The History Thread!

Benjamin Britten's 'lost' Malaysian anthem.

I have to hand this to History channel today. Their morning run on Caligula actually paid service to the history of his actions being rooted in political intrigue and a very dangerous political game. This includes the plot to usurp him. They also mention the political and social nature of that infamous bridge to intimidate the rich nobles.

Ok more from the book today. I had an opportunity to do more reading. The Italian Chapter is pretty long and for a good reason. Italy was effectively the heart of quality European armor trade period. However there are some caveats. For example in 16th century Italian steel armors went from medium with high mix to low with medium carbon mix armors with low carbon lower quality steel being predominate. The reason? The sudden sharp increase in use of fire gilding. This reduced or removed tempering of higher quality steels to apply gilding. While protection was important but the slow decline of the efficacy of armor was starting to show it was still valuable. Only now looking good as well as being functional was important.

The compensate for reduced quality and strength of steel used in armor they took a simple expedient of increasing the average armor thickness by up to a full millimeter of material. Which means more weight for the record. Armor went from an average of 1-2mm to up 2-3mm. Most of the low steel armor though was kept inside of Italy with higher quality materials effectively being export or nobility products.

Apparently even up to this time period outside of wealthy individuals such as high ranking knights, nobles, professionals, and people of importance. Medium and high carbon high quality armors were not common field items. Instead low quality/low carbon steel was very common as was straight up refined iron. There was an example of even a wealthy Italian professional soldier wearing nothing more then low carbon and even Iron plate in the field and this was apparently common across Europe. Your average foot slogger in plate was likely wearing iron or low quality steel munitions armor as were poor knights and those without the means to pay the hefty sums for higher quality armors.

Now the author did touch on something many of you would find interesting. We all know about how exotic shapes of armor are not necessarily practical in terms of overall design but meant for show and ceremony. However in Italy and other parts of Europe that fancy armor was made of mid to high grade steel. This included fancy parade armors. A notable example was a helm belonging to Dell Rovere that was a decorative helm that was pistol proofed. This is in sharp contrast to common field armors which at most were apparently mostly lower carbon steel up to medium carbon.

Apparently one of the creators of this armor was the family Negroli with one of their smiths,Filippo Negroli, considered by many to possibly being the best armorer in European history because of his elaborate ceremonial, parade, functional, and costume armor made out of hardened steels with high attention to details. A well known example of his more functional but decorate armor was the Armour made for Dauphin Henry of France in 1540. An example of his work at the Met Musuem of Art That helm is likely made of hardened steel.

edited 3rd Oct '15 7:28:17 AM by TuefelHundenIV

I lol'd

I have two questions regarding a story idea.

1. How much gang activity was there in 1920s Shanghai?

2. Will I offend people if I set it there?

I think there was quite a bit, especially around the International Settlement. This was the time of Fairbairn and Sykes (of the knife fame) of the Shanghai Municipal Police.

Why discussing history on the internet sucks.

Achae: I dunno man we do pretty good here. But then again this is a different environ then that.

Baghdad still hasn't recovered from when the Mongols decided the city and their people were too "Chinese" and Islamic and decided to remedy that situation.

http://lostislamichistory.com/mongols/

Note, Hulagu, the khan at the time, (though not the Great Khan - that was Mongke), who carried out the sack was batshit insane although not to the same extent as that other utter prick, Timur.

We're much better here, because it's nice and small. The arrogance of the posters there though. STEM field students have this really irritating conceit that because they have some training in the natural sciences, they must be adept in the humanities. Reddit is dreadful for it. 'Hey guiz, Rome fell becuz of teh lead pipes - check out Wikipedia!' +2145 upvotes 'How did they manage for centuries prior with the same lead pipes?' -200 'OMG why do historians reject le scienc?! Muh Sokal affair!'

edited 14th Oct '15 2:56:03 AM by Achaemenid

It amuses me when they pull stuff like that, because they're the same sorts who are often disliked by their lecturers and professors because they can't accept that maybe, just maybe, they don't know everything. Hell, finding an engineering student who admits they don't know everything was a sight to behold for me.

I'm willing to admit that my knowledge is not complete and that there are definite areas I can work on - but I can still use what I do know.

(Oh, and Sokal amuses many of us who stepped away from postmodernism and post-structuralism, for the same reasons you can guess.)

