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FreudianSlippers posted:I find it somewhat strange how Norse paganism is much better known then Baltic/'Romuva' paganism. When the latter lasted almost 400 years longer. That's because the Vikings eventually wrote their stuff down. IIRC when Baltic paganism was being stamped out, there was a distinct effort not to record anything about it besides the most superficial details only heard of.
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Jul 5, 2015 22:53
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SS. Division 'Romuva'
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Jul 6, 2015 00:56
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So there was talk of Extra History and Crash Course History a few pages back: can anyone recommend similar series? I'm not fussy on the actual content, just want to watch more interesting history videos.
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Jul 6, 2015 01:02
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Obliterati posted:So there was talk of Extra History and Crash Course History a few pages back: can anyone recommend similar series? I'm not fussy on the actual content, just want to watch more interesting history videos. Well, there's Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, but that's a podcast, not a video. I can't comment on how correct it is, and I don't know the goon concensus on it, but I find it entertaining at the very least.
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Jul 6, 2015 01:53
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Mister Olympus posted:That's because the Vikings eventually wrote their stuff down. IIRC when Baltic paganism was being stamped out, there was a distinct effort not to record anything about it besides the most superficial details only heard of. Yeah but all we know about Norse paganism is from texts written by Christians in the 13th century. When the Lithuanians still had more than a century of paganism left in them and you'd expect them to at least have written something about their own religion in that time. Maybe I'm just being Icelandocentric and unfairly expecting everyone to have a bunch of preserved and often copied medieval texts laying around.
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Jul 6, 2015 02:34
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FreudianSlippers posted:Yeah but all we know about Norse paganism is from texts written by Christians in the 13th century. When the Lithuanians still had more than a century of paganism left in them and you'd expect them to at least have written something about their own religion in that time. Maybe I'm just being Icelandocentric and unfairly expecting everyone to have a bunch of preserved and often copied medieval texts laying around. I think preservation is one of the biggest issues there.
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Jul 6, 2015 04:24
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:To add to sullat, about as bad as their Christian minority religions. There were massacres of Coptic Christians, for example. On the other hand, the Crusaders of the 4th Crusade were incredibly pissed off by a Mosque in Constantinople and the open worship the Muslims were allowed. So at least it seemed to have gotten somewhat more tolerant with the centuries. Saith posted:Well, there's Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, but that's a podcast, not a video. I can't comment on how correct it is, and I don't know the goon concensus on it, but I find it entertaining at the very least. I think it is looked at rather positively. Personally I love Hardcore History, because Carlin clearly excels in bringing the stuff alive. Decius fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 14:11
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I have a love/hate relation with Carlin - I love how he can build a narrative and describe a global situation in complicated times. Also the way he repeats important points makes it easier to remember stuff you should. But then he finds some small thing and talks about it for 15 minutes, sometimes it's something that translates to global picture, but often it's just an interesting (for him) off-topic stuff he's found in a source. From the podcasts: I recommend China History Podcast. Author works in a company that does a lot of business in China and Taiwan so he often brings unique perspective to stuff that happened compared to some history professor.
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Jul 6, 2015 14:29
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The China history podcast loves going into weird topics and modern Chinese history though and it's kind of cool but can be kind of a bummer. Like he did a 10-part marathon episode on the History of Tea after a months-long absence. Not exactly my... bag.
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Jul 6, 2015 14:47
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Arglebargle III posted:The China history podcast loves going into weird topics and modern Chinese history though and it's kind of cool but can be kind of a bummer. Like he did a 10-part marathon episode on the History of Tea after a months-long absence. Not exactly my... bag. tea bag?
