r/AskHistorians • u/AutoModerator • 23h ago
FFA Friday Free-for-All | December 27, 2024
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.
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u/bug-hunter Law & Public Welfare 19h ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1hmv0vn/where_do_historians_obtain_their_sources/
From the Source Mines, of course. The real scandal is what historians do once they find their sources, because the answer to that is that they keep them chained up in the basement.
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u/Halofreak1171 12h ago
We aren't meant to let them know about the source mines! Soon they'll be calling for us to free range our sources, and who knows what'll become of us!
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u/Dongzhou3kingdoms Three Kingdoms 6h ago
I feel you don't cover enough how many historians are actually immortal beings who absord information via eating brains.
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u/Dongzhou3kingdoms Three Kingdoms 21h ago
I didn't realize it was Friday
How have people been finding this festive week? Have people here had a nice time?
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u/Gankom Moderator | Quality Contributor 10h ago
I have had maybe 5 hours of sleep since Sunday. You might be thinking I'm living off fumes, but at this point I am ascended, powered by the raw spirit of Christmas.
I get SUPER into it, and am often put in charge of the kids. They declare its been one for the history books. I declare that this weekend is dedicated to sleep.
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u/Dongzhou3kingdoms Three Kingdoms 6h ago
May your rest be true and pleasant this weekend. I'm glad Christmas went really well for you and the kids
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u/Pyr1t3_Radio FAQ Finder 4h ago
It is, unsurprisingly, much harder to explain why Christmas isn't a pagan festival to your friends after you've had several cups of punch.
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u/BookLover54321 19h ago
Reposting this because my thread didn’t receive a reply:
In their book The Dawn of Everything, and in a prior research paper, David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that many Indigenous groups in present-day California - such as the Maidu, Wintu, and Pomo - had no tradition of slavery, and among societies that did practice slavery in some form, it was not widespread:
As we mentioned, the Yurok and their immediate neighbours were somewhat unusual, even by Californian standards. Yet they are unusual in contradictory ways. On the one hand, they actually did hold slaves, if few in number. Almost all the peoples of central and southern California, the Maidu, Wintu, Pomo and so on, rejected the institution entirely.
Regarding the Yurok, they write:
In many of these societies one can observe customs that seem explicitly designed to head off the danger of captive status becoming permanent. Consider, for example, the Yurok requirement for victors in battle to pay compensation for each life taken, at the same rate one would pay if one were guilty of murder. This seems a highly efficient way of making inter-group raiding both fiscally pointless and morally bankrupt.
They also note:
There appears to have been something of a transitional zone on the lower reaches of the Columbia River where chattel slavery dwindled into various forms of peonage, while beyond stretched a largely slave-free zone (Hajda 2005); and for other limited exceptions see Kroeber 1925: 308–20; Powers 1877: 254–75; and Spier 1930).
I was wondering how many other societies are there that had no tradition of slavery, or which abolished slavery early on?
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u/AncientHistory 17h ago
Some folks might be interested in this one - Lovecraft was well-known as an atheist, but what happened when a rabbi, one of his revision clients, comes to him with a manuscript detailing the true parentage of Jesus Christ, as revealed by various Jewish & Germanic sources? Well...read on if you want to find out what Lovecraft thought about the historicity of Jesus, and the kind of sources and arguments two men in the 1920s/30s would reference in that kind of argument.
http://deepcuts.blog/2024/12/21/deeper-cut-lovecraft-the-rabbi-the-historical-jesus/
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u/Kaiser-Bread 15h ago
In the final stage of peer-review on my first articles on statistically modeling specie distribution in Europe and the Americas to be published in journals. Very exciting stuff.
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u/AlviseFalier Communal Italy 12h ago edited 3h ago
I've recently been on an early 2000s kick, helped by a podcast I discovered called Remember Shuffle, which delivers impressive social analysis and commentary on cultural and media landmarks of the early 2000s.
With this inspiration, I've been revisiting some cultural narratives which I never really thought to analyze in that time period, especially with regards to football in Italy. Why? Why not? I've shared my notes below.
