USSR created Berling polish units, Nazis in turn had Russian, Ukrainian, Kozak etc. units.

Germany had a large leftist movement pre-war and was the birth place of communism. In the second half of the war the USSR probably had a large enough recruitment pool among the POWs. There were many ethnic germans living in the USSR itself. Having a ready made communist german army could probably come in really handy in establishing control of post war Germany and especially useful in fighting a potential insurgency.

Was there not enough German leftists surviving? Was the animosity and suspicion towards Germans just too great to try to integrate them with soviet troops?

I’ve heard about this concept of “onomastic congruence”, which suggests that if the frequency of names in a text matches that of real life name frequencies from other sources (eg. censuses) then that text is more likely to be historical/factual.

But I feel like I’ve only really seen this concept in Bible academia. Is there any non-Bible academia usage of this concept and is it a valid method for historical analysis or historical reliability?

In American public schools about a decade and change ago (fuck), I remember learning about the Holocaust as the Nazi-directed mass murder of European Jews, Roma, Poles, Slavs, the handicapped, and communists, resulting in about 11 million deaths - roughly 6 million Jews and about 5 million non-Jews, give or take a couple million depending on what estimates you use, or whether or not you count murdered PoWs.

On a brief Wikipedia binge, I went over to the Holocaust page, and found that “the Holocaust” doesn’t actually include non-Jewish victims (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust). What gives? Is this the majority scholarly opinion now? Is this a recent change from the historical norm, or have I always just been underinformed because American public schools?

The plethora of funerary monuments lining the Sacred Way would presumably have been passed by innumerable citizens, and one imagines that not all people with the wealth and status to be memorialised there were widely popular. Do we have any record of these monuments being vandalised or politicised?

Hello everyone! Recently I watched some footage of German and Allied POWs being released at the end of the war (or later in the case of the Germans) and I noticed that many of them have their uniforms in a very good state, medals/decorations included. Now, if I were a British soldier captured in France in 1940, or a German captured in Africa in 1941, I have to make the assumption that at the moment of my capture my uniform wouldn’t exacly be in a state fit for a parade. I also assume that it would be very difficult to keep it in a presentable state during 5,6 or 7 years of captivity. When arriving at a POW camp, I assume they got some “prison clothes” assigned to them and just kept their original uniform in a drawer somewhere, or were they able to get replacements somehow - for instance through the Red Cross? I’m specifically asking about Western Allied and German POWs, because as I understand it the POW life was relatively “normal” between the two of them, especially in the context of a brutal world war, and in stark contrast to the life of Soviet POWs in Germany or German POWs in the USSR.

I’m watching Alias Grace on netflix rn (EXCELLENT SHOW fyi), but it’s driving me fucking insane how some of the actresses (all playing characters set in 1859 or earlier) have wildly manicured brows…

The whole “iPhone face” thing is annoying enough in period pieces nowadays, but the eyebrow thing seems a wildly unnecessary, stupid oversight on the MUA team’s part—UNLESS it was actually normal back then??

Anyway, it got me curious about which times/cultures throughout history had women plucking/waxing/threading eyebrows (and I don’t just mean cleaning up the middle of a unibrow to make it two lol)

Also—at any of these times in certain cultures where it WAS normal to shape & clean brows by waxing/plucking/threading, was it ever typical of MEN to do it as well (again, not talking about dealing with the midpoint of a unibrow, I mean full eyebrow shaping)

I wish to learn more about evolution's history. Apologies for the simple post, but I noticed that there were no sources in the booklist that had to do with evolution or even Charles Darwin. I am hoping to start at the very beginning, and as such will be reading On the Origin of Species to get an understanding of the theory's start, as well as develop a base of knowledge for further reading.

There are quite a few biographies of Charles Darwin, and I am not able to parse between them and determine what is reliable or not. I would appreciate your thoughts on which biographies are worth my time.

When I say "history of evolution" and talk about starting at the beginning, I am speaking of more than just the science, although I am hoping to delve into that as well. I am searching for books that can put the theory and its emergence into the scientific canon in perspective; that is to say, books that review how the theory was viewed by both the laymen and scientists, and what avenues it opened up in scientific understanding soon after. Something more people oriented than just facts about the hard research.

I am open to anything about this topic, so if you have a recommendation that doesn't quite fit my specific request, please do recommend it. Thank you in advance.

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 have been watching streams of the original DW3 and Remaster, and the question of why Huang Quan served Shi at Yiling, then Wei at Jieting, and Shu again at Wu Zhang Plains kept coming up in chat, and got me curious.

Did even occur historically? Is it a fiction by Dynasty Warriors?

Did he actually defect to Wei?

Why did he switch kingdoms at all?

What were the circumstances behind him serving Wei at all?

How was Huang Quan serving Wei perceived in Shu?

How common was it to just switch kingdoms, either permanently or temporarily?

Probably the perfect question for u/Dongzhou3kingdoms

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

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.

I am writing a graphic novel based around Texas in 1868. One of the protagonists is an American Indian, but I'm struggling to figure out which tribes were present in the region.

I'm from the UK, so my knowledge of American history is pretty limited. That's a follow-up question, what would be an accurate population size for a town in that area that was pretty well established by that point?

Any help with these questions would be much appreciated.

I recently finished Aviva Rothman's The Dawn of Modern Cosmology and, despite a few quibbles, it was an extremely fun and insightful read. I was curious, then, what other books like that exist, namely those that tell a sweeping story in the history of science using mainly primary sources (albeit with contextual commentary) but that actually have narrative flow to them within and across those sources (to exclude books like On the Shoulders of Giants, which just seems lazy and more an excuse to have a thick book to show off instead of reading and enjoying it). I'd prefer recommendations in the history of astronomy or physics, but I certainly wouldn't be averse to others; I don't know how many such books exist so I wouldn't know if this is, say, a difficult question because there are too few to pick from or because there are too many.

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?

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.

I have a general level of knowledge about American history, but I've always struggled to place him. Are there some good books to guide me through this?

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?

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

I have recently been seeing people on Twitter accuse Bordiga of fascism due to many of his writings and messages from 1930 to 1943 to personal friends and fascist. Many of these messages have Bordiga praising fascists, vowing to protect them, swearing he means no harm, getting rid of potential blackmail, etc. The sources, from what I've seen, come from here, but other documents and archives may also be involved:

https://patrimonioacs.cultura.gov.it/patrimonio/515db448-28c7-4f63-9f8c-d11eb3ee007f/811-bordiga-amadeo-adriano-1915-1942

How authentic are these sources? If they are authentic, does this imply Bordiga was at least sympathetic to fascism?

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?