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Jul 6, 2015 14:52
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Back To 99 posted:tea bag?  On a slightly off topic topic, do we really know why Opium caught on the way it did in China? All I have found are lots of things saying "lack of opportunity for advancement" and "dissatisfactions with Manchus" but those do not seem a reasonable enough explanation for the sheer explosion of shitfacedness that came out before and after the Opium wars.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:01
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Josef bugman posted:
Beats me. I know it was preceded by an earlier boom in tobacco smoking which produced similar issues for the government with the outflow of silver. This earlier smoking craze probably helped lay the cultural groundwork for the opium boom.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:11
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Back To 99 posted:tea bag? [Grand Fromage]The thing I do to your mom[/Grand Fromage]
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Jul 6, 2015 16:16
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alex314 posted:I have a love/hate relation with Carlin - I love how he can build a narrative and describe a global situation in complicated times. Also the way he repeats important points makes it easier to remember stuff you should. I personally find that a positive. I was listening to his Death Throes of the Republic series, and he spends about 20 minutes explaining how Caesar may have been the John Lennon or Kurt Cobain of his time - and how it took a cultural knowledge of 'beatnik hippies' for a historian to recognise a Roman counterculture. Again, I can't speak on how accurate that is, but it's the sort of thing you don't see or hear about very often, and I found it incredibly fascinating.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:26
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Saith posted:I personally find that a positive. I was listening to his Death Throes of the Republic series, and he spends about 20 minutes explaining how Caesar may have been the John Lennon or Kurt Cobain of his time - and how it took a cultural knowledge of 'beatnik hippies' for a historian to recognise a Roman counterculture. Again, I can't speak on how accurate that is, but it's the sort of thing you don't see or hear about very often, and I found it incredibly fascinating. Oh yeah with the minor difference that Lennon was merely a wifebeater while Ceasar was more of a Rommel with a body count of millions
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Jul 6, 2015 16:35
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sullat posted:Not well. During the Second Sassanid war, the emperor decided to force-convert all the Jews in the east, leading them to go over to the Sassanids en masse. After the war, when the empire recovered the area, they massacred the Jewish communities in Antioch and Jerusalem. When the Muslims swept through a few years later it became less of an issue, since the religious minority-heavy areas were now under Muslim rule. I don't think the Byzantines recovered any primarily muslim territory in great numbers to have an idea of how they were treated, although I do think they massacred the Muslims on Crete pretty thoroughly, although that was because they were pirates. Decius posted:On the other hand, the Crusaders of the 4th Crusade were incredibly pissed off by a Mosque in Constantinople and the open worship the Muslims were allowed. So at least it seemed to have gotten somewhat more tolerant with the centuries. More then likely after the Byzantine Renaissance in the 10th century and after the Iconoclast controversy the Empire was open to most religions.
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Jul 6, 2015 17:17
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Obliterati posted:So there was talk of Extra History and Crash Course History a few pages back: can anyone recommend similar series? I'm not fussy on the actual content, just want to watch more interesting history videos. If you want another podcast recommendation, I just went through the entire History of Byzantium podcast (45-50 episodes) and it's really good. It does take its time to eventually find its own groove (it consciously aped the History of Rome format for the first 10-15 episodes or so). The whole set of episodes on Justinian and the Plague are outstanding as are most everything afterwards. The best innovation the podcast has done is a retrospective and Q&A at the end of each century. I think most people with a passing interest in ancient Rome tend understand the basic eras up to the Crisis of the Third Century. Since even most Roman history buffs are not quite as familiar with the later eras of Byzantine history, it makes for a really welcome retrospective to see just how the Empire had evolved and changed over the previously covered 100 years. And since it was just brought up, the Thwomp fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 18:30
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Josef bugman posted:
Opium is awesome. Chinese had been using opium way before the opium wars, the British just took advantage of it. People figured it out made you feel good way back in antiquity, and opium made its way to China a couple thousand years ago.
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Jul 7, 2015 04:08
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Josef bugman posted:
http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/journey-into-the-opium-underworld/ because the stuff you used to smoke it was cool as poo poo.