I was seven years old in November 1999 when in a foggy AC Milan-Venice match, the orange-green goalkeeper Cavazza fouled AC Milan’s Ukrainian star Shevchenko, getting himself sent off. Venezia was out of substitutions so defender Fabio Bilica donned the shirt of his expelled teammate and positioned himself between the posts. Bilica actually saved the penalty, but the ball bounced to the feet of AC Milan’s Orlandini and there was nothing to be done, AC Milan scored and the match ended 3-0.
This is one of my first memories, not just of football, but one of my absolute earliest memories. Or rather, I remember watching the images on television: the red card to Cavezza and Bilica putting on the shirt of the expelled goalkeeper. I remember exactly where I was watching it: Sitting in the living room at my maternal grandparents' apartment, in Spinea, a town in the Province of Venice, watching television with my grandfather who was explaining what was going on to me.
I like this story because it explains several things. One: How it was clear to me early on that the team that wins all the matches and scores all the goals is called AC Milan; and two: that following Venezia, as my grandfather did, implies a degree of suffering.
It’s a suffering that I think many Italians embrace. The word “Passion” which gets tossed around so much when talking about Italian football is far too reductive, because for so many people the local football club is a component of identity, a reflection of pride in the community. It’s not even about winning and losing - it’s about being able to say that for ninety minutes, each week, someone else comes to town (or you go to their town) and they need to pay attention to you. Whatever happened during the week, you matter for those ninety minutes.
This happens all over the country, in large cities and small towns. The football system in Italy (as in the rest of Europe) is a pyramid. I actually think that certain clubs might even prefer to be in the lower divisions, where opponents really are their neighbors, and winning and losing almost every match delivers immediate bragging rights over neighbors, colleague, friends, or relatives.
This is maybe why when Venezia was relegated from the Serie A in 2000 (and even if they bounced back in 2001, they went right back down again the next season) I recall a certain resignation and acceptance. Before 1998, Venezia hadn’t been in the Serie A since the 1960s and I feel like there was an understanding that the northeast was a land of medium-sized football clubs which might appear in Serie A from time to time, but more typically lived in the the Serie B (where some seasons, up to five clubs out of twenty could be from the Veneto). Among the occasional northeastern protagonists of top-level football, Hellas Verona had won the Serie A in 1986 (and their stadium was one of the venues refurbished for the 1990 World Cup). Neighboring Vicenza had won the Coppa Italia in 1997 and had the longest run of any northeasterner in European competitions, reaching the Cup-Winners-Cup Semi-Final the following season (also, over the years they gave Italian football legends like Paolo Rossi and Roberto Baggio). Even Padova, Venezia’s neighbor and biggest rival, had spent a few early 90s seasons in the Serie A with none other than Captain America, Alexi Lalas, on the roster and which had given Italian football a legendary player like Alessandro del Piero.
But having said all this, the most important northeastern club as far as Venezia is concerned is called Mestrina, haling from Venice's mainland. And I’ll explain why, you’ll have to bear with me.
There is a fundamental issue with Venice: Since the unification of Italy people have been asking the question, “What are we going to do with this place.” It is an urban space completely unfit for the modern world. So on the one hand, it’s an incredible place where it does really seem like time has stopped. On the other, no other historic center in Italy has experienced rapid depopulation like the Venetian lagoon has, which went from two hundred thousand inhabitants at the end of the Second World War to fifty thousand today. At the height of the Italian Economic Boom in the 1960s, thousands of people were leaving the city each day. And most of them went across the bridge to Mestre.
But damn, this is longer than I thought. this does loop back to football, after the jump.
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u/AlviseFalier Communal Italy 12h ago edited 3h ago
How do I explain Mestre. Mestre is - or at some point was - a perfectly normal, if somewhat boring medium-sized northeastern city. It’s got a rather quaint main square in Piazza Ferretto complete with an old medieval watch-tower. But if you listen to Venetians talking about it (even, or especially, those who moved there) they’ll say it’s a horrible industrial wasteland. Realistically, being the first town over the bridge from Venice would warp the conception of any city, but it’s also it’s also important to mention that all of the modernity which is missing in Venice was built in Mestre. And this isn’t just modern housing, modern transport, modern amenities, but it’s also an Oil Refinery and Shipyards - modern, industrial, jobs. There’s a certain clarity in comparing Mestre and Venezia in representing the changes which Italy underwent during the economic boom: the old, historic city that lost population to the modern neighbor, where people live in modern buildings which housed not only those who left the old, decaying historic center, but also those who arrived from backwards places all over Italy, lured by the prospect of modern work in modern industries. Whole old and new stands side-by-side in much of Italy, here it is clearly separated. But one cannot exist without the other, and so entwined are Venezia and Mestre that there is even a question as to if they are two distinct cities at all - and formally, administratively, they’re not.
