The History Thread!

It's been a while since I checked, but I think he did his Masters in History, specifically Stalingrad. I might be mistaken there, but in general he has been a big buster of myths of WW2.

Ahh "Tankers Chocolate" making deranged meth heads of Nazis since the 1940's.

Seriously though looking through his other material, this one is almost from left field. Some of the commenters are pointing out he is citing a lot of really bad sources for the vid to boot.

It's almost a 180 from his regular stuff. There was some indications of him drinking the Peterson coolade, which might explain his...bizarre position.

Edited by TerminusEst on Aug 15th 2018 at 3:30:15 AM

I've recently finished watching Extra History Channel's series about Genghis Khan.

I'm from Kazakhstan, and I think it should go without saying (with us being a Central Asian country) how strong an impact Genghis Khan's (and his many, many descendants') exploits made on our history. Despite this, the history courses I took in high school and university understandably focused more on the Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Jochi's Ulus, the Golden Horde, glossing over the subject matter of EH's series, the Mongol Empire's formative years, when Genghis Khan was still known to the world as Temujin of the Borjigins.

And holy shit, did our history teachers leave the best parts of the story out.

It's interesting that (if how the events portrayed in the series were close to the truth) Temujin rose to power not only thanks to his (and Subutai's, who sadly wasn't included in the videos, the man was 700 years ahead of his own time when it came to strategic and tactical thinking) enormous military talent, but also essentially being a humanitarian Reasonable Authority Figure (at least compared to his peers and predecessors), probably the main reason why he was able to build such a large power base and unite the Steppes.

I also find it deeply ironic that this ruthless, fearsome, bloodthirsty conqueror, who's guilty of numerous terrible war crimes, whose armies committed genocides and atrocities that shook the world to its core on his direct orders managed to establish, more or less, a fully meritocratic society with total religious freedom on an unprecedented scale (again, with a Fair for Its Day disclaimer – history is never this unambiguous).

The makers of the series also made an interesting choice in portraying Temujin in his childhood as this shy and timid Momma's Boy. As far as I know there's little to no reliable sources about Genghis Khan's childhood, so that part is most definitely an artistic choice. They've used it to great effect in this music video of the series' main theme.

Also, Ogedei's portrayal in the series is hilarious.

Edited by Millership on Aug 15th 2018 at 5:05:49 PM

Recently got the book "Dissenting Japan: A History of Japanese Radicalism and Counterculture from 1945".

It's an interesting book for anyone interested in left-wing-led events that permeated in Japan years after the Allied Forces ended occupation in Japan.

I've yet to read the entire thing, but I browsed through it. One of the events the author was able to research is about the infiltration of Camp Asaka in the 70s by left-wing student radicals. This isn't talked about a lot when I did modern Japanese history.

For you historical warfare fans "Native North American Armor, Shields, and Fortifications David E. Jones"

The book is a historical look at the various weapons, general tactics, and habits of creating fortifications of the North American Native Peoples. So far I have found accounts of some tribes using a longbow that was built and performed in a fashion similar to the Welsh Longbow. Even descriptions of great penetrative power against animals, obstacles, and lightly armored opponents. Some snippets from the book so far.

The most favored fortification of the prairie region, especially along rivers, were walled towns and villages with log palisade, dry moats, stockades and by the 1300's were incorporating multi-bastion style walled fortifications using timber. They even figured out that the fortification process was a deliberate and initial part of constructing inhabited locations. Evidence partly based on archeological finds of incomplete defensive structure sites being abandoned with no residential structures or the usual signs of long-term habitation such as common detritus locations in or around the site.

Siege warfare at this point was largely focused on undermining and firing the outer walls to create a breach.

So far this is largely for just the prairie region which is more or less defined as the region we call the Midwest.

Ok finished the Prarie region chapter.

