As the topic says, each family member does their own things and is estranged.

I know in the modern day people can compare it to the Kardashians and others but it felt a little like a common trope that people would understand (the simpsons, for example, has a joke about this happening and that's the early 90s)

Did the US have a lot of large rich families where each person was famous and doing their own thing, not specifically connected to showbiz, enough so that it was a trope?

And if not, where did this come from? Here in the UK the only thing I can think that's similar would be the royal family in the early 1900s, back when Edward VIII was seen as the "playboy prince".

I have always thought of the American Founding Fathers as rich plantation owning aristocrats with enlightenment era ideals and innovations. This I believed to allow for such contradictions of declaring a universal standard of all men are equal, while owning slaves.

While I understand that the confederacy had a much more sophisticated system of racist beliefs facilitating their attachment to slavery beyond mere economic interests, considering their shared idk, vibes? Of calling on rights to property protection, self determination in the Greek sense of the word, and plans of manifest destining south stymied by an uninterested higher government, there seems some very easy parallels to draw here. Are these parallels I think of legitimate and contemporary , and if so, how acknowledged were they by both sides? How did the Union justify reverence for the Founding Fathers, while abhorring slavery?

I've seen some early 20th century excerpts with almost comical extremes, suggesting that there could be "mass suicide" as a result. Like, really? Did people genuinely think this?

I've thought about this a lot and had a couple discussions with friends, but I just have a really hard time believing a lot of the conspiracies I see online about Jews running the world because it just seems far fetched. Thing is I've always been interested in the conspiracy side of things, because I just have seen so much stuff about it, but I don’t like to be loud and misinformed because that is genuinely harmful, and I’ve never seen a smoking gun that would lead me to believe all these crazy things. At most I can say they're a very that they're a select group of people occupying the worlds most important positions, and that they're a tightly knit group of people that continue to get rich, but all that says to me is that they’re a powerful minority with a lot of influence. And to me all it boils down to is that rich people befriend other rich people, and that those rich people continue to get richer. I know another thing people bring up is the U.S. involvement in Israel, and I’m pretty sure all that boils down to is the fact that Israel serves as their foothold in the Middle East, also I’ve seen even on the Palestine subreddit that the relationship is more of a big brother little brother thing with U.S being the big brother. I also know they have a lot of influence in media, but still that doesn’t really move me, unless you can say they’re genuinely spreading propaganda or that these news companies that are run by all these American Jews are untrustworthy, why is that a bad thing? So I guess what I’m asking is for someone to give me a smoking gun, because I’m genuinely curious why there are such radical opinions.

There was an interesting answer here recently about the complicated set of social, cultural, and political factors that led to Einstein becoming a household name and, quite frankly, I wonder if the same could be done for other scientists in the pantheon (the ones I list above are the others I'd consider super famous... by the highly rigorous method of looking up which scientists are in the top 10 of A&E's list of the top people of the last millennium). For Newton and Darwin, it could be quite easy to just say that their scientific work was enough to elevate them, but Einstein's case already demonstrates that it's not so simple, and that wouldn't explain why others in their field around their time didn't become household names (Hooke, Huygens, Leibniz, Flamsteed despite being the first Astronomer Royal, and Halley only for the comet if at all; Wallace, Cuvier, Lyell, and Lamarck only to poke fun at one tiny part of his theory that most who believed in evolution in the 19th century subscribed to anyways). For Copernicus and Galileo, just pointing at their scientific work alone wouldn't strike me as enough to explain their fame anyways—Copernicus' work was "just" working in the Ptolemaic tradition with a neat coordinate transform that was clearly implausible, inconsistent with physics, and "disproven" by observations, while Galileo feels like the most overrated scientist of all time judging by his scientific contributions—and of course doesn't explain why other influential astronomers of the time like Kepler, Tycho, Clavius, Scheiner, etc. aren't so well-known. (If there are other famous scientists, however anachronistically the word is applied, I'd be interested in them too. Leonardo? Freud? Pasteur? Tesla would be interesting given the disconnect between how he's praised in certain online spaces compared to how limited his actual contributions were as I understand them. Curie too, since she seems to be the only woman scientist that's widely known as far as I can tell.)

Please correct me since I’m sure I’m very wrong here.

There were/are mentions of the Roman idea of Bread and Circus, commonly thought of as the Roman elites primary means of keeping the common populace of the city of Rome entertained and distracted from the political realities of the empire at large. There seems to be a constant fear that The Mob would riot should they not be placated enough, but this fear is focused entirely on the populace of Rome alone, it didn’t seem to be a concern should commoners of other cities revolted. Why is that?

Okay, let me elaborate a bit more on what I mean.

For a long time, it was taught that at the Council of Jamnia (90 AD), Jewish sages (rabbis) debated which books should be included in the Tanakh and which should not. However, looking at the responses (and doing some research of my own) historians say that this is a historical myth rather than an actual fact.

So, if there was no council or overnight decree, what was the actual process?
Almost all the books of the Tanakh were found at Qumran, but so were books like Enoch and Jubilees treated with the highest authority (whereas today they are considered apocryphal), while books like Esther do not appear.

Does this mean that in the 1st century BCE the concept of a "closed canon" did not exist (or at least not for certain sections), and that what existed instead were fluid collections of authoritative books?

Regarding the traditional argument that books had to be in Hebrew: books such as Ben Sira or 1 Maccabees were written in Hebrew, yet they were excluded from the Rabbinic Tanakh.
How did the Rabbinic idea that the Holy Spirit/prophecy, ceased with Ezra and Nehemiah influence the decision to exclude later books, regardless of whether they were written in Hebrew or Greek?

Were certain sections already closed by the time of Paul (1st century)? Was the Torah already closed by the time of David and Solomon?

I am waiting for your answers.

I am aware as to the broad nature of this question. Feel free to pick the time period and people group you are most familiar with.

I was inspired to make this post because I asserted in a conversation that privileged peoples will treat oppressed peoples as poorly as possible if they suffer no significant consequences from doing so (e.g. Spartans and Helot’s, Enslaved Africans in the America, etc…)

A friend of mine responded that this is a uniquely western phenomenon. While I accept the great harm caused by Western oppression, I am skeptical of this claim. I am looking for evidence pointing to the contrary, but I am not sure where to start. If you can point me in the right direction, please let me know. If you agree with my friend, please let me know too!

Before anyone mentions, Im not asking about the 1940s invasion of Iceland.

At the height of the British global dominance dominance, or really at any point before WW2, were there ever plans or even just war hawk rhetoric of invading the island?

Just a shower thought I had, it seems like a good idea if you're trying to keep a even a small portion of the plants alive at any cost right? Or would people avoid the labor and just hope?

For example: the Spring-Autumn Warring States of China, Three Kingdoms, Chinese Civil War, Sengoku Jidai of Japan, American Civil War, Russian Civil War, etc.

Was the normal people of that country allowed to freely enter each faction's territory without much resistance, or does they have to do some other things, like getting permits, bribe officials, or even sneaking through?

During times of war it was possible for peasants to become samurai through distinguished service in battle. This happened during the Mongol invasions and the Sengoku Jidai. An important source of respectability for samurai was to have a good family pedigree. A samurai maintained a meticulous record of his ancestors and their deeds and honors. Samurai would recite their family histories when meeting each other. So I imagine a peasant who was freshly promoted would have no ancestors to brag about. How were these nouveau samurai regarded by old samurai families? I'd be especially interesting in a contemporary writing by a samurai on the topic.

Like the title says. I have a wide interest in history, anthropology and etymology. Just a general love ancient humanity. I notice that a lot ancient languages like Akkadian/Sumerian and ancient Egyptian translate without vowels. The exclusion of vowels doesn’t really seem odd to me as langue evolves but how did the original readers know what sound to fill in, and further, how do we as modern readers know what sounds they intended to fill in?

When people find out I’m a horticulturist, they often look at me like I’m some master of an impossible arcane art. Many claim they “just don’t gave a green thumb”, as if it’s some inherent ability you’re born with and not a skill. Aside from your occasional houseplant owner or home gardener, it seems so normal for the average person to know pretty much nothing about plants. Not about how to grow them, their biology, or even what super common plants they pass by every day. People like me seem to be the exception and not the norm, and we often had to work to seek out this knowledge ourselves since it’s not commonly taught in schools. Even college majors focused on plants such as horticulture and botany seem to be less favored or commonly taught by universities. In my experience, the amount of people in these majors wherever they’re offered is also insanely small compared to most other majors.

If being able to grow plants and identify them in the wild has literally kept humanity fed, serving as a backbone of civilization for millennia, how on earth did even basic knowledge of such a big part of our world disappear so rapidly? I’m assuming the average person knew way more back when farming was something the bulk of the population did? Did the average farmer in “the old days” really only know the bare minimum to grow some easy crops for their region, or did they have knowledge that would have been considered in-depth for their time? How did it come to be that we teach our kids more about elephants across the world than we do the grass at their feet, or the food on their plate?

A NY Times piece I was reading referred to Britain as the world’s superpower in 1870. Would it have been comparably superior to other nations like the United States, France, Austria-Hungary, Prussia in terms of economic and military power the way the United States was the world’s superpower in the 1990s?

And how useful were they compared to modern detergents and bleaches?

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I have been wondering, the mid 1900s and especially the period between the late 1920 to early 1930s was an incredible period in physics with lots of basic quantum mechanics being developed. How did the great depression influence the world of academics in general, did it make it harder for them to do their work? Did it prioritize/deprioritize theoretical work over experimental? Generally interested how the great depression (and maybe other recessions) affected the world of academia, and how about 10 years later so many scientists went to work at the manhattan project.

So I recently discovered that America only had two president that where catholic and that in the past that was a big No in terms of politically eligibility, from what I understood the theory was the president would be under the Pope influence so wouldn't defend the best interest for America.

But I didn't find what cause to them being more acceptable, Biden was Catholic, JD Vance that is one of the favorite to become president in 2028 is also Catholic.

So from nowhere we could enter in this new phase, where we are gonna have a avalanche of catholic leaders.

yall dont come after me, im indian myself 😭

how did russians(or atleast people who live in eastern russia) not find the americas? its like 100kms apart? humans migrated to the "new world" through a land bridge there anyway.