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HEY GUNS posted:everyone's literate, Give it a few years.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:53
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HEY GUNS posted:everyone's literate, everyone writes all the time, the archives have never gotten bombed or looted in 400 years of war Every once in a while, you get a story like this: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ri...8eb69c.amp.html County in Virginia just got a bunch of colonial records back that had been looted by Union soldiers during the Civil War) And if you want a challenge, try slave geneologies. Moat slaves werent literate, most people didnt have left names until they were freed, a lot of information was in plantation records that got scattered, lost or destroyed during the Civil War, and first names got changed every once in a while.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:56
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Epicurius posted:Every once in a while, you get a story like this: The downside is that it’s also extremely depressing and infuriating.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:59
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Epicurius posted:And if you want a challenge, try slave geneologies. Moat slaves werent literate, most people didnt have left names until they were freed, a lot of information was in plantation records that got scattered, lost or destroyed during the Civil War, and first names got changed every once in a while. More importantly, noone who wrote things down cared about them in the sense of officially recording their births and deaths. Mostly you see them in farm records next to the other farm equipment or in wills, in the form of 'I leave to my daughter my thresher, my cow Bessie and my slave Phibba' kind of thing.
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Dec 11, 2018 17:00
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I was going to mention this - the history of white people in the US is boring and easy, the history of everyone else is really challenging. Yeah, I minored in Archaeology. The fact that entire Native American civilizations existed right here and were just - erased - is horrifying.
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Dec 11, 2018 17:05
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Cessna posted:Yeah, I minored in Archaeology. The fact that entire Native American civilizations existed right here and were just - erased - is horrifying. It's also extremely frustrating to see that both the primary and secondary history taught in the United States, and even worse the popular culture view, remain so hopelessly stuck in mid-20th century knowledge at best. It was 30 or 40 years out of date when I was getting my degree back in 2003, and it's barely moved since.
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Dec 11, 2018 18:03
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Cessna posted:Yeah, I minored in Archaeology. The fact that entire Native American civilizations existed right here and were just - erased - is horrifying. Seriously don't even get me started. When the Pilgrims landed it was estimated my tribes (Panawahpskek and Wabanaki, or Penobscot and Abenaki in English) were put between 13 and 20 thousand in the greater New England area. By 1680, there were less than 5000. By 1750, less than 500. By no means were we advanced tribes like those in Central and South America but its rather scary to realize that millions of Native Americans from North, Central and South America were wiped out to the person in less than 300 years.
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Dec 11, 2018 18:07
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EvilMerlin posted:When the Pilgrims landed it was estimated my tribes (Panawahpskek and Wabanaki, or Penobscot and Abenaki in English) were put between 13 and 20 thousand in the greater New England area. I know the high school history answer to this but...why? how? ...I suppose my asking this is likely to get you started so apologies in advance
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Dec 11, 2018 18:14
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bewbies posted:I know the high school history answer to this but...why? how? A lot of it was disease.
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Dec 11, 2018 18:22
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wdarkk posted:A lot of it was disease. Yup. It is hard to understate how apocalyptic the pandemic that swept across North America after the European colonists arrived was. Late 17th/early 18th century North America was a Mad Max grade post-apocalyptic wasteland.
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Dec 11, 2018 18:23
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Comrade Gorbash posted:It's also extremely frustrating to see that both the primary and secondary history taught in the United States, and even worse the popular culture view, remain so hopelessly stuck in mid-20th century knowledge at best. It was 30 or 40 years out of date when I was getting my degree back in 2003, and it's barely moved since. So, so agreed...
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Dec 11, 2018 18:25
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Cessna posted:So, so agreed... The previous generation's history is still current politics so teaching anything about it is going to be extremely contentious. It's just easier to stop the bus riiight before that and say, "you decide," than to try to factually explain current events and get the whole school board sacked for not showing the "true patriotic history" blablabla hurl. Didn't Louis Barthas have some anecdote about a teacher getting a bit of hell after trying to get into the topic of the Paris Commune? Either that or you have something like my school district that had us all on an austerity budget (no local budget; just a trickle of state money) the entire time I was in school. At that point, I was fortunate to at least see a picture of Earth from the moon at the end of some books.
