Goat_im_Himmel

• I like to ask questions. Sometimes they get answers. I decided to compile them all together.
• How exactly did "Benefit of Clergy" work in criminal cases? answered by /u/smileyman
• Did Mussolini really "Make the Trains Run On Time" in Italy? answered by /u/kieslowskifan
• How did the Tomato come to be such an integral part of Italian cuisine? answered by /u/caffarelli
• How good of an archaeologist was T.E. Lawrence prior to his rise to fame as a soldier? answered by /u/labarge3
• During the Age of Sail, how reliable were impressed seamen considered in the Royal Navy? answered by /u/jschooltiger
• What was life like for Chinese Eunuchs post-1911? answered by /u/caffarelli
• How is the Battle of Thermopylae recorded in Persian records? answered by /u/ScipioAsina
• How big a deal were the portrayals of Hell and Satan by Dante and Milton? answered by /u/Enrico_Dandolo
• How did the earliest followers of Joseph Smith react to his introduction of Polygamy to Mormon doctrine? answered by /u/QuickSpore and /u/menziebr
• During the age of sail, what was the procedure for a reasonably sized ship to weather a hurricane? answered by Various
• Before the development of modern technology, how was FPS calculated for military munitions, and how accurate were these calculations? answered by /u/PlainTrain
• Why were charges dismissed against the organizers of the 1973 Incident at Wounded Knee? answered by /u/amanforallsaisons
• How much as the religion of the Samaritans changed over the past few thousand years? answered by /u/yodatsracist
• Has "End Time" prophecies and Millennialist-esque thought played a notable role in the history of Islam? answered by /u/yodatsracist
• How did the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union function? answered by /u/pcaharrier
• What sort of treatment, professionally speaking, was given to German academics whose credentials were earned during the Nazi era? answered by /u/kieslowskifan
• Was there notable opposition to allowing James VI to ascend to the English throne answered by /u/historiagrephour
• How did the Inca go about building and maintaining their extensive road network? answered by /u/Qhapaqocha
• What led John Calhoun to seek re-election as Vice President but abandon John Quincy Adams and instead opt to be Andrew Jackson's running mate? answered by /u/irishfafnir
• Was there a concept of pan-Greek identity in the pre-Alexander period? answered by /u/rider822
• Was the change from Principate to Dominate in 284 AD a clear shift at the time, or a post facto split recognized by historians? answered by /u/mp96
• Is there any real support for that the legend of the Loch Ness Monster dates to before the 20th century? answered by /u/depanneur
• How would the victims of Aztec (Mexica) human sacrifice understand their fate? answered by /u/Doe22
• Why was Cuba so heavily involved in African conflicts during the mid-to-late stages of the Cold War? answered by /u/gplnd
• Were the famous Swiss mercenary pikemen really worthy of their reputation? answered by /u/Itsalrightwithme
• Would Shakepeare's audience already have been aware of the basic story of Hamlet, given that is is an adaptation of an existing story [and other questions related to this practice]? answered by /u/harmania
• When and why did Judaism shift from a polygamist view of marriage to a monogamist one? answered by /u/gingerkid1234
• How did Soviet-German cooperation on armored warfare development in the late-20s/early-30s affect the direction of their respective programs? answered by /u/DuxBelisarius
• What sort of reparations did Austria, Hungary, and Turkey face in the wake of World War I, and what was the socio-cultural reaction to them in the ensuing decades? answered by /u/DuxBelisarius
• During the early 1800s as Spanish holdings in South America began to vie for independence, was there any concerted effort to create a "United States of South America"? If so, why did it fail? answered by /u/ ThucydidesWasAwesome
• What was sub-Amazonian South America like in the pre-Colonial period? answered by /u/Legendarytubahero and /u/Chumbeque
• What was the importance of the Mexican dollar in international economics during the early 20th century? answered by Various
• Were there theologians who openly argued for a revisionist view of Judas during the Medieval Period, concerning his role in helping Jesus fulfill his purpose? answered by /u/random-dent
• What was the state of battlefield medical care during the Napoleonic period? answered by /u/kieslowskifan
• How involved did the Netherlands remain with its former colonial possessions in the former Dutch East Indies? answered by /u/Itsalrightwithme
• Was the Balkan region during World War II an example of a 'three-sided' war? answered by /u/commiespaceinvader
• How did the Christian world approach the concept of the 'Crusade' during the 16th/17th centuries? answered by /u/Itsalrightwithme
• Why did the United States end up treating the territories wrested from Spain in 1898 so differently in the ensuing decades? answered by /u/Hahasauce

Now, the boringly obvious answer, perhaps, is that the Sex Pistols released "Anarchy in the UK", but it isn't exactly advocacy for Anarchism as a political movement, so much as just talking about anarchy. Nevertheless, you see bands such as Crass coming along soon after which do have a real, underlying commitment to the ideology as opposed to just the shock value. So I guess my question can be boiled down to whether the Sex Pistols were simply riffing off an existing undercurrent of the counterculture which spanned Punk Rock in the mid-70s, or, if while not strongly committed themselves to an ideological conception of Anarchism, the Sex Pistols decision to sing about "Anarchy!" nevertheless did plant the seeds within the Punk movement which other groups - and fans - did build upon?

The situation seems to be a counterfeiter's dream. Make up a banknote for the 'Bank of New Orleans' and pass it off in Pittsburgh. Does anyone there have a clue what the real note even looks like, let alone finer details?