Basically, nearly all the native peoples of the region at a minimum dug defensive earthworks for their towns and villages and often supplemented it with various timber fortifications where possible. In the hotter more southern climes they used thorny plant life and sometimes even built stone breastworks. The fortifications were largest and most numerous in the region roughly between what is Nebraska and the colder regions of what is now Canada. They had several forts that housed fairly uniform living huts, organized streets and squares, and protected entryways. Deliberately constructed cave structures were common and appear mostly to serve as storerooms and shelters for the non-combatants. Dugouts and earth houses were a fairly common hold out points. The largest forts had well over a hundred huts which mean each fort held hundreds of inhabitants in general. They were observed by some Europeans Explorers and traders as a necessity to repel large enemy forces. An account of an early explorer noted one such fort with earthen huts was overrun by two allied tribal groups estimated to number around 2,000 attacking the fort. The fort being overrun resulted in the decimation of any inhabitants who failed to escape.

Early armor was often bone or wood dowels in a layer or two sometimes topped or backed by leather. Leather shields were very common and most often used to protect against arrows and spears. The later armor around the time of the European settlers evolved to reflect the adoption of cavalry combat. The protective leather headwear was common and groups began to increasingly wear breastplates of thick cured leather and sometimes guards on arms and legs. Back armor of leather became common as well. They also adopted a variety of leather horse armor to help protect their mounts.

They adapted their strategic and tactical fighting and defensive structures quite readily to the musket and used loopholes, reinforced earthworks, and accounting for height advantage of mounted riders by digging deeper dry moats.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Aug 25th 2018 at 6:10:43 AM

Adding that to my list! I've always been interested in Japanese dissent and left-wing actions during the war. The work done by Sanzo Nosaka and his fellow Japanese communists "re-educating" IJA POWs for the Chinese Communist Party was quite fascinating, as was the participation of Japanese servicemembers in post-war revolutionary movements, from the Viet Minh to the Indonesian Republican Army. Apparently a couple of them even stuck with the Communist Party of Malaya all the way till its final surrender in 1990.

On a semi-related note: A wartime IJN sailor recounts his experience burning classified documents at the end of the war.

Huh, interesting. My knowledge of Native American warfare only really goes as far as Hämäläinen's Comanche Empire, so I really have no idea how things worked in pre-Columbian times. Did these fortifications mainly belong to small tribes and city-states, or were they mainly built by larger polities? I'd thought that wars among larger states would've been dominated by chevauchée raids against the civilian economic base outside the walls, since storming a fortified structure is a pretty unpleasant affair no matter where you live.

Eagle: The forts varied in size from about a dozen huts to what basically amounts to good sized towns. The largest described for the prairie region had around a couple hundred huts and was rather well fortified. The fortifications appear to be a basic response to raiding. How large a fort was determined by the size of the group that chose to settle there initially. Some of the forts showed signs of growth after what appeared to be the initial defensive structures being built with additional moats and walls being expanded outward to encompass collections of huts outside of the original walls.

The fortifications were basically at that interim step where they were built to secure the inhabitants against wildlife, hostile groups raiding them, and as a safe place to store their harvested and gathered materials. The more nomadic the tribe was the less permanent their fortifications. The tribes that moved seasonally had retreats they maintained that they would occupy and maintain on a regular basis based on accounts of earlier explorers, the accounts of the tribes and archeological evidence.

Basically, it seemed all the tribes made use of the fortifications just the size and permanency varied based on the tribes living habits. Even the more nomadic tribes would basically dig earthworks if they thought they were threatened. They were described as using their teepee poles and the buffalo hides as a means to shore up earthwork ditches. They also made use of any brambles and briars to hand.

The stonework examples were only in the more Southern hotter regions.

From what I gathered the bulk of the large and more permanent forts were done by the more settled tribes who were both hunters and farmers their crops offering them the stability in food sources they needed to form settlements. Just like most permanent fortified settlements formed along or near water sources and in strategic locations as well.

James Buchanan is regarded as one of, if not the worst president because of his failure to do anything about the incoming Civil War. I wonder-if he became president farther away from the specter of Civil War, like during the 1844 election, would he have handled it much better? Is there a time in his life where he would actually work? I could also say the same thing about Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce, though the latter has his horrible personal luck as a factor for why he was bad at it

Not that familiar with Buchanan or the counterfactuals, but wasn't he persuaded by Southern sympathisers in his cabinet to avoid reinforcing Army garrisons in the South? I've heard that he wanted his presidency to be impartial, but that doesn't speak well of his good judgment.

Anyway, just got my hands on something that explores one of my more niche interests: Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan, a book on the history and identity of Japanese jazz going back to the 1910s. The first "native" Japanese form of modern street music actually originated in the late Meiji era, where commercial brass bands (jinta) performed in the streets to advertise businesses (as well as the occasional yakuza syndicate). Jinta performers went through a musical evolution that sometimes converged with their counterparts in Chicago and New Orleans, such as their adoption of extended solo breaks. The art form gradually fell out of view around 1908, following the economic hardship and repression that came with the Russo-Japanese War.

The Taishō period saw an increasing number of Japanese students and businessmen travelling to the United States, where they encountered African-American street bands playing early forms of jazz and blues. American and Filipino bands on ocean liners also contributed to the influx of jazz scores into Japan, and were often hired to perform at upscale establishments. When the Roaring Twenties came, the worldwide Dance Sensation (dansu netsu) hit the country. Social dancing entered the lives of the urban middle class, who enthusiastically signed up for classes and social sessions. The first commercial dance hall, the Kagetsuen in Yokohama, was opened by Shizuko Hiraoka in 1920. When the New York Times reporter Burnet Hershey came to report on the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, he wrote:

Okay, that guy was a raging racist, but anyway. The groups of students who first encountered jazz in the 1910s returned to the US repeatedly throughout the twenties, bringing back new transcriptions by artists such as Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington each time. Osaka and the greater Kansai region became a cultural hub for up-and-coming artists, as the economic infrastructure of Kantō had been severely damaged by the earthquake. Japanese jazz playing in this era, though precise, was often caricatured abroad as stiff and lacking in imagination, leading many musicians-in-training to seek out Filipino shipboard musicians to teach them their signature ad-libbing.

It wasn't all meat and no potatoes, of course. The first pushback against the jazz movement came from Japan's own cadre of Western-trained classicists, who thought it an inferior art form. The Great Depression made things worse for everyone everywhere, and then the militarist insanity of the Shōwa era kicked in. Western products like jazz, Disney cartoons and baseball were out, while runaway military coups, state surveillance and the arahitogami cult were in. Y'all know what happened next.

Japanese jazz was reborn in the postwar era, when the country was occupied by a large numbers of US troops in need of live entertainment. Music became one of the "safer" lines of work thanks to the volume of demand. American troops would often drive to artists' gatherings on trucks, call out for certain numbers of instrumentalists for the evening, and those who sign up would usually earn a very decent pay. The Americans also opened officer's clubs that offered stable employment for Japanese bands, and some enterprising Japanese took the risk to open their own dance halls, where American troops and Japanese locals would mingle, allowing post-war jazz to diffuse back into Japanese public consciousness. Post-war Japanese musicians like Joji Kawaguchi and Sadao Watanabe were quick to find an international audience, and pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi famously kick-started her US career at Berklee. Japan's jazz scene continued evolving alongside the international one through the following decades, coming full circle with the recent resurgence of swing.

Apart from the strictly historical stuff, the book also discusses the topic of cultural appropriation and the different perception of jazz culture worldwide. There's a pervasive collective insecurity about the "authenticity" of Japanese jazz that dates back to the Taishō era, and the effort by African-American musicians to "reclaim" jazz during the Civil Rights Movement made it a particularly sensitive topic for everyone. Some African-American and Japanese musicians spent the sixties trading barbs at each other on the authenticity of their craft, though many jazz legends like Miles Davis saw no conflict between the two traditions and endorsed Japanese jazz as its own, authentic art form. There's also some fascinating discussion on the contrast between jazz's working-class roots in New Orleans and its rapid adoption by upper-class urbanites around the world, something that I think still weighs upon its identity as an African-American art form.

I'll end with the wonderful postwar track that led my attention to this book: Shizuko Kasagi's "Hey Hey Boogie", which my girlfriend and I discovered while putting together a playlist for our Lindy Hop socials last week. Enjoy!

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Aug 24th 2018 at 10:31:53 AM

Where there is contact culture will spread one way or another. That is kind of an interesting sample of the history of Jazz. Especially the sharp pre-WWII cut off with the regime basically cutting down the alternate culture. Was there underground music in Japan or was this almost unheard of before the end of WWII?

The California area has a bit of an oddball situation going in that in the only distinctly and uniquely Californian Native examples are ones which have the least contact with tribes of other regions. All the other examples ultimately develop similar equipment and different tactics because of that more direct contact with the groups outside of the California region.

The central region was punctuated by the very small scale and highly controlled and formalized warfare. This is in part due to the fact the areas of the region are very heavily populated compared to their low plains counterparts. Military organization was largely informal, with only a few known warrior societies existing, and was typically carried out by the Kin/Family. Common practice was small raids, ambushes, and sometimes even a duel. This was typical for an act of perceived or actual harm caused to one of their kin. The local social structure was very strongly formed around a system of commitment, behaviors, and organization around the kin of the tribe members.

Leadership was often the most wealthy male of a family and the most wealthy family leading a village. There does not appear to have been any sort of larger scale organization at the tribe level beyond shared cultural traits and anything done at that level was largely done by collective consensus of individual groups. Warfare organized at the village level was uncommon and by the various accounts warfare organized at the tribal level was rare at best. The majority of conflicts were small-scale family feuds. Most family conflicts were informal but rarely resulted in large numbers of casualties. Part of the reason for the smaller numbers overall was villages were smaller in overall number than on the plains and the area had a lot of tribes living in smaller groups making large-scale warfare a lot less practical.

The most common cause of conflict at the kin level was another family, village, or especially another tribe trespassing or poaching on another's territory. The various groups were highly territorial and sensitive to trespassing into resource areas. Deliberate trespass could lead to someone being killed outright if not assaulted in general.

When warfare was taken on in a formal sense it was typically by consent of the two warring parties with an often strictly adhered to a set of rules and considerations. The engagements were often limited to a brief exchange before retiring and resuming the conflict a number of days later. Casualties were low and the preferred method of militant exchange was by use of ranged weapons, typically bows, but could also include casting lances and in the case of a couple of tribes use of slings, and one of the more coastally affiliated groups used harpoons and a hardwood throwing stick. The locals used clubs, daggers, knives, and sticks/staves. Poisoned arrows were apparently common among some of the groups. There were stone axes but they were rarely used. Hand to hand in the formalized fighting was rare but not unknown. It was most often used when one side decided they wanted to break with the ritualized format. This was rare but it was known to happen.

Even more interesting was that at the end of the conflict the two leaders would gather assess the damages and decide the winner by consent. This was basically carried out sort of like a negotiation. Typically in terms of conflict over resource points, the winners got the overall resources. However, the groups also had a very strongly held tradition of reparations for property damaged and lives lost. So while a military victor would ultimately gain a better long-term position they would still lose out more in the terms of overall cost in paying out mutual reparations. These were negotiated and it was common for there to be threat displays by the warriors, such as war dances, ritualized weapon brandishing, and the whoops and calls, to encourage more favorable dealings on their behalf.

Some groups practiced a tradition that after hostilities were concluded of destroying their wartime weapons before leaving the area. Some groups adopted a more strict and limited form of warfare similar to combat by a champion in some regards. An example would be a few warriors would take turns firing a number of arrows at each other. The one being fired on would try to dodge and then would take their turn firing on their opponent.

The central California region had little to no presence of fortifications outside of earthen huts that were basically a bunker with a choke point entrance to resist the periodic raids. They had little or no shields and armor outside of ceremonial use. Warfare was rarely high casualty though anyone not agreeing to it could possibly face a more vicious raid aimed at killing far more than would suffer as a reprisal.

However, in sharp contrast the parts of California region that bordered with other tribal cultures. Not only were they far more likely to practice warfare inline with the low and high plains tribes, these groups used fortifications, typically earth and stick with some stone examples, but also wore armor and used shields. There is some suggestion that ritualized warfare was possibly some culture bleed over from the Aztecs, a tribe to the south that had direct contact with the Aztecs and had a "Counting Coup" like system, as well as similar practices among their neighbors. However, they also indulged in the less friendly smash your face in kind of warfare and were the groups consider the most warlike and most likely to break from the formalized warfare of the interior.

