The History Thread!

Those old pop up books about old castles I had when I was living on a US Airforce base in England didn't fail me after all!

Edited by Informer on Apr 28th 2024 at 11:39:08 AM

Wasn't boiling water used as well?

Probably, though boiling water will cool quite quickly, so it isn't as effective. Tar and pitch are hot and sticky, and smell very strong, so these will do quite a bit of damage to the poor bastards hit. Still, boiling water is scalding and hurts a lot, so it was likely used when nothing else was available.

Edited by Mara999 on Apr 30th 2024 at 6:52:13 PM

How did the myth get started that the Polish tried to fight the tank-riding Germans with swords and cavalry?

nazi propaganda probably. they weren't exactly the types to praise the people they planned on exterminating.

It was first Nazi propaganda, followed by Communist Russia Propaganda. Both of them perpetuated the myth for pretty much the same reason.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on May 3rd 2024 at 9:27:07 AM

didnt the germans also do that?

Then again, at least one soldier did successfully fight in World War II with medieval weapons. ;)

Recently I've heard Sam Cooke's song Chain Gang a lot on the radio, which made me think about penal labour in general and how much media points out that many of the convicts were not hardened criminals at all. In the southern US, what was the mildest crime that could lead to someone ending up in a chain gang, rather than just having to pay a fine?

So I've been thinking about this for a bit:

You know how the historical work Records of the Three Kingdoms became the source for the Historical Fiction Romance of the Three Kingdoms? What other examples are there of historical sources that get adapted into fiction more or less wholesale that then overtake their source in popularity?

Herodotos' The Histories isn't exactly an obscure source, but the parts about Xerxes I' later life aren't usually as well-known as his earlier invasion of Greece. We're told that the King of Kings fell in love with his brother Masistes' (unnamed) Bactrian wife and tries to cozy up to her by marrying his son to her daughter, only for him to get touchy-feely with said daughter instead. Xerxes' consort, Amestris, finds out and isn't happy, so she sends her goons to murder her sister-in-law, which in turn sends Masistes running to Bactria to plot a rebellion, only to end up getting killed himself.

The whole story is kind of sus – Ktesias' lost book Persika gives a different account of Xerxes' later years, and the Achaemenid Persians themselves lack historical literature for us to refer to. But it's probably more well-known in its (further) fictionalised form in the Book of Esther, which puts Persian Jews in the principal cast and gives it a happy ending.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on May 4th 2024 at 5:19:52 AM

We have a 19th Century magazine writer named Sarah Hale to thank for the popularization of Thanksgiving.

Refresh my memory. Why was yew wood the best kind to craft into English longbows?

It has to do with the internal physical structure. It behaves somewhat similar to laminate bows because of how the natural wood layers interact when made into a bow. This is why some English longbows can have surprisingly high draw weights for self-bows. It is also why they are so long and made from such a large piece of cured timber.

RE: Polish cavarly vs. tanks. it's worth remembering that horses were still important draft animals in WWII, for all armies. Hell, horses are still used in difficult terrains because they are more nimble than motor vehicles and require less maintenance than helicopters. The story about Poland is one of those stories that change with subsequent retellings.

I remember reading on this very wiki that King George III was so mad about Napoleon stealing all of his white horses that he replaced them with black ones.

Bump with a historical thought I just remembered. Even though Celtic culture was once spread all over Europe during ancient times, when people nowadays think of Celtic culture, they usually think of Scotland and especially Ireland. Why is that?

It's partly a matter of linguistics, as the Celtic languages have in the past millennium been supplanted by other languages in places they used to be spoken in. Language depends a lot on influence, political and economic, so it is usually the thing that changes the easiest within a population. During Antiquity a lot of places that we currently might associate with Germanic, Slavic, or Latin languages, would have about two millennia ago had prominent use of a language then considered Celtic. Then again, there is also some uncertainty, whether the classification of ancient tribal groups by contemporary historians can be used at face-value, since their way of categorizing a tribe as "Celtic" or "Germanic" might not match modern-day linguistic research at all.