All this flows back into why Mestre's most prominent football club, Mestrina, more so than all the northeastern clubs I talked about, is the most important rival in Venezia’s history. Because just as the historic city of Venice experienced the most rapid depopulation of any historic center in Italy, so did the fortunes of its football club decline - and why after Venezia got relegated in the late 1960s, it seemed fated never to return to the top flight.
Venezia tumbled down to the Serie C2 (the Italian third division ran on a two-tier system until fairly recently) and by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Venezia was fighting against relegation there, risking falling out of the professional football system altogether. And in the very same division at the same time, Mestrina was instead fighting for promotion, seemingly poised to climb up the ranks of the professional football pyramid. I think this is a very clear reflection of the fortunes of the opposite banks of the lagoon.
It’s difficult to explain the mental self-image of Venetians who moved to Mestre. Even after decades, many still talk as if they have merely temporarily relocated, “Stago Mestre, ma son de Castello” ("I'm staying in Mestre, but I'm from Castello"). Be it in Mestre, or running errands along the old roman roads of Miranese and Terraglio which have now become suburban commuter arteries, my grandmother would take great pride in being able to correctly pinpoint which island of the lagoon or ward of the city the people she crossed were originally from (how she did it I don't know - probably a combination of an ear for accents crossed with a good memory for gossip, especially as no gossip was more valuable than a haughty Venetian family trading a decaying palazzo for a modest Mestre apartment, augmented by the fact that subtly moving furniture out of the city of canals is impossible, "I ghera tanto signori in casa, varda che strasse in canal, na famegia rovinada. Riva i profughi!").
But there weren’t only people from the lagoons relocating to Mestre, there were people coming from all over northeastern countryside, and even some (less than other industrial centers, but nonetheless noticeable) who came from the south. All came in search for modern jobs, modern homes, and modern life. And many sought Sunday entertainment in Mestrina's Stadio Baracca! Feelings, pride, and all a manner of emotions were heightened in the half a decade of heated derby matches in the Serie C2 between Mestrina and Venezia, and Mestrina was the club who regularly came out on top. The Mestre fans famously had a large banner insulting Venice (“Venezia esiste perché la merda galleggia”) which they unfurled during derby matches.
All this led to no small degree of controversy then when in 1987, a wealthy entrepreneur from the neighboring region of Friuli (Maurizio Zamparini) bought a majority ownership in both Mestrina and Venezia, and merged the two clubs. The green-black Venezia Calcio was merged with the orange Merstrina to form the orange-black-green AC VeneziaMestre.
I can’t say I was there, but I feel like I’ve done enough reading to reconstruct the mood in the city at the time. Suspicions from both Venezia and Mestrina were assuaged by the argument that merging the clubs was necessary to build a competitive team in the city. In addition, Mestrina had again finished one spot shy of promotion, sowing doubts as to whether they were the right club to represent the city in the upper divisions. Also persuasive was the fact that the merger occurred the summer after Hellas Verona won their first and only Serie A title, a fact that embarrassed Venice, the regional capital. So media narratives were enthusiastic that this new united club would bring high level football back to the city. Concurrently, fans referred to the club as “L’Unione,” or even, “L’Unione Venezia-Mestre,” as a way to assert that the two clubs continue to exist, they’ve just been united under one roof.
So AC VeneziaMestre donned their merged orange-black-green colors and began playing in Mestrina’s old stadium, the Stadio Baracca on the mainland, abandoning the Stadio Penzo in Venice. It was a successful season, they came in second and were promoted to the Serie C1.