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Jul 7, 2015 05:52
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Josef bugman posted:
Foreign competition from the East India Company, American merchants, Turkish exporters and the burgeoning 19th century global trade network in general crashed the domestic price and opened up the market to the poor. Previously it had been an expensive hobby for the rich. Even during the worst period of opium abuse about 50% of supply was produced domestically in China. Also bad monetary policy, exacerbated by increasingly negative balance of trade, and an elitist government unresponsive to the economic concerns of the poor caused a death spiral of economic problems in the mid-late 19th century China. Major transactions like rent and tax payments were conducted in silver, and a negative balance of trade reduced the silver supply in China and strengthened silver's value. Peasants' incomes was in copper cash which floated freely against silver. When it was time to convert copper to silver to make payments the peasants were ruined and thrown off their land. These peasants migrated to urban centers where they had access to foreign goods and opium and contributed to the negative balance of trade problem. Qing policy never confronted the core monetary problem because the already very wealthy benefited immensely from the strengthening of silver against copper and the government was hopelessly corrupt and myopic. The Qing government preferred to scapegoat foreigners and addicts and pursue useless* drug interdiction policies. *As we know from modern experience. Tens of millions of peasants were ruined by the silver exchange rate. The correct policy response would have been to move rent and tax payments to copper currency but the government was falling apart. It would take too much effort to enumerate all the reasons why the Qing government would not have been able to undertake major monetary reform in the mid-19th century. And they probably couldn't have been convinced to try anyway. Really the Qing party line (and the politically correct line) about Britain forcing opium into China makes less sense than Americans blaming Colombia and latin americans in general for the cocaine trade in the US. We all recognize that US demanders are part of the problem, and if the US produced 50% of the cocaine it consumed blaming foreigners would make even less sense. Foreigners contributed to China's late 19th century collapse but I think economic factors are far more important than the relatively minor military encounters China had with Europeans. In fact when you look closer most of those encounters are fights over trade policy which the Chinese officials clearly don't understand. The Europeans cleaned up at the negotiating table more than they ever did on the battlefield, because the Chinese negotiators didn't understand what they were giving away. Losing a city is peanuts to China; but giving away most-favored-nation status or agreeing to tariff limits? Disastrous. The Qing government mismanaged foreign trade as comprehensively as they mismanaged the internal economy. I don't want to let the foreigners off for starting wars over China's trade policies, but the point I want to convey is that the Qing lost the struggle over the Chinese economy as much or more than the Europeans won it. I really shouldn't be writing about this in this thread or right now though uuuuuuh Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 06:25
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P-Mack posted:Beats me. I know it was preceded by an earlier boom in tobacco smoking which produced similar issues for the government with the outflow of silver. This earlier smoking craze probably helped lay the cultural groundwork for the opium boom. It was one of the most important crops of the rough hill country dividing Burma and Yunnan when the British first entered the area in the 19th century, mostly flowing north along longstanding trade routes. I think the Chinese use of opium was an old tradition before the British got involved.
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Jul 7, 2015 08:26
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As someone else said, it's worth restating just how amazing opium makes you feel. I'm not talking a pain pill, heroin, or even cocaine high, I mean.. Holy poo poo. Combine that with the problems the populace was struggling with, the abundance of it, and how easy it was to get to make out how it caught on like wildfire. Opium is the poo poo, and will absolutely ruin a person.
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Jul 7, 2015 08:52
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drat, now I wanna try me some opium.
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Jul 7, 2015 10:44
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Imagine smoking three marijuana cigarettes and then having premarital interracial intercourse in a stolen police cruiser while listening to that song about Satan by iron metallica. Now double it. That's opium - not even once.
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Jul 7, 2015 13:38
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The China History Podcast has an episode on opium if you want more detail. What Argle posted is a good summary of my understanding of all the details. Incidentally, opium's use as a painkiller was well known by physicians in the ancient world. The lotus eaters episode in the Odyssey is sometimes taken as an opium metaphor.
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Jul 7, 2015 13:46
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Sulla-Marius 88 posted:Imagine smoking three marijuana cigarettes and then having premarital interracial intercourse in a stolen police cruiser while listening to that song about Satan by iron metallica. Now double it. That's opium - not even once. Having sex with someone that has another skin color, the ultimate high.
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Jul 7, 2015 13:55
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Alhazred posted:Having sex with someone that has another skin color, the ultimate high. I was trying to figure out a way to work same sex marriage and not saluting the flag in there as well but it was already clunky enough as is
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Jul 7, 2015 14:02
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Grand Fromage posted:Incidentally, opium's use as a painkiller was well known by physicians in the ancient world.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:11
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Alhazred posted:Having sex with someone that has another skin color, the ultimate high. You now I've been thinking there must be some evolutionary psychology mechanism for that. Inbreeding in hunter-gatherer groups must've been something fierce.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:15
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Friendly Tumour posted:You now I've been thinking there must be some evolutionary psychology mechanism for that. Inbreeding in hunter-gatherer groups must've been something fierce. Pretty sure your average prehistorical hunter gatherer group isn't going to regularly encounter people with a different skin colour
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Jul 7, 2015 14:31
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Between the rise of agriculture and the first cities, how did most ancient humans live? They had to be tied down to one place because they were growing crops, so I'm guessing small villages? Why did it take thousands of years before these turned into cities?
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Jul 7, 2015 14:34
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Ras Het posted:Pretty sure your average prehistorical hunter gatherer group isn't going to regularly encounter people with a different skin colour Ethnic genepools are more than skin colour.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:37
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Friendly Tumour posted:Ethnic genepools are more than skin colour. Eh, sure, but you didn't expand on the skin colour bit at all.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:42
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Ras Het posted:Eh, sure, but you didn't expand on the skin colour bit at all. I don't get you. Anyway, I was just hypothesizing.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:44
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Are you saying that we can't distinguish ethnic groups if their skin melanin content is the same as ours?
