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From the book I'm reading, a funny anecdote about Teddy Roosevelt's serial philanderer Uncle Rob.quote:"As a kind of territorial marker he gave elegant green gloves—purchased in bulk at A.T. Stewart’s department store—to the women he slept with. Society types used to laugh whenever they walked down Fifth Avenue or rode a carriage in Central Park and spied a woman wearing these gloves, which might as well have been the Scarlet Letter. Apparently, these women didn’t realize the negative connotation of the gloves."
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Feb 7, 2022 03:18
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During the viking age, making love poems was banned. The reason being that if someone made love poems about a woman it would violate her honor. Any skald who did it risked being exiled.
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Feb 7, 2022 20:31
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Alhazred posted:During the viking age, making love poems was banned. The reason being that if someone made love poems about a woman it would violate her honor. Any skald who did it risked being exiled. Thus the seed of black metal was planted in the barren soils of Norway.
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Feb 8, 2022 15:14
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A lot of ancient cultures, especially in the British Isles, Scandanavia and Gaul, considered poetry and song to be literally magical. Jokes too, a satire could basically be a devastating curse.
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Feb 8, 2022 16:08
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Killing someone was considered justified in Norse culture if they mocked or insulted you in verse. Flyting, which was an exchange of poetic insults, often done at parties, was an exception to this right until it wasn't because someone struck a nerve
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Feb 8, 2022 16:29
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you probably still had to pay weregild tho
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Feb 8, 2022 16:34
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RedSnapper posted:Killing someone was considered justified in Norse culture if they mocked or insulted you in verse. I can only imagine that would be like the roastee pulling out a gun and shooting the roaster Or I guess like a rap battle turning violent, is closer, but I'm amused by a murder roast
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Feb 8, 2022 16:35
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Brawnfire posted:I can only imagine that would be like the roastee pulling out a gun and shooting the roaster A bit of both, probably.
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Feb 8, 2022 16:42
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I was under the impression that if you got roasted, you didn't throw down then and there, you challenge the roaster to Holmgang and that happens at a set later date.
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Feb 8, 2022 16:45
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I think that Holmgangs were essentially judicial combat, and you didn't have to pay wergild from them, but if you just killed someone openly you had to pay. And if you murdered someone in secret, which was illegal, you were declared an outlaw, which meant that you lost all of your property and had to leave for life or for some years. e: and if you didn't leave anyone could kill you without repercussions. ChubbyChecker has a new favorite as of 17:26 on Feb 8, 2022 |
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Feb 8, 2022 16:52
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I was under the impression that if you got roasted, you didn't throw down then and there, you challenge the roaster to Holmgang and that happens at a set later date. You think cuz you spit bars that you're better than me? Come face me on a tiny island out on the sea Bitch think you're finna go home and brag I'll send you back from the holm in a body bag
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Feb 8, 2022 16:56
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Yeah, a person's honor and dignity was considered a very real, measurable thing that would be respected in judicial matters in a number of places. Hey Guns over in the milhist thread had a number of fun anecdotes about soldiers in the 30 Years' War constantly suing the hell out of each other over insults. With one particular couple of enemies, it got to the point where the court ordered them to get to their trials on different roads, because any time they met on the road to or from a trial they'd get into a fight that'd lead to them suing each other all over again 
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Feb 8, 2022 17:11
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Perestroika posted:Yeah, a person's honor and dignity was considered a very real, measurable thing that would be respected in judicial matters in a number of places. Hey Guns over in the milhist thread had a number of fun anecdotes about soldiers in the 30 Years' War constantly suing the hell out of each other over insults. With one particular couple of enemies, it got to the point where the court ordered them to get to their trials on different roads, because any time they met on the road to or from a trial they'd get into a fight that'd lead to them suing each other all over again And that is how duels became legal. One weird trick to stop annoying people and their constant annoying lawsuits
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Feb 8, 2022 17:27
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Evil skallagrimssons saga is an amazing epic about a viking. Were in he survives being captured by some baltic dudes by convincing them to wait with starting the torture until morning, because if they kill him and his band after dark that’s murder you see. During the night Egil manages to escape his bonds, frees his men, loot the balts and they flee to their longship. Halfway there Egil realizes what they are doing is stealing, horrified of the thought of being a thief he (alone) returns to the farm were they were prisoners. He then sets fire to the longhouse and sword in hand kills every single person trying to escape the flames through the only door. Satisfied with this now being a proper Viking raid and not a burglary he returns to his ship and sails away. Vikings were weird
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Feb 8, 2022 17:40
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zokie posted:Evil skallagrimssons saga is an amazing epic about a viking. Oh god, Egil's Saga is a goldmine of fun Viking stuff: Egil's dad was so strong that he once buried his axe so deep in an enemy's skull that he ended tossing the guy up trying to pry it out And more on the subject of Viking poetry and fame: he gets out of getting executed by Eric Bloodaxe by composing a poem about how great a warrior Eric was. After he finally settled on Iceland, a friend visited him once. Egil was away on some business so the friend just left him a nice shield as a gift and left. When Egil saw the shield he exclaimed "I'll never be able to reciprocate such a fine gift! Now I have to murder him!" They remained good friends
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Feb 8, 2022 18:01
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Allegedly the reason hólmganga was banned was because there was a number of what was essentially professional duelists that would roam around laying claim to anything from horses to farms to women and challenge the actual owner to either a hólmgang or to pay reparations for whatever they claimed was theirs. Essentially using the practice as a form of robbery. The other explanation is that one specific hólmganga, of course featured in a Saga, was so intense they just had to ban the custom. It was a very formalized affair in some cases even fought within a boxing rink of sorts where a tarp or fur would be laid down and stakes hammered into the corners and ropes stretch between. Probably to imitate the older more traditional way of fighting which was on a small island (or hólm). Bouts were usually to first blood and each duelist was permitted three shields which would be provided to them and changed out as the previous one broke.
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Feb 8, 2022 18:12
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Brawnfire posted:You think cuz you spit bars that you're better than me? does this mean I have to fight Brawnfire now? I don't want to but I will defend my honour.
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Feb 8, 2022 18:27
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ChubbyChecker posted:I think that Holmgangs were essentially judicial combat, and you didn't have to pay wergild from them, but if you just killed someone openly you had to pay. And if you murdered someone in secret, which was illegal, you were declared an outlaw, which meant that you lost all of your property and had to leave for life or for some years. It was a lightbulb moment for me when I realized (relatively recently) that "outlaw" wasn't just an old-timey way of saying "criminal", but meant that someone was literally outside the law, that they had transgressed so severely that they had no legal protections at all, not the even the ones that normally applied to criminals.
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Feb 8, 2022 18:55
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ToxicFrog posted:It was a lightbulb moment for me when I realized (relatively recently) that "outlaw" wasn't just an old-timey way of saying "criminal", but meant that someone was literally outside the law, that they had transgressed so severely that they had no legal protections at all, not the even the ones that normally applied to criminals. Yeah, same. I think that I finally understood the difference when I read about vikings.
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Feb 8, 2022 19:04
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zokie posted:Evil skallagrimssons saga is an amazing epic about a viking. I think there's a parallel to capitalism here that I'm not eloquent enough to make.
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Feb 8, 2022 19:35
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Perestroika posted:Yeah, a person's honor and dignity was considered a very real, measurable thing that would be respected in judicial matters in a number of places. Yeah, one saga talks about the two vikings, Tord and Bjørn, who traded insulting verses. poo poo started to escalate and one person died, they then decided to start peace negotiