The History Thread!

Pretty much, at least in part. The recruitment practices for bodyguards was to be significantly taller than Bonaparte, while other troops were required to be shorter than him, for stealth reasons. Napoleon himself stood 168 cm tall, which during his recruitment was taller than the average Swedish soldier, at 165 cm. Beyond his gigantic bodyguard, the main reason are the English political cartoons at the time, which portrayed Boney usually like a child-sized monkey-man with an enormous hat.

Napoleon was of average height in that range for a Frenchman of the era. His troops weren't short for stealth they were average height for the French of the era. The average Englishman was of comparable height. The Duke of Wellington was 4-6cm taller. Not a huge Margin in height difference. The average British trooper's minimum height requirement was roughly that of Napoleon's height.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jan 20th 2024 at 1:45:28 PM

It was badly phrased, but I was under the impression that there was a requirement for regiments equivalent to sappers and other combat engineers to be on the shorter side, partly due to operating in stealth.

Wasn't it War and Peace that championed the idea that Napoleon was short?

Mara: Ahh that makes more sense. The British Navy had a preference for shorter crew members as well.

Watching Moana gave me this historical thought. Is it true or false that the Polynesian people originally came from Taiwan?

Kinda, sorta? I gotta get back to Patrick Vinton Kirch's On the Road of the Winds for the details, but the popular model for Austronesian expansion has them sail from Taiwan to the Philippines, and from there out to the wider Pacific. Look up the Wikipedia page for Proto-Austronesian languages: IIRC it has some interesting vocabulary comparisons that point to a deep shared ancestry between the cultural families.

How did that happen? In between the years 1200 and 1920, France has had the highest number of people getting killed by wolves: 7,600.

One thing you can do is compare the words for the numbers 1 through 10 within the various Austronesian languages. Even if their vocabularies otherwise deviate from each other, they're otherwise very similar when it comes to numbers.

Here's a good resource on how each of them look.

This historical thought just occurred to me.

Were any other of the US Presidents stepfathers? It’s thanks to Fire of Learning that I found out George Washington didn’t have any kids of his own; he became the stepdad of the ones Martha had from a previous marriage.

Here we have the ingredients for an excellent medical drama, part ER and part House, set in Medieval times. The crown prince is shot with an arrow, which means that the royal chirurgeon has to invent a new type of surgery to remove the arrow-head, without killing the prince, because the arrow is lodged deep in his face.

I just remembered this one.

Who was the first dictator who caused the word "dictator" to carry the negative associations it does now? Back in ancient Greece and Rome, a dictator was considered a Noble Profession.

Bumping this thread with another question.

How did the (now discredited) idea that the Aztecs thought Cortez and the conquistadors were gods get started?

Oh hey, I read about this in Camilla Townsend's The Fifth Sun. So, when Cortes' party told the Mexica that they came from the "Kingdom of Castile", the latter didn't really have a frame of reference for where that was. But they understood that the newcomers spoke of themselves as representatives of their god, even if the natives didn't believe in said god, exactly. So, lacking a toponym to call the outsiders by (Nahua speakers called people by the place they hailed from – people from Tenochtitlan were "Tenochca", people from Tlaxcala were "Tlaxcalteca", and so on), they called Cortes' people teotl – "messengers", which the Castilians rendered in writing as teules.

I don't have the book on hand to refer to, but the rest of the story went a bit like this: a few decades after the events, Spanish missionaries in New Spain (Mexico) started writing about how the Mexica supposedly took Cortes for a god when he arrived – the god in question being Quetzalcoatl, whose Mayan counterpart Kukulkan was a major deity for the Mayas whom the Castilians first encountered on the coast, but was himself a comparatively minor deity for the Mexica, who primarily worshipped Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli. Now, some of this might have been misunderstanding; but given that the textual records by Cortes' party emphatically did not say anything about them being treated as gods, it's more likely (in Townsend's opinion) that this was deliberate propaganda by the missionaries, written to make the Mexica look backward.

And thing was, these missionaries weren't just writing for Spaniards in Spain. They were also teaching a new generation of native Catholics, who were anxious to document the conquest in writing before the last people who remembered it died out. These students knew that their ancestors weren't dumb, and that they commanded a powerful state. They wanted an explanation for how that state could be laid low by a small band of foreign conquerors (putting aside the key role of Tenochtitlan's regional rivals), and yet they didn't have the analytical tools that we now have to explain the underlying history – how the Spaniards gained the edge in military and maritime technology, how Old World pathogens became a lethal biological weapon that severely weakened the natives. The idea that the Mexica let Cortes in out of piety before their gods, was appealing: it explained why such a proud people would (supposedly) make a mistake that would bring their own downfall. By the early-mid 17th century, it had become the dominant narrative in the Spanish writings of native-born scholars.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Feb 24th 2024 at 2:41:48 AM

As I understood it, they didn't necessarily think he was god, but as noted by Eagle, a representative of the divine an agent in their name. The ruler of the time was hyper-superstitious and pushed not angering and trying very hard to appease the Spanish early on. They initially tried to keep the Spanish at a distance, but the Spanish were insistent on looking for treasure in Tenochtitlan. They tried appeasement and offering gifts and treasure which only encouraged them. Moctezuma basically changed his mind way too late, and by the time he did, he had been taken into captivity. Moctezuma arranged for one of his servants to sacrifice himself and kill some Spanish soldiers to test them. The servant was expected to be killed in reprisal. It went poorly and is, in part, what led to him being taken captive.

There were a number of nobles and warriors in the city at the time who wanted the Spanish attacked and driven out fairly early so it was definitely not a universal feeling.

I heard that the Soviet Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov recently passed away. Which got me thinking: what happened to the leaders of the Soviet Union and its satellite states when it all came crashing down in 1991?

A pretty long video explaining why the Zoomer Historian is an sham history channel that engages in Nazi apologia.

It goes down from the constant use of misleading statements over the Nazi leadership; cherry picking how he cherrypicks events to paint the Nazi leadership as not "being malicious" and the horrible acts being isolated incidents from "bad apples"; partial truths and partial quotes with very important parts cut off; directing citing David Irving as a source or using only "historians" whose main claims aren't verifiable or corroborated by other historians; downright repeats Nazi propaganda and ignores the role of agency on the Nazis during and before WWII; blatantly exaggerates claims against the Allies and ignores how history played out; etc.

Edited by AngelusNox on Mar 4th 2024 at 10:40:52 AM

Never heard of this guy until now and my life is richer for it

As if people blindly supporting the Soviet Union's questionable actions, especially during Stalin's time, wasn't terrible enough...We have these kinds of apologists still around.

Edited by Rmpdc on Mar 4th 2024 at 5:22:28 PM

-face desks- Fucking Nazis. Tankies are bad enough, we don't need more nazi apologists.

Those channels trying to pass themselves as "legit historians" are exploding in popularity in Youtube.

Having actual historians push out against them helps counter the wave of bullshit, that Zoomer Historian most popular video is about the "myths of the SS" has a quarter million views. So by any means the historian community and content creators need to spent time debunking those idiots, otherwise they can go unopposed and spread their bullshit even further.

Anyone who cites Irving as a source is a fucking joke.

Who is this Irving and why are they bad?

David Irving, Holocaust denier.

Yep fuck him then.