What happened next continues, after the further jump.
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u/AlviseFalier Communal Italy 12h ago edited 3h ago
At this point I think it’s equally important to point out that while I think most people reluctantly accepted the merger, not everyone did. I think it’s important to introduce a theme which will crop up several times in the club’s modern history: some people felt that they weren’t represented, in this instance specifically those living in the lagoon.
By this time a wider narrative had developed that those who still live in Venice were holdouts, survivors from a bygone era (and you still hear this kind of language from people who live in the lagoon). Efforts had been ongoing to make the city of Venice more livable, and although residents might argue that enough wasn't done, expansive public and subsidized housing was built, especially in the far eastern end of the old city, incidentally near the Penzo Stadium. So while all Venetians now needed to take a ferry and a bus to watch this club, the residents of the large residential neighborhood near the old stadium now needed to travel over an hour to get to home matches. Some undertook the journey without complains, but others weren't having it and instead founded a new Calcio Venezia, which moved into the Stadio Penzo and began playing in the amateur divisions with the express purpose of representing the lagoon community. While this club didn’t survive long, questions of representation continued to exist, and longer-lasting protest clubs continued to be founded in the following years.
In 1989 the club changed its name to AC Venezia, dropping “Mestre.” So murmurs of discontent also came from mainlanders now, but the club was still housed in the mainland Stadio Baracca and former Mestrina fans could be satisfied with "their" orange remaining prominently featured on the jersey. Besides, excitement was high as in 1991, promising young manager Alberto Zaccheroni guided Venezia to the Serie B, the Italian second division (which fans in Mestre had only tasted in the ersatz wartime tournament, and Venetians hadn't seen since 1968). But it’s now the 90s, and the top divisions have new stadium standards. Very serious refurbishment efforts need to happen because there isn’t a stadium in the city limits that meets these standards. And what does Chairman Zamparini decide? He decides to refurbish the Pierluigi Penzo Stadium in the lagoon.
I’m not quite sure why that decision was taken. Something tells me that it’s easier to get public subsidies to refurbish things in Venice proper, and for the occasion of promotion Zamparini may have reassessed that it would be easier to “Sell” a club based in the world famous city on the water (even if he had plans to build a whole new stadium on the mainland down the line).
But if the “old Venetians” had been annoyed by the initial move to the mainland, it was not the turn of the “Mestrini” to be upset. Alright - maybe not all Mestrini, since many people from Mestre not only work in Venice, but also head to the old city each weekend to shop, dine, go to exhibits and the theater, so heading to football matches wasn't too much of a stretch. But this decision, coming off the back of the removal of “Mestre” in the club name, fanned the flames of discontent. So not one, but two clubs from Mestre's suburbs, from Favaro and Malcontenta respectively, applied to use the newly vacated Stadio Baracca. The club from Malcontenta won the bid, and they promptly changed their name, changed the club colors to orange, and in ten years, climbed from the amateur Eccellenza tier to the C2.
So I want to just pause right now to emphasize: Between 1987 and 1991, we had not one, but two clubs founded as a consequence of resentment and lack of clarity with to who this club was meant to represent. And I won’t say these were headline developments, nor will I argue that the entire fanbase left to follow these protest clubs, or that the protest clubs were in any way actually successful. But these are still things that were talked about. They are threads of conversation which undermined the legitimacy of the “United” AC Venezia the way no other club in Italy was undermined.
We can't know if Chairman Zamparini was bothered by this discontent. At any rate, after reaching the Serie B in 1991 for the next six years Zamparini spent lavishly to built some of the best Serie B squads, but his short patience made it difficult to achieve consistency. Even a young Christian Vieri played for the club in 1995-96, but he recently reminisced about the experience: “We were a strong team, but changed manager four times over the season!”
Ultimately Venezia did make it to the Serie A, spending a glorious four-year cycle as an elevator club: Serie A from 1998 to 2000, and again from 2001 to 2002. For me, 1998-99 is the perfect football season, not just because it’s pretty much the first season where I was actively following football: AC Milan wins the title, and Venezia avoids relegation. The club was very much a fixture of the football ecosystem in this period, employing managers who would go on to become household names like Walter Novellino, Luciano Spalletti, and Cesare Prandelli. Future grey eminence of the game Giuseppe Marotta was the sporting director from 1995 to 2000.