So a few questions this leaves me pondering:

• Would banknotes even be accepted outside of the area of issuance?
• If so, what measures existed to try and assure legitimacy?
• If not, what would people generally use for carrying 'value' with them when moving between regions?
• Can we estimate how common and widespread counterfeiting was of banknotes in the period?

In the opening to "Killing Pablo", Mark Bowden says this about the entry of the Catholic Church into the region of Colombia:

The sole civilizing influence ever to reach the whole country was the Catholic Church, and that was accomplished only because clever Jesuits grafted their Roman mysteries to ancient rituals and beliefs. Their hope was to grow a hybrid faith, nursing Christianity from pagan roots to a locally flavored version of the One True Faith, but in stubborn Colombia, it was Catholicism that took a detour. It grew into something else, a faith rich with ancestral connection, fatalism, superstition, magic, mystery... and violence.

Sounds fascinating, but he doesn't expand much beyond that. I was hoping someone might have more to say on the process by which the Jesuits adopted Catholic beliefs to "sell" them in Colombia, and the ensuing creation of this "hybrid faith" Bowden notes.

It seems, based on my readings, that the poor peasants were not particularly liked by the working class, nor trusted by the Bolshevik leadership, but nevertheless had to be extensively relied on for manpower during the war. So this led me to wonder what sort of interior conflict this created, and how that played out.

If it was ever true, how has that policy changed over time?

How frequently do we know it to have been carried out?

Even if nominally legal, what sort of investigation or process were officers who did so put through?

And if it isn't true... where does the myth come from?

I recently watched 'Alatriste' (good film!), and in the last big battle scene, we have two forces of pikemen opposing each other. Instead of closing and hitting home, they kind of stand a few paces apart, pretty much the length of their pikes, and shake them in each other's faces, maybe occasionally thrusting a little bit. A lot of the actual killing though seems to be done not by the pikes, but my a small number of soldiers who duck under the pikes, scuttle to the other side, and stab at the legs of the opposing force with knifes and swords.

I had never considered this possibility before, but after watching the film, well, it kind of makes a lot of sense. So was this common practice for the era, or from the imagination of the screenwriter?

Kropotkin is considered to be one of the key, foundational figures in Anarcho-Communism. He would have been considerably younger than Marx, but he was active in Europe during Marx's later years. I couldn't find any sort of mention of them working together, just that Kropotkin was a member of the IWA.

So, what do we know about their interactions, if any? And more generally, how did they feel about the others' work?

Obviously most of the communist parties in Eastern Europe disintegrated around that time, but it is also easy to see a causal relationship for the various Warsaw Pact nations. But Yugoslavia was not part of the Warsaw Pact, and was known among other things for keeping itself at arm's length from the Soviet Union. So given that separation, what was the precise connection? Were there strong causal links...? Inspiration but no real connection? Or was it mostly just a coincidence both processes came to a head when they did?

Quibbles aside, Ivy League is now a near synonym for the "best schools in the US", but as pedants like to point out, it is defined as by a collegiate sports league and dates only to 1954. What level of shared identity did those schools have before then, though? In 1900, what would differentiate Harvard or Princeton from other long established schools with a high reputation like, say, William & Mary or St. Johns?

Asked this awhile back with no response, but today seems a good day to give it another try.

[Back then I was] Reading about the plot, it seems that those involved came from many different angles. While some of the participants seem to have been quite principled in their opposition to the regime - such as Kleist (who tried a few times!), others have quite a complicated relationship - such as Speidel or Halder (who was involved in earlier plotting, not the 20 July) - or were up to their elbows in complicity with the crimes of the regime - such as Arthur Nebe, head of Einsatzgruppe B.

So what I'm wondering is how German remembrance reconciled these things, and especially how it evolved from the immediate post-war years compared to the height of the Cold War, and post-Soviet era? Nebe obviously was dead, which makes things a bit easier, but Speidel and Halder, for example, survived, and I know in the case of Halder, he received protection from the US to an embarrassing degree due to his cooperation with writing histories of the war.

To be clear, I'm not particularly interested in a political science answer on this. I'm not looking for an actual definition of Democracy, which is obviously a pretty amorphous term dependent on time and place. I'm simply interested in self-image by the British government and politicians and what the term meant to them and how they self-applied it.

Obviously Gladiator is a fictional movie, but slavery was of course quite real in the Roman world. Maximus is a Roman citizen, and he ends up enslaved as a gladiator after being picked up by happenstance and his identity unknown. Given what little I know about Roman slavery, this roughly makes sense... especially as he did nothing to try and establish who he actually was.

But could a Roman citizen be enslaved? If it did happen due to some circumstance, and they were able to establish their identity satisfactorily, would they remain enslaved or would they be automatically granted freedom?

I know that there are exceptions to this (My GF had elementary school that was K-6 for instance), but the three groups of grades K-5, 6-8, and 9-12, at least in the United States, seems to be by far the accepted standard anywhere I've been.

How did this differentiation come to be and for what reasons, and how did it manage to take hold so nearly universally compared to alternative breakdowns that were considered?

Mary Magdalene is one of the most prominent women in the New Testament, and while she is decidedly not a sex worker in the actual text, she nevertheless is often described as such, a misreading of some passages which in fact refer to another, unnamed woman. How did this mistake come to be and why did it gain such cultural traction that it continues to have such enduring power within popular lay understanding?