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Dec 11, 2018 18:44
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:Didn't Louis Barthas have some anecdote about a teacher getting a bit of hell after trying to get into the topic of the Paris Commune? Well, not quite. This is Abel Barthas, son of Louis, recounting something that happened in early 1914. quote:“One evening, after school, I had to write a history lesson, a description in a few lines of the work of [historian and politician Adolphe] Thiers, under the heading ‘Thiers, liberator of our territory.’ My father told me, ‘Wait, I’ll give you the description myself.’ And he wrote: ‘Thiers, hangman of the Commune, assassin of the working class.’ I was shaking on my way to school, the next day. The teacher took my notebook, turned red, then pale; he closed it, and didn’t mention it again.” The teacher was trying to propagate the official line and I suspect that, absent the spin Abel put on the story, the teacher probably knew of Barthas's reputation as the local malcontent and knew he wasn't going to get anywhere if he tried to push back, so just quietly let it lie.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:10
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Cythereal posted:Yup. It is hard to understate how apocalyptic the pandemic that swept across North America after the European colonists arrived was. Late 17th/early 18th century North America was a Mad Max grade post-apocalyptic wasteland. I also wouldn't underestimate the effect of the bounty on scalps, which was set by the Phips Proclamation in 1755 at "40 pounds for the scalps of dead Penobscot males age 12 and over, 25 pounds for the scalps of women, and 20 pounds for the scalps of children under the age of 12."
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Dec 11, 2018 19:11
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Cool and unsettling thread on US nuclear targeting priorities in 1972 https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1072549754536673280 Interesting that after the USSR we planned explicitly for a response to PRC. At what point did China's "no-first-strike" policy go into effect? Was it US policy to initiate strikes on the PRC in the event of an exchange with the Soviets? Also, does c3 stand for Command and Control Center or something less obvious?
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Dec 11, 2018 19:28
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:The previous generation's history is still current politics so teaching anything about it is going to be extremely contentious. It's just easier to stop the bus riiight before that and say, "you decide," than to try to factually explain current events and get the whole school board sacked for not showing the "true patriotic history" blablabla hurl. Didn't Louis Barthas have some anecdote about a teacher getting a bit of hell after trying to get into the topic of the Paris Commune? What I'm referring to is that what's taught as "recent discoveries" in the pre-contact history of the Americas are things that were known in the 1970s, and in many cases much earlier than that. Clovis First is still being taught as if it were something figured out recently - if you're very lucky there might be a mention of Monte Verde.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:28
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When Lewis & Clark arrived at what is now Portland, they found a big village, mostly empty, with only a few ragged survivors of some disease. The rest were dead or fled. They tried to trade for supplies, and were told "no", so they tried the old "mighty wizard" gambit with matches and gunpowder. Then they just took the needed supplies.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:33
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zoux posted:Also, does c3 stand for Command and Control Center or something less obvious? Command, Control and Communication.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:37
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Comrade Gorbash posted:I'm not the talking about the history of the 1970s. Well I remember even my high history textbooks ten years ago had a map showing the coastal migration route and maybe even had Monte Verde plotted on it alongside other important early archaeological sites. I think I recall some waffling about about when the peopling of the Americas really occurred but I don't recall anything I later found to be dramatically off, and that was in like American history rather than a specialized class. What sort of research do you think is really missing from common curricula?
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Dec 11, 2018 19:41
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Cessna posted:Give it a few years.
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Dec 11, 2018 19:53
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Yea the way understand it it isnt until rather recently (1980s) that historians realized how many people died on americas BEFORE widespread settling since after first contact the diseases ran rampant across the continent without further white people assistance. What majority of European settlers saw as ”indian culture” would have been post-Apocalyptic version a generation or two after the devastations first wave.