But all was not well for long in the lagoon. What happened next follows.
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u/AlviseFalier Communal Italy 12h ago edited 3h ago
In spite of everything above, various forms of discontent continued to fester. For the club's first consecutive Serie A season since 1961 (and second Serie A season overall since 1967) in the summer of 1999 the kit manufacturer Kronos organized a presentation ceremony at a villa in the posh suburb of Mogliano, where they unveiled a home shirt with broad green-black stripes separated by orange pinstripes. This enraged Mestre-based fans who felt “their” orange stripes were subordinated to the lagoon’s green. As a temporary solution Venezia wore the all-green third kit at home matches (which may have inadvertently raised tempers further, as orange was not only featured on the jersey trim) until December 5th when the players took to the field at home against Reggina in a striped home kit displaying the colors in more balanced proportions, forever creating a precedent where Venezia fans feel they ought to have final approval on the design of the home shirt. When not frustrated by the fans, the chairman also became frustrated with the city council's foot-dragging to build a new stadium and entertainment complex would be built in the suburb of Tessera.
While any mainland location would make fans in the old city unhappy, Tessera was actually a good compromise: it’s where the airport is, on the water. Since there is a direct waterbus (Vaporetto) connection to the airport, presumably a one-seat waterbus journey to the stadium could also be arranged. And of course, Tessera is easily reachable by bus or car from Mestre itself.
But here is where I am not entirely sure what happened: Zamparini became so frustrated with the city council that he resolved to implement his vision elsewhere. So when in 2002 Serie B side Palermo went bankrupt, Zamparini pounced to buy the club for pennies, and loaded twelve Venezia players and the manager onto a bus from the club's preseason training camp in Pergine (in the province of Trento) and drove them to Palermo’s training camp two hours away in the province of Belluno. The deed to AC Venezia was promptly transferred to a nondescript associate of Zamparini's.
I remember a sort of philosophical fatalism about the ordeal - at least along the Via Bafile in the beach locale of Jesolo where I was when I heard the news. It’s not that people didn’t care, but maybe having spent thirty years outside of the top flight, coupled with the recent undercurrents undermining legitimacy, there just was an acceptance that Venezia wasn't too have have a substantial football club.
With Zapmarini gone, things soon went downhill: players were purchased from South America with the hopes of selling them on the advice of shady agents, accusations emerged of Match-Fixing, and soon wages were being paid sporadically. By the summer of 2004, AC Venezia went bust and the mayor rounded a group of local entrepreneurs (the most influential of which appear to have made their fortune with some sort of air freight fraud) to found SSC Venezia, which would restart play in the C2, where the club had started back in 1987.
I’m not going to go into too much detail about SSC Venezia, but suffice it to say it was an unhappy time. The club even more poorly run than AC Venezia post-Zamparini, with ongoing disputes between the owners, a total disinterest in generating interest from the fans, a disregard for the local press, and I’m pretty sure my ongoing obsession with soccer jerseys started in this period - because even if you wanted to hand the club money in exchange for a kit, you just could not find a jersey or any sort of merchandise anywhere. It seems that the club only really survived thanks to a sponsorship deal with the Venice Casino (which pretty much prints money) that appears to have been brokered by the mayor himself.
The 2008-2009 financial crisis prompted a total abandonment from this new ownership group. The mayor basically nationalizes the club by, from what I understand, having the Casino (which itself is owned by the city) outright buy the club and refund it as Football Club Unione Venezia.
Even amidst this financial crisis, fans are heartened by the inclusion of “Unione,” which is what they call the club, finally explicitly included in the name. A supporters trust, VeneziaUnited, emerged during bankruptcy negotiations with the goal of buying the club, and even after the sale to the casino authority was complete the trust continued to push to extend shareholdership to fan groups. While they were unable to broker a deal, the club ended up relying on VeneziaUnited to manage season ticket sales. The VeneziaUnited website would post matchday directions, along with long social media posts with news and opinions. I don't know how close FBC Unione Venezia truly was to becoming a fan-owned club, but even if it didn’t it was in this period that the club felt like it belonged most to the community. Of course it wasn’t perfect - in 2013 a group of fans from the lagoon abandoned “Unione” in order to follow ASD Laguna Venezia, in the amateur leagues (which, as the name implies, represents the lagoon but not the mainland).