Armor for the groups that wore it was similar to the plains. Typically hide armor in sort of breastplate, dowel armor, or even slat armor were the common armor forms. Hide bucklers and shields were common with a few examples of heavy shields. There is mention of a type of deer hide "pavise" like device. Where a deer hide was hung loosely from a stick to catch or deflect arrows. Hide capes were known and sometimes were integrated into a headpiece. One tribe piled their hair under a type of wicker/basket woven helm to cushion against blows. The various styles of armor and protection often reflected which tribal group they had the most contact with.

These groups most commonly used the earthwork style of fortification one example in the 1800's built to resist Spanish incursions had a trench system fortified with log lumber and branch barricades. The earthworks were of good enough quality that they resisted cannon fire. The barricades had to be fired and the fortifications flanked to defeat them.

So the overall takeaway I get is this. There is a central core of small but numerous tribes in high density populations. They develop a very strong sense of territoriality especially in relation to resource access. Because they are effectively buffered from more hostile neighbors by the tribes inhabiting the outer regions they maintain a sort of low key low-intensity style of warfare. Otherwise, the tightly packed groups would likely have created an untold amount of blood shed had they been more aggressive in their warfare style. The outer regions tribal groups adopted tactics more similar to their more aggressive neighbors out of necessity and were more likely to build fortifications. The region is known to be very horse poor so there are little or no horses for warfare in the region in general but had to contend with the plains culture who had developed a tradition of mounted warfare.

The next chapter touches on the High Plains tribes.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Aug 25th 2018 at 3:14:46 AM

I managed to find a free copy of the book off the Internet and read the whole thing.

God all of this is super interesting.

I really appreciate you relaying this stuff for us Tuffy.

My granduncle passed away last week, he was one of the few remaining WWII veterans in Brazil who served in Italy during Monte Castello campaign.

Edited by AngelusNox on Aug 25th 2018 at 9:12:13 AM

rmc: Which one. The jazz book or the Native American Warfare book?

Well, like their Nazi allies, the militarist government found it hard to get rid of jazz completely. The dance halls still opened until 1940. Major artists like Ryoichi Hattori still pumped out tracks, some of them satirical and subversive, until the war against America started in earnest. Wartime patriotic songs often featured jazz instruments and elements (under the euphemism "light music"), and Radio Tokyo broadcasts made use of western jazz as part of the psy-ops against Allied troops. Jazz wasn't strictly seen as "alternate culture", socially speaking. Japan under the Taishō democracy consumed foreign imports eagerly, to the point where the overall political and cultural trend of the era was called the "erotic, grotesque and nonsense" (ero-guro-nansensu). In this light, you can see the military's forceful entry into politics in the Shōwa era as a reactionary movement towards twenties Westernisation and the Great Depression, building upon nationalist myths that had been cultivated since the Meiji Restoration.

I find the part about the winners having to pay out more reparations than the losers to be quite interesting. Was that part of a larger social contract to reduce overall conflict? What stopped the victors from just declaring "Vae bloody victis" and just extort everything out of the losers? And when the book says that the California nations had contact with the Aztecs, does it mean that they ranged all the way to the Valley of Mexico? I don't really know anything about Mesoamerican civilisations further west. Also curious about the mention of armour - I've looked up Pacific Northwest (Haida and Tlingit) armour for an art project before, but I've never seen anything like it in depictions of the southern natives.

Looking forward to the Plains Nations chapter!

(Also, I've got a bunch of articles on the Atlantic Triangle and Age of Sail shipbuilding developments stashed on Google Drive if anyone is interested)

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Aug 25th 2018 at 6:16:44 AM

eagle: As far as I know it was part of a deliberately created social contract among the tribal groups that participated to keep warfare from becoming a major issue. They relied on the kinship social structure to keep both organization but also warfare groups small and smaller groups were more likely to settle than fight battles of attrition. There were some accounts of groups starting things back up or even deciding war was better than the settlement, that was more an exception than the rule from what I gathered. The threat of continued warfare was what apparently was used to ensure they went for negotiation rather than larger war. I imagine it was something handled by the family heads to avoid decimation of their families and to retain wealth and power. The compensation worked out that way in most cases because to win you had to kill, injure, do more damage to the other side. Some apparently also had religious requirements attached for those who killed on purpose such as purification rituals. So the limited warfare appears to be a common factor in broad terms practiced among the closer neighboring tribes in a sociopolitical construct to prevent large-scale conflict.