Well, it's Reddit. The only worthwhile subs there to discuss History are /r/badhistory and /r/AskHistorians, for the most part.

Besides, what can you expect from a place where there are users who think the Romans wrote the Gospels in order to control people or that World War I began merely due to Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination?

edited 14th Oct '15 4:37:26 AM by Quag15

Well, if nothing else apparently Theophilus was very instrumental in writing Luke and Acts, and he sounds pretty Roman-ish. XP

Sokal?

Who's Sokal?

The Sokal Affair Basically some guy set out to prove an academic publisher really wasn't academic and riddled with biases and failure to fact check. Created a "tidy uproar".

edited 14th Oct '15 6:45:34 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Another reason for it was to route out what he saw as nonsense occasionally written by postmodern and post-structural writers, where some go too far in their proposals and what they say.

The paper in question was one suggesting that gravity is socially constructed, and there was a particular concern at the time of postmodernists overstepping their bounds and going into areas where they shouldn't.

What the post-modernists were doing is precisely what I'm condemning, except in reverse: Making authoritative pronouncements on fields outside their area of expertise. But, at least on the web, the people who do this seem to almost entirely STEM students talking about social sciences and the humanities. You don't see people with history degrees saying they know how to build a bridge.

Eh, I have seen worse.

Mind, I think we should be careful about stuff like this. It risks importing drama.

I'm an engineering major... and I know I know nothing. Seriously, its why I lurk more than I comment, I just feel I don't know enough about any given situation to really make any meaningful remark about it. At least when it comes to OTC. For instance, I have no idea how to link that quote earlier to Socrates; I'm really bad a remembering formatting rules for that sort of this. Sorry if this is off-topic.

So... I went to the Wikipedia page mentioned earlier. Specifically, the talk page.

Look at how all three of the Wikipedia projects that page is listed into rate it the exact same way. Which reminds me, the article itself doesn't has any disclaimers pointing out any possible problems in the article, and when I first looked at the article it said the last person who edited it was 15 days ago. These three things together lead me to conclude it's not a particularly looked after page.

Futhermore, the rating these three projects did to the page is "C-class. Mid-importance." That doesn't looks so bad at first, but then you look up what "mid-importance" means, to quote Wikipedia themselves Mid means "Subject is only notable within its particular field or subject and has achieved notability in a particular place or area." this basically means that chances are that it's only going to be looked at if it happens to have a few determined and cooperative editors who happen to take an interest for one of those topics and pages for whatever reason.

C-class also doesn't seems so bad either, but again this changes when you click the link about "The Quality Scale" and find out they define it as "The article is substantial, but is still missing important content or contains a lot of irrelevant material. The article should have some references to reliable sources, but may still have significant issues or require substantial cleanup. The article is better developed in style, structure and quality than Start-Class, but fails one or more of the criteria for B-Class.

And the best part? C-class is the third lowest score of the Quality scale. The only things lower are "Start-class" which is described as "The article has a meaningful amount of good content, but it is still weak in many areas, and may lack a key element;" and stub class which is the lowest.

Point being? Not even Wikipedia thinks that article is good. Maybe acceptable, but not good at all. That guy was very unwise, especially since he doesn't even seems to have a very realistic idea of how the very site he linked to works.

edited 15th Oct '15 3:07:40 AM by SaintDeltora

Wikipedia has crankery built into its discussion of history by design, because of its editorial standard of 'verifiability not truth'. Nicholas Moran posted about this a while ago: his actually going to archives, scanning and uploading documents online, was 'an editor's original research' and not sufficiently good evidence to cause a change to an inaccurate article.

Not the point.

I am aware Wikipedia's methods are... polemic. But I am not really interested in discussing them.

My point was that by Wikipedia's own standards that article is sub-par. And it's very likely a good number of Wikipedia members would have facepalmed at what he did.

I know it originated from Victorian Britain, but did the rest of Europe also go with Victorian style for women's clothing in the 19th Century?

edited 15th Oct '15 7:40:29 AM by HallowHawk

Here in Portugal, that fashion was mostly adopted by the aristocracy and the royal family. The middle classes tended to prefer the more French-ier styles, iirc.

Okay, but what about Imperial Germany?

More Mitteleuropan, in the broad sense (keeping in mind that Austria-Hungary and glittering Vienna were part of the same cultural context). Britain is historically the European exception than the European trendsetter.