The story ends, as it often does with Venezia, on a negative note. Halfway through the 2010-11 season a Russian politician and former Soviet Army Colonel, Yuri Korbalin, bought a majority stake in FBC Unione Venezia. Proclamations of grand designs follow, and the club does climb to the Lega Pro Prima Divisione (the rebranded Serie C1, the Italian third tier) but each season the league paperwork was submitted later and later, while blogposts on VeneziaUnited got more and more worried, until in 2015 the ownership basically disappeared without a trace.
The mayor had changed by then, but was no less active in salvaging the situation. There was a lot of early confusion, including a failed takeover bid by a Vicenza-based event planning company. In the confusion of the liquidation sale, a group of entrepreneurs bought the rights to the SCC Venezia trademark (the club's identity two bankruptcies ago) and promptly claimed this entitles them of the older AC Venezia's history, applying these claims to a newly refunded club called Calcio Venezia. But, they’re not admitted to the Serie D. Because the rights to Unione Venezia have been purchased by a group of American investors. Initially, the chairman is identified business executive from Connecticut called Jeff Daniels, but it quickly emerges that American celebrity lawyer Joe Tacopina - who was previously a shareholder in Roma and Bologna, is heading the consortium.
Joe Tacopina’s ownership is almost a call back to the ego-driven chairmen of the 90’s - his personality is very present and visible around the club. And it initially seems to work: The club rises quickly from the Serie D to the Serie B. The club even hires former AC Milan and national team superstar Pippo Inzaghi as manager.
Joe Tacopina ends up being forced out by his other investors after he is unable to turn the club into a stable Serie B club: In spite of a playoff run in 2018, the club was relegated the following season, only readmitted thanks to the fortuitous bankruptcy of Palermo, the club that former Chairman Zamparini had jettisoned Venezia in order to take over back in 2002. It seems that Zamparini, done with football altogether, handed Palermo's club's ownership to a crony who paid off the club's debts and oversaw its disappearance. Did he perhaps choose to execute this last maneuver in the summer of 2019 out of guilt for what he did to Venezia all those years ago?
We have now amply passed the sub-s 20-year-rule, but I hope I will be granted grace by the friday-free-for-all's relaxed standards (helped, perhaps, by this period between Christmas and new year's even when we all don't know who we are or what we are doing). My last thought is linked to the post-Tacopina ownership's revolving door of directors and investors, whose only real concern seems to be hawking club merch on social media, turning the jerseys into in-demand streetwear. For a club whose jerseys were such active conduits for identitarian debate, it has been disorienting for fans to see this happen to their club. While an analogous transformation catering to tourists and outsiders has impacted almost every other facet of the old city, many continue to feel bitter that this has come to pass for the football club too.
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u/subredditsummarybot Automated Contributor 23h ago
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, December 20 - Thursday, December 26, 2024
Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 1,663 | 69 comments | I read a claim that the 40-hour work week had been conceived with the assumption that a spouse would be around to handle other tasks such as cleaning, cooking, caring for children and shopping, and therefore it has become outdated. What is the historicity of this claim? |
| 1,131 | 40 comments | The villain in the 1943 Batman serial has a closed-circuit television security camera. Did these already exist in 1943 or was this prescient science fiction? |
| 884 | 58 comments | [Great Question!] Why were prison gigs such a thing in the mid 20th Century? |
| 872 | 24 comments | In WWII it's really common to see the belligerents listed as 'The Axis' and 'The Allies'. Surely the axis powers did not refer to their enemies as 'The Allies', so what would the Nazis, the fascist Italians or the Japanese call their enemies? |
| 757 | 59 comments | So I’m reading Count of Monte Cristo, in which Edmond Dantes is accused of being a Bonapartist. What was wrong with being a Bonapartist? |
| 735 | 105 comments | Why do Americans tend to identify with their Irish or Italian roots but not with English or German ? |
| 641 | 44 comments | How did families in single-room homes procreate with no privacy? |
| 503 | 44 comments | How accurate is this statement? (Found under Prager U’s slavery video which I think is dumb) |
| 452 | 44 comments | Has Spain ever recovered from the "brain drain" caused by the Spanish Inquisition? |
| 440 | 17 comments | [SFW] I just bought a home. The entire process seemed designed for the buyer and seller to never meet. How long has this been the case for? When did this shift happen and what motivated it? |
Top 10 Comments
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u/viera_enjoyer 18h ago
Do any of you banner-users edit or have thought about editing wikipedia articles? Has it been a fulfilling experience or a nightmare?