From the sound of it, the compensation made the losing party less likely to want to come back for more and took a little wind out of the sails of the victor for the short term at least and the dispute was considered settle in the victor's favor. It makes a certain amount of sense. Just enough violence to vent pressure but not enough most of the time to create long-term hatreds in larger scales. I am certain there was a lot of small-scale feuding but it seems larger scale warfare was rare.

I found a few examples of both the dowel and slat armor. The slat armor from the sounds of it was from the groups that had more contact with the N/W coastal tribes like the Tlingit. Some groups apparently viewed armor as a sign of rank despite the overall ease of manufacture of wood and twine based armors like the dowels and slat armor. The Tlingit seemed to have more elaborate armor schemes typically of wood. I can't wait to get to their section. They lived in the region of the US I am from originally. So far the dowel/rod armor looks to be common. Karuk rod armor. They also sometimes used layered armor.

I misread the bit about the Aztec, I had to pull up the note again. Some of the tribes oddly enough fought in a tactical style very much like the Aztecs. Including the distribution of armored and unarmored troops, the tradition of acts of bravery but not necessarily body count, and leadership rarely being at the forefront of the war. They suggest there were some encounters with the Aztec at some point but that they had developed an almost identical form of line combat prior to those possible encounters. I have seen references to some sort of limited contact with Aztec before but nothing I would call sustained contact.

@ Angelus Nox: I hope he went peacefully and his/your family's able to cope. WWII veterans are becoming a dying breed. At minimum you'd have to be in your nineties to possible be one. I find it notable that along with being one of the longest-lived presidents, George HW Bush is also at the minimum age range WWII veterans could possibly be. It's weird to think than JFK(another WWII veteran president) is only 7 years older than him despite 6 presidents between them, and his immediate precursor in office was a WWI veteran(and his precursor was president during WWII)

With my James Buchanan talk, it's more a case of how much the events around a leader determine their quality as leader. Buchanan was someone who believed in compromise and wanted to be a peacemaker in a time where compromise isn't an option. So if it wasn't such an inflammatory time, would he have worked? Much could be said about if Lincoln would've been as great or good as he was were it not for the Civil War and issue of slavery

Edited by RJ-19-CLOVIS-93 on Aug 26th 2018 at 10:26:09 PM

The Ninja: An Invented Tradition by Steven Turnbull.

Turnbull's partial recantation for his role in fueling incorrect history and pop culture surrounding the ninja.

A number of presidents didn't have children of their own. I know that for James Buchanan it was him being a bachelor, James K Polk was sterile and George Washington probably was. But is there a reason why James Madison and Andrew Jackson didn't have biological children?

Edited by RJ-19-CLOVIS-93 on Aug 28th 2018 at 2:14:08 AM

Probably Single-Target Sexuality in the latter's case, as far as I know about him.

He was a grieving widower, and it's safe to say more than a half of his duels were initiated because someone insulted his wife.

And that was a blessing, no more Jack(asses)sons running around.

I was more asking why Jackson never had biological children with his wife, same with James Madison since I don't think they were sterile. Or did they just want to adopt?

Edited by RJ-19-CLOVIS-93 on Aug 30th 2018 at 3:21:48 AM

I've looked it up, and the Jacksons indeed adopted several children and their marriage lasted for about 20 years. Personally, I think the reason why Andrew Jackson didn't have biological children (the couple definitely wanted kids) is because of Rachel's poor health that contributed to her untimely death. Rachel Jackson probably simply couldn't bear a child.

Edited by Millership on Aug 27th 2018 at 11:06:01 PM

From what I understand, JFK was thinking of dropping LBJ in the 1964 election. Had they considered an alternative running mate for his next term? Besides Bobby of course, since I imagine Nepotism would hurt his chances. This is particularly pertinent when Kennedy knew he could die in a possible second term due to his terrible health, so he'd be mindful of the possibility his veep succeeds him