The History Thread!

Big gallery of WWI pics For the faint of heart or easily disturbed I do not recommend this.

@Teufel

Nice album. The German in number 66 has quite the thousand-yard stare.

77 & 78: The British forgot to mention how they had intercepted the Zimmerman Telegram - by intercepting US diplomatic communications.

Disappointing to see much being made of the Tannenberg battles but, as usual, no mention of the epic Brusilov Offensive.

More military music for your delectation.

Yeah the Brusilov Offensive is much more important than the Tannenberg battles. The Brusilove Offensive was essentially a sign of things to come for what eventually happened in 1942 onwards in the Eastern Front...

Something I hadn't really appreciated until I re-examined the wikipedia page - Brusilov's butcher's bill was absolutely murderous. Russian estimates say he lost almost twice the amount of men his enemies did. I wonder how that happened? Assaulting a dug-in enemy will always entail more casualties, but that many excess? I'm curious now.

I wonder if Breakerchase knows anything about it, he's always been knowledgeable the Imperial Russian Army.

edited 20th Oct '14 3:54:02 AM by Achaemenid

He lost a lot of men because he was expecting the other generals to flank those he's already engaging. And they won't do that because they'll just end up helping Brusilov be successful, but they would probably be just noted as "those who helped him".

So, I recently acquired a copy of an LP entitled Over There, by Albert White and his Gaslight Orchestra, produced in the early 60s and featuring authentic renditions of the songs of World War I, and it got me to thinking about my theory about why the Great War was the last great time for patriotic, pro-war popular music. (Patriotic, pro-war music in general isn't what it once was, but nowhere near as bad as its popular side.)

Patriotic, pro-war popular music generally has the aim of whipping up the common man's patriotic spirit and, in some cases, getting them to enlist. And a lot of the songs of World War I do that admirably, very admirably in fact. George M. Cohan's "Over There" is probably the archetypal example of its type of song (I'm not repeating that phrase again) - one listen and it makes me want to go out into the trenches of France and fight the Hun.

There are many other, lesser-known examples: "Goodbye Broadway, Hello France," "Let's All Be Americans Now," and my favorite, "We Don't Want the Bacon (What We Want is a Piece of the Rhine)", featuring such lyrics as "We'll crown Bill the Kaiser with a bottle of Budweiser" and "Old Wilhelm der Groß will shout 'Was ist los?!'" Many of them share the same catchiness and patriotism as the aforementioned "Over There," and also to an extent make me want to go fight the Hun at the Somme...

But that was the last high, and I'm forced to conclude that the reason people can't write good patriotic, pro-war popular songs anymore is that the sentiments behind them generally got uglier and more nasty.

Take World War II, which did produce a few enduring classics, like "Der Fuehrer's Face". A lot of the songs, though, had an ugly side of racism to them, as a lot of wartime product in that era did, since we now had a non-white enemy to fight against. Take, for example, "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap". (That's incidentally two songs I've mentioned that are best well-known by appearing in a cartoon.)

Some of the songs of World War I had a revival during this period - "Over There" had become a standard by then, but some soldiers apparently preferred singing songs from then to singing more modern stuff, if that means anything.

The Korean War didn't really produce any war related songs of note, but by Vietnam, that ugly side of patriotic pro-war pop songs was in full force and at times was incredibly vile - there was a song celebrating the guy who ordered the My Lai massacre. And it apparently was a hit in 1971, reaching #37 on the Billboard Hot 100!

And there haven't really been any good patriotic pro-war pop tunes since. The first Iraq War? Nothing. The War on Terror? Produced some songs, but I hesitate to call them good, and a lot of them were in the country arena, which has pretty much had a monopoly on patriotism in songs since the 60s.

So, anyone agree with me on this?

Some would say that's because there haven't been any wars worth singing about.

From Vietnam, there's also this charming ditty.

Another one has been a general war exhaustion, in part due to the War on Terror, in part the Cold War and in part due to the Second World War - we've not quite recovered from them all yet.

Patriotic music strikes me as the product of imperial and nationalistic attitudes that have faded or receded to varying degrees in the subsequent years to the songs creation. Instead the songs are now meant as an avenue for entertainment and profit instead. Personally I find the songs the troops make or use for parody to be far more entertaining and worth listening to.

Oh it's Trafalgar Day (Oct 21) apparently. lol

Kiss me KISMET, Hardy!

Roman Gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank a tonic of ashes after training

No wonder Spartacus revolted.

Only noticed this now LOL, our government's article/press release for the 70th anniversary of the Leyte Landings.

I don't remember getting any US or world history at all in high school. I think it's only in the past couple years that I learned that the Spanish American War was a thing.

And just the other day I learned that the Boston Massacre was a thing too. I just read that page on The Other Wiki and nothing on it at all sounds familiar.

That's...odd. I know education is very much state-by-state in the US, but I'd thought that world history (somewhere around freshman year) and basic US history (11th or 12th grade) were both requirements in most high schools?

I somehow never got any. I know I got US History, but I don't remember anything at all from it, and I don't remember World History even being offered.

Huh that's odd but than a lot of kids seemed to forget history from the previous year in high school (as a kid who remembered that, I found it very frustrating and had to remind myself they put up with me asking to go over things a bunch in math if they were in my Math class). Not an American mind, but I remember World History being very Europe/U.S. focused (I'm from Canada if you're curious). Of course this is just B.C. (and Education is a Provincial matter so it really would depend on what your province is).

We get Asian History first before World History. Of course before Asian History there was Philippine History.

In my case (this being Brazil), early History classes usually told about history of local things and heroes of that particular state, before branching out to general national history and then to world history. Later on, we had one class for national history and one for world history, which mostly stuck to Europe (we studied the French Revolution for some three years in a row), with some of the United States later on (little attention to the Revolutionary or Civil War, mostly focused on the 20th century).

As of late there's been a big push to teach more African and Asian history in schools.

Oh we focused on Canadian history at first too, though grade 6/7 were Ancient Civilizations (like Mesopotamia and Rome you know the standard ones). And Grade 8 was World focusing mostly on Europe with a little bit about Japan and China. But mostly on Canada though a lot on Ontario and Quebec and a bit more about the Maritimes for some reason (well I guess because we are much younger than they are still weird to learn so much about the East when you are as far West as us).

New scans refute old diagnosis of King Tut's, other pharaohs' health

Very interesting find.

Yeah, it turns out the pharaohs just had Plato-tier flat backs.

Why, o fucking why, do things like this exist?