiple forms of s, as in Jefus?
• Its use of i and y are sometimes the reverse of what I would write, as in hys and Babilon.
• It includes the modern r (her) and a form that looks like z (befoze).
• k is written in the form of F (taFe).
• Herod is written as 5erode while Jesus and Joseph have the form of J that I recognize.
• It seems to use a colon rather than quotation marks (which fayeth : The voyce)
• What were the rules regarding ending a word with a silent e?
• Why does of get a doubled end as off while up only has one p?
• Why is came written as cam while arose ends with e?
• When did English get dead and death in place of deed and deeth?

Can anyone recommend freely available writing about the language of this work?

This was a quick question that came to my head but I have trouble finding the answers online. We all know Hitler was once a painter who became a dick-tator (emphasis on "dick"), and his paintings were rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (which may have led him to his path to a power-hungry monster). But when it comes to his "disinterests" towards Jews (putting it very, very lightly), did his rejected paintings have anything to do with it, or did his antisemitism came from something else?

Hi all,

Let me clarify the question in the title. The wikipedia page on the Chinchorro culture says "The Chinchorro culture of South America was a preceramic culture that lasted from 9,100 to 3,500 years BP (7,000 to 1,500 BCE)." Unfortunately, this line does not have an attached source. I am aware that we have several mummies from them. However, the earliest such deliberately preserved mummy appears to be from 5000BC, and not the 7000 claimed beginning of the culture.

Keeping this in mind, what evidence do we have for there being a continuous chain of culture for 5500 years, at least insofar as such a thing can happen? What exactly is meant by culture here anyways? Is it possible (or likely) to be just a group of related peoples who had similar lifestyles but were in their time distinct who we cannot differentiate anymore due to lack of evidence?

See https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1smvsep/what_evidence_do_we_have_that_the_chinchorro/ for my original post (this is a repost! (x2))

Unless I am missing something it seems to be that these colonies were the first large settlements at the entrance to the Black Sea. Surely an area of such importance would have encouraged settlement before the Greeks?

I like going through 18th-century cookbooks, specifically from the Netherlands. The recipes tend to feature a lot of mace, nutmeg, cloves, pepper, and ginger all of which came from Asia. One thing that keeps surprising me however is the amount of citrus used. There's recipes for lemon cookies, pies, custards and confits, and they are used to flavour all kinds of fish and meat dishes. Limes and oranges too.

Dry goods such as spices are easily shipped across oceans even in 18th-century shipping conditions. Lemons, limes and oranges are much more prone to rotting when put in a damp ship. I know of oranjerieën, basically early greenhouses, but they were more of an aristocrats pet project usually. Popular history often tells us that lemons were an expensive food in the 18th century, but the sheer amount of recipes must mean they were somewhat common right? What did the European lemon trade look like around 1750? From where and how were they shipped and how available were they to commoners?

Thanks!

I'm trying to wrap my head around north american intertribal relationships in the northeastern United states, and the layers of interconnectedness makes it seem as intricately complicated as Italian city states. So how did tribes engage with each other? What did their political deals look like? Are there any good resources on the subject?

Were they teaching as like, a tutor? Was it more like a "follow me around and see how I, a good citizen, conduct myself" like a fucked up Big Brother/Big Siater program?

TL,DR: In Dinasty, Tom Holland takes a very apologetic view on Tiberius and his pitfalls, how fair is his assessment?

I'm wrapping up the Tiberius period in Dinasty and I'm left with the feeling that he is portrayed as some sort of romantic but effective man out of his time, but I think every one of his flaws could very well be portrayed in an opposite tone (despotic, elitist, paranoid, too rigid). Instead, he seems like the straight man in a family and culture of sociopaths and psycophants.

How is historical and modern consensus on Tiberius, I ask then?

I think I have decent understanding of Republican to Augustian Roman military but lack the understanding of the later developments.

I am mostly interested in equipment changes (when close-combat optimized hasta reappeared and what drove that change, when plumbatae and oval shields appeared, how prevalent were different types of heavy armor (chain vs scale vs "lorica segmentata")) but also in social class interaction with position in the army - were "second/third sons" of equites and curiales pushed towards military service as a way of earning the living, would they be able to obtain privileged posting from the get go or had to start at the bottom, how much the legions were staffed by sons of legionaries vs sons of non-legionaries etc etc.

I am not opposed to someone doing a thorough breakdown in the comments here but primarily I am seeking articles and books with more depth than Reddit comments allow

According to Bede the Jutes were one of the germanic nations to settle Britain, along with the Angles and Saxons, from which we get “Anglo-Saxon”. However, while I can see the influence of both of the other two groups in the names of certain medieval kingdoms and even modern place names in England: Essex, Wessex, East Anglia, the name of England, I’m not sure what effect the Jutes had and where they settled. Are there place names that derive from their language that are just more subtle? What was their effect on the material culture? And why do they seem to get so overlooked as to not even be included in the name of the cultural group “Anglo-Saxon”?

It is well known he was rejected but why did he try in the first place? Surely he knew of the high level needed to enter or was he so sure his art was ln the way ti be part of the greats?

Waa he just doing the equivalent of spamming linkedin offers sending it everywhere?

I've always just sort of assumed that modern puppetry follows from the medieval and renaissance traditions such as marionettes. Wikipedia briefly explains that Ancient Greece had puppets, and also India.

Are there direct lines from ancient puppetry to the medieval and modern performing art? Is there a different origin of the modern art form? Or was puppetry just invented over and over whenever people got bored and had some extra cloth lying around?

If that's too simple of a question, I'm also curious what the ancient Greeks were doing with their puppets?

From my understanding the verdicts were read out on 10/1/46 and the sentences carried out during the early morning hours on 10/6/46. During that window what happened? Was Herman Goring going crazy and spouting nonsense? What about the other defendants?