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Dec 11, 2018 20:27
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zoux posted:Cool and unsettling thread on US nuclear targeting priorities in 1972 The thread makes the point that the priorities are about weapon allocation not like, the actual order in which targets are attacked. Likely because it takes a surprisingly high number of nukes to ensure an industrial target or key infrastructure is permanently destroyed. I think it was in this thread a while ago where someone pointed out that the UK's entire second strike arsenal was likely mostly targeted at just Moscow, because taking malfunctions and accuracy into account it would take a huge number of bombs to completely destroy all important industries and infrastructure. Horrifying to think about but, I guess nothing about those plans wasn't horrifying. Like, didn't the US not have a war plan that didn't involve nuking China (even if China wasn't involved in the war) until MacNamara? Mr Luxury Yacht fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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Dec 11, 2018 20:33
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It's kind of like how math classes have trouble bringing in the newer developments of math into high school and middle school, because despite how it's critical to important things happening today and it's kinda the critical element to linking the abstract elements of math to the fact that you can solve complex problems by reducing them to mathematical terms, but some kids just don't get it and won't end up using it later in life, so you might as well just give them a bare minimum so that they can get the important bits in college. Except history classes have more than just academic experts trying to bring advanced elements to the classroom, it has revisionists and nationalists trying to push their own things through, and they're a lot louder and more stubborn than just parents who get grumpy about not understanding their children's homework.
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Dec 11, 2018 20:33
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bewbies posted:I know the high school history answer to this but...why? how? As was already said... mostly disease. 80% of the Native population of the East was wiped out by disease. Mostly small pox. Our tribes were also pushed further and further north away from our standard food sources. Lowlands and the ocean. Where winters were a lot meaner, with longer periods of seasonal food shortages. By the time the Europeans were "done" our tribal lands were forcefully moved from the MA/NH border along the entire ocean, to a rather small island in Central Maine. My mother's tribe forced from Southern NH to well into Canada... That's a lot of change people were not prepared for.
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Dec 11, 2018 20:34
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This reminds me that I need to re-read "1491: New Revelations of the Americas" by Charles Mann (my Ex has my old copy and...I'm not getting that back). Granted the book is now over 10 years old but I can't imagine the scholarship around the subject has changed all that much, considering how little was there in the first place. It was one of the most eye-opening (and depressing) non-fiction books I have ever read.
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Dec 11, 2018 20:38
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:The thread makes the point that the priorities are about weapon allocation not like, the actual order in which targets are attacked. Likely because it takes a surprisingly high number of nukes to ensure an industrial target or key infrastructure is permanently destroyed. How much does irradiation play into this kind of planning? Sure you need a lot of bombs to physically destroy ball bearing factories or whatever, but if you drop a nuke within a mile of one, even if it's operational, are you gonna have people working in that factory the next day?
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Dec 11, 2018 20:43
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zoux posted:How much does irradiation play into this kind of planning? Sure you need a lot of bombs to physically destroy ball bearing factories or whatever, but if you drop a nuke within a mile of one, even if it's operational, are you gonna have people working in that factory the next day? I'm not an expert on the subject but I'm guessing it's something like ensuring that if the ball bearing equipment and ball bearing experts both managed to survive, the factory can't just be packed up and moved somewhere that's glowing a bit less.
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Dec 11, 2018 20:49
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zoux posted:How much does irradiation play into this kind of planning? Sure you need a lot of bombs to physically destroy ball bearing factories or whatever, but if you drop a nuke within a mile of one, even if it's operational, are you gonna have people working in that factory the next day? Well lets assume a 1960's era nuke from the US. And assume the average yield of 1MT. The air blast radius is 4.4 miles or so (assuming an airburst weapon) at 5 PSI overpressure will destroy most non-hardened buildings. Drop it on NYC. An estimated 2 million people die instantly. Over 3 million seriously injured. A surface detonation will scrub the earth clear in a 1.2 mile radius. This includes hardened buildings. For those that want to see how lovely nukes can be, use the common Russian warhead fitting most of its missiles today. 800kt. Most Russian MIRV's are airburst. And understand the Russians targeted nearly every single population center in the US as a primary target. https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ And the Russian known targets based on a 500 warhead attack and a 2000 warhead attack. More or less, if you are in a major city. You are gonna get nuked. The East Coast from Maine down to North Carolina is gonna be gone. Like totally wiped off of the face of the planet. As is most of the California coast. Florida doesn't do well either. 