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u/Dongzhou3kingdoms Three Kingdoms 4h ago edited 4h ago
I know u/_dk does wiki editing because dk is the one that got me into wiki-editing. Warning, AH people are bad influences.
Disclaimer: My experience is, in western terms, a very small subject with a few key users like dk. I'm not editing say US Presidents or things involving current affairs, Hollywood superstars. My experience won't reflect everyone's
In terms of ease of use, I'm not someone with any coding experience or anything like Wikipedia's before this, so it took a bit of adjusting (start small like a spelling error or a sentence or two to add). However, they do try to make it as easy as possible. In some ways the biggest challenge is it seems more overwhelming than it is when you start so best to put one step forward in front of the other. Once you get going, you should soon get the hang of it.
I have seen wiki mods move quickly, trolls and the like kaput. Someone who, in discussions and edits, shows them unable to handle wiki can be got rid of quite quickly. The first time you create a wiki page (outside your own sandbox), it will run through a moderation process (and I get the impression some will have oversight on future ones as well till they come up to a standard as a user).
The 3k community in wiki itself is very small (though the sniffy attitude towards it from wider 3k community has stopped), the likes of FollyMox, the WayWeAllGo, Remsense, dk, Yezhanquan and others have been collaborative, encouraging, and helpful. I have had one instance (not involving any names mentioned above) of someone being over-protective of an article they helped build, but otherwise it has gone smoothly, and I have enjoyed being part of the 3k project. Larger ones (or ones where a toxic member gets into the coop) I can't speak of how well that goes.
Worth it?
So in the idealistic sense, yes. I'm adding a bit to public knowledge each time, updating well-meaning but incorrect ones, fleshing out ones that could do with more context. People use Wikipedia, so getting pages up to a good standard is giving people a better platform towards learning (and can provide sources for them to explore via citations and further reading). Also, if you remove the bad stuff, people won't cite it on places like Reddit. Of course, that is easier to say when it isn't a busy part of wiki, where I'm not encountering problems.
Now, enough about how I am the world's greatest hero.
In a “do I gain from it, for I am a greedy git” sense: Oh yes. I have no institutional education access and the like. One very good way (as well as academia.edu, JSTOR's free program and open access programs) to get good free history access is wikilibary. To gain access: be on wiki for 6 months, 500 edits overall (you don't have to get it in the six months), and then after all all you need is 10 edits in the last 30 days.
74 default resources (newspaper and historical archives, journals including medical and nature, major publishers) plus 28 you can apply for (like Perlego). So for me, it is JSTOR payable equivalent access, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis, De Gruyter, Project Muse and Brill as my mainstays from it. Books, articles and so on to download and keep forever. This is a money saver (JSTOR alone is near 200 dollars/150 pounds a year saved) and, to be frank, offers a wider selection of papers than I could dream of being able to afford.
So for me, that is a very good price for my labours.
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u/small-black-cat-290 6h ago
Today I toured a Civil War battlefield (American) and every time I do this year I find myself going down a rabbit hole of AskHistorians prior questions/answers. While a lot of the threads are between 5 to 10 years old, I find them to be a really great resource covering strategies or tactics of various generals across different battles, which to me is the most fascinating aspect.
It's also a relief to see so much repudiation of Lost Cause mythology.
Thank you to those here who have helped invigorate in me an interest in Civil War History!