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Jul 7, 2015 14:45
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goose fleet posted:Between the rise of agriculture and the first cities, how did most ancient humans live? They had to be tied down to one place because they were growing crops, so I'm guessing small villages? Why did it take thousands of years before these turned into cities? The thing about agriculture is it's not a sudden shift. Archaeologists used to believe in a 'Neolithic Revolution' where everyone discovered farming and gave up mobility within a generation or two, but it's a lot fuzzier than that. For example, maybe your band knows about a number of stands of wild grains that are some distance apart. You don't need to plant these crops yourselves, they're growing anyway: you show up, harvest them, maybe pluck up some weeds or tree sprouts, and move on to the next stand. As you get better and better at this, you can modify the local environment more actively, and that takes more time and investment, so you move around less often and between fewer locations. Full-blown sedentism is a serious commitment - you've got to be able, for example, to store enough food to get you to the next harvest if you're going to stay in one place, and that's both not easy to just suddenly start doing from scratch and disasterous if you miscalculate. Agriculture and sedentism are often linked, but they don't have to be. My area is the Neolithic Middle East, and the vast majority of groups I study are moving between set locations in a seasonal round trip between areas of wild plants that they harvest and tend (edit: gradually becoming more entangled in the investments needed to sustain agricultural practices). Even when cities emerge, they make up a minority of local populations until essentially the Industrial Revolution. Basically both agriculture and sedentism are sliding scales, not either/or propositions. If you go to the Pacific Northwest coast of the US and Canada, indigenous groups there were able to do the exact opposite even post-contact: these areas were so abundant year-round that you could maintain a fully hunter-gatherer lifestyle and still be almost entirely sedentary. On the cities point, there are varying theories but no real solid consensus. Suffice it to say that large settlements are less a question of how to feed those people as how to organise them - particularly to stop the 'fissioning' of groups where they split up, which is a common behaviour in the Neolithic and earlier. With rare exceptions like Catal Hoyuk in Turkey, 'cities' seem to appear around the same time as centralised authoritarian structures, but which is the chicken and which is the egg is anyone's guess. Unrelated to this, thanks for the suggestions on videos and podcasts, everyone.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:00
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Vagon posted:As someone else said, it's worth restating just how amazing opium makes you feel. I'm not talking a pain pill, heroin, or even cocaine high, I mean.. Holy poo poo. Combine that with the problems the populace was struggling with, the abundance of it, and how easy it was to get to make out how it caught on like wildfire. Opium is the poo poo, and will absolutely ruin a person. Hmm. If opium is better than heroin or cocaine and easy to make then how come everyone does heroin or cocaine now instead of opium?
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Jul 7, 2015 15:19
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To further my point about losing cities versus losing control of tariff policy: in 2012 the GDP of Shanghai* the city was about $300 billion dollars, while China's net balance of trade was about $2 trillion. Shanghai is tied with Beijing for most valuable city in China, and you would be better off signing away ten Shanghais than reversing that trade balance.* But trade concessions is exactly the sort of thing the Qing government tended to give away in its treaties after minor engagements with European powers. Although the world was not as interconnected then as it is now, global trade was still important. The few piddly concession cities that people tend to remember as the big deal were unimportant compared to the hugely unfair trade concessions that left China hemorrhaging silver faster and faster. And I mentioned already how badly the Qing government mismanaged the silver currency within its borders as well. *Besides, no matter how much Europeans might technically own an annexed Chinese city it's not as if it's scooped out of the earth -- the government will lose tax revenue but economic activity will continue.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:22
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Friendly Tumour posted:Are you saying that we can't distinguish ethnic groups if their skin melanin content is the same as ours? ...I don't think I am? Are you saying that there's supposed to be some particular human urge to have sex with people from different ethnic groups? I don't think that's true, but also, if it would be true, I don't think you could pull up an easy evopsychohistorical explanation for it.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:30
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feedmegin posted:Hmm. If opium is better than heroin or cocaine and easy to make then how come everyone does heroin or cocaine now instead of opium? Opium is super hard to smuggle. It's also making a minor comeback in medical usage as it's less addictive then some of the synthetic pain killers.
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Jul 7, 2015 15:31
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