EvilMerlin fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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Dec 11, 2018 20:52
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The Case of the Type 74 and the Missing Rangefinder: or, The CIA Are Kinda Bad At Their Job I mentioned the Type 74 earlier, and because I'm a total weeaboo, it holds a special place in my heart. It's a cute little high-tech tank designed to fight T-62s in mountains. The JGSDF regarded it as obsolete almost as soon as it arrived because they compared it unfavourably to the brand new T-72, but between the vastly superior fire control system and its expected foe being Soviet naval infantry's T-55s, it's quite excellent.  In 1983 the CIA published a document about the different fire-control systems used by various tanks from around the world. It can be found here and it goes into quite some detail on the Type 74. You may remember I talked earlier about the different workflows in the M48A2C Patton and the Leopard 1, where I slammed the M48 for requiring the commander to perform the rangefinding duties. The Type 74 is described as having a commander-operated laser rangefinder, but unlike the M48, the rangefinder is described as being in a rotating periscope. The commander can therefore pick out a target, lase it, and hand it over to the gunner with the firing solution already calculated, in true hunter-killer fashion! Awesome, right? Unfortunately it's not true. The Japanese Ministry of Defence published some incredibly detailed documents on the Type 74, and they clearly identify the laser rangefinder:   That is not a rotating periscope, and the cupola can't rotate either. This becomes extra clear from this photo of the commander's station: there's simply no room for the cupola or periscope to rotate:  (Source) The laser rangefinder is mounted straight forward, always pointing where the turret is pointing. It can also be operated by the gunner if necessary: both the commander's and gunner's primary sights have big, obvious "lase" buttons. According to the CIA document, the FCS can be commanded to line the crosshairs in the gunner's sight up with where the laser is pointing, which only makes sense if the laser is mounted facing forwards. This allows the gunner or commander (who has a joystick to control the gun traverse and elevation) to line up the rangefinder for a lase. Either the gunner or commander can then line up the crosshairs based on the computer's firing solution: the commander's sight has crosshairs that mirror the gunner's. If I'm reading the Japanese MoD tables correctly, the gunner's primary sight (J2) has an 8-power magnification, the gunner's fine aiming sight (J1) has an 8 to 9.6 power magnification, and the commander's primary sight (J3) has an 8 power magnification. It almost makes you wonder why they bothered with the gunner at all.  ...I'm not sure why I'm writing this. Warn you of the dangers of relying too much on declassified CIA sources? Just an excuse to talk about how cool the Type 74 is? Justifying all the research I did into something completely pointless? 
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Dec 11, 2018 20:57
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The "sudden discovery" of information that was actually already known continued with Native Americans well beyond the first contact period as well. InRange did some videos where they talked about Little Bighorn and the reason why it was a complete massacre of US forces, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZIxezwmPEQ One of the causes was a severe disparity in weapons: along with the Indians badly outnumbering the US cavalry by over 3 times, they were armed with a large number of lever-action repeating rifles while the US were mostly using single-shot weapons with copper cases that easily got stuck or fragmented in the chamber. When word of the massacre got back, there was initially an effort to bury the facts about how well-armed the tribal forces were. There was a political desire to paint the dead as martyrs and revealing how badly outmatched they were in every way would have instead made them seem incompetent. The official position on Little Bighorn for a very long time was that the Native Americans had only a minimum of repeating rifles and were mainly armed with muskets and bows. There were sarcastic remarks about making sure Winchester filed a lawsuit against the Sioux because they sure must have been making a lot of rifles illegally on the frontier, but it wasn't until 1980s archaeological digs due to a chance grass fire on the battlefield that modern archaeologists confirmed it. Of course, the Native American accounts of the battle were always accurate in that sense...and ignored.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:04
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Valtonen posted:Yea the way understand it it isnt until rather recently (1980s) that historians realized how many people died on americas BEFORE widespread settling since after first contact the diseases ran rampant across the continent without further white people assistance. What majority of European settlers saw as ”indian culture” would have been post-Apocalyptic version a generation or two after the devastations first wave. Do we have recorded oral histories of that? I mean oral histories the native americans passed along among themselves of their downfall?