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u/nintendo_shill 20h ago
Is there a way to browse only the answered questions? It's kinda bummer to click on a good question with 70 comments but see it empty. Maybe an "answered" tag?
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u/TheHondoGod Interesting Inquirer 19h ago
I suggest the Sunday Digest, it collects all the answered questions each week.
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u/Vir-victus British East India Company 9h ago
You should also check out the subreddit r/HistoriansAnswered , which only features posts getting an answer. (Criteria are that said answer still stands after 12-hours, usually that means it is rule-sufficient, but can also sometimes apply to questions that werent answered, but got a Mod-disclaimer in the comment section, just fyi).
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u/CitizenKnowNothing 19h ago
Topic: Did the Roman Empire stop advancing scientifically and technologically after about 175 AD?
A lot of ink has been spilled about the Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire in the 5th Century AD, but if improvement is the measure of a healthy civilization, I haven't found any "breakthroughs" of the Roman Empire after Ptolemy died around 170 AD. Is it just because I haven't found the right information, or was the Empire already stagnant and ceased to make progress by that time? What are your thoughts?
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u/BookLover54321 13h ago
What do people here think of the historian Greg Grandin? I haven’t read anything by him, but he has a new book coming out that looks interesting, titled America, América: A New History of the New World. It is blurbed by Ned Blackhawk, among other people. From the description:
This is a monumental work of scholarship that will fundamentally change the way we think of Spanish and English colonialism, slavery and racism, and the rise of universal humanism. At once comprehensive and accessible, America, América shows that centuries of bloodshed and diplomacy not only helped shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also the laws, institutions, and ideals that govern the modern world. In so doing, Grandin argues that Latin America’s deeply held culture of social democracy can be an effective counterweight to today’s spreading rightwing authoritarianism.
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u/RobotMaster1 13h ago
Trying to find information about something called a “Martian Room” - where reports were made analyzing reconnaissance photos over Europe during ww2. the reports included extrapolated information based on those photos (like gun emplacement dimensions). A historian author named Steve Zalago keeps mentioning it and I can’t find anything at all on google.
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u/sasha-ashpis 11h ago
Can you help identify the emblem on a Soviet World War 2 shoulder board?
I have a picture of my grandfather, a senior lieutenant in the Soviet Army.
The picture, which has an emblem above the 3 stars, looks like a star with a wreath around it, what does it mean?
Thank you in advance
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u/jumpybouncinglad 10h ago edited 10h ago
I'm currently reading Dorris Kearns' Team of Rivals, and i wonder if there are books, documentaries, or movies that explore a similar theme but focus on the Confederate side. I'm not really interested in the battlefield or military strategy, but in something like Downfall or The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I'm looking for something that details the political turmoil in Richmond during the last few months of the Confederacy.
Thank you!
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u/Bernardito Moderator | Modern Guerrilla | Counterinsurgency 22h ago
Over the years, I have repeatedly posted about my research on the Kit Carson Scouts during the Vietnam War. Just last month, I published what might be the concluding piece of scholarship on the topic of the scouts. There are bits and pieces that I feel need to be brought up, but nothing I can turn into a longer article or chapter. Therefore, for the time being, my chapter "Trusting Your Enemy: American Encounters with the Kit Carson Scouts During the Vietnam War, 1966–1973" published in Enemy Encounters in Modern Warfare by Holly Furneux and Matilda Grieg (eds.) is the finale. Here's the abstract:
This chapter marks my fourth published article/chapter on the Kit Carson Scouts. I have previously explored the reasons for why South and North Vietnamese soldiers defected and joined the scouts in "Phan Chot’s Choice: Agency and Motivation among the Kit Carson Scouts during the Vietnam War, 1966–1973", the presence of women Kit Carson Scouts in "Women as Turncoats: Searching for the Women among the Kit Carson Scouts during the Vietnam War, 1966-1973" and the conceptualization of the scouts through Old West metaphors by Americans during the war in "Together with Bloody Knife in South Vietnam: Old West Metaphors and the Kit Carson Scouts during the Vietnam War".
I would be happy to provide PDFs of any of the aforementioned articles if they are of any interest to you. Just send me a message and I'll sort you out!