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Dec 11, 2018 21:04
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aphid_licker posted:Do we have recorded oral histories of that? I mean oral histories the native americans passed along among themselves of their downfall? Yeah we have some. Mostly about the Europeans coming to preach to us. Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore by Simmons has a few in it. Indian New England Before the Mayflower by Russell is good too. Indian New England 1524-1674: A Compendium of Eyewitness Accounts of Native American Life by Karr has the stories from the European side. If you want to see just how hosed the Europeans made the Native Lands in New England: Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England by Cronon.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:09
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chitoryu12 posted:There were sarcastic remarks about making sure Winchester filed a lawsuit against the Sioux because they sure must have been making a lot of rifles illegally on the frontier, but it wasn't until 1980s archaeological digs due to a chance grass fire on the battlefield that modern archaeologists confirmed it. Of course, the Native American accounts of the battle were always accurate in that sense...and ignored. Wait, the Sioux actually had a cottage industry making Winchester clones? Please tell me I understood you right because that sounds rad as all hell.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:09
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https://twitter.com/lmcgaughy/status/1072582789214732289 Oh I'm sure we could round up enough people to do it pro bono
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Dec 11, 2018 21:11
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chitoryu12 posted:The "sudden discovery" of information that was actually already known continued with Native Americans well beyond the first contact period as well. Indeed. We were always portrayed as savages with bows and arrows and the occasional stolen rifle.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:11
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chitoryu12 posted:
Uh, I thought the Sioux/Lakota/Dakota/Arapaho and Cheyenne were using Henry Rifles at this time? EvilMerlin fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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Dec 11, 2018 21:13
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Wait, the Sioux actually had a cottage industry making Winchester clones? Please tell me I understood you right because that sounds rad as all hell. It was sarcasm on their part. People who were actually out west knew that the Indians had a ton of lever-action rifles, but the US government denied how well-armed they were to keep up the narrative of brave cavalry fighting savages instead of getting overwhelmed by thousands of warriors with much better equipment. So someone said something along the lines of "Well, you better tell Winchester because they must really be infringing on their patent out there!" EvilMerlin posted:Uh, I thought the Sioux/Lakota/Dakota/Arapaho and Cheyenne were using Henry Rifles at this time? Over 40 types of firearms were excavated from the battlefield, which included the Winchester 1866 as well as the Henry. The Winchester is basically the exact same gun with a side loading gate and wooden handguard.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:20
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I'm going to phrase this carefully so I don't come across as minimizing what European colonizers and the nations that arose from them did to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It's even money whether our genocidal native policies or chattel slavery is a bigger moral stain on American history, and the effects of that are still being felt by descendants of those oppressed peoples to this day. We rightly frame the near genocide of indigenous Americans as an atrocity, and should do everything we can to grant restitution and recompense to these remaining peoples, and our education and historical discussion should never whitewash, sanitize or otherwise ignore what was done in the name of manifest destiny and expansion. My question is, what differentiates our historical perception and reaction to the global history of displacement, massacre and genocide? Genghis Khan killed so many people that it lowered global temperatures, but we view him through a clinical eye, devoid of the emotion and disgust we feel when we look at the European and then American Indian policy. Do we feel that people in the 19th century should've "known better" than people in the 11th century? Is it simply the recency of it? Was the brutality unprecedented? I guess I'm trying to get at why some things are just "historical facts that happened and we don't really make moral judgement about them" and "history that we react emotionally to and make moral and ethical analyses of them". Is this something that professional historians grapple with? Do people discuss the ethical implications of Tamerlane's massacres of Christians in the mid-East? In 2000 years are people going to view what happened to native Americans the same way we today view what happened to Carthage? Again, not trying to say "what's the big deal, everyone does a little genocide now and then" because nowadays, we definitely know better. Just curious about how professional historians deal with moral questions that arise when studying their areas. zoux fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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Dec 11, 2018 21:41
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zoux posted:In 2000 years are people going to view what happened to native Americans the same way we today view what happened to Carthage? The succinct answer to your question is 'yes'. There are no Carthaginians (or Romans) any more, after all. It would be surprising if the USA still exists in the year 4000.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:45
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zoux posted:I'm going to phrase this carefully so I don't come across as minimizing what European colonizers and the nations that arose from them did to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It's even money whether our genocidal native policies or chattel slavery is a bigger moral stain on American history, and the effects of that are still being felt by descendants of those oppressed peoples to this day. We rightly frame the near genocide of indigenous Americans as an atrocity, and should do everything we can to grant restitution and recompense to these remaining peoples, and our education and historical discussion should never whitewash, sanitize or otherwise ignore what was done in the name of manifest destiny and expansion. It wasn't a simply known better. It was the "hey these people live in skin tents and grass houses, don't have a written language and don't believe in the same God we do". That was enough for the Europeans to assume we were lesser people. These are the same reasons Africans (and others) were used as property.
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Dec 11, 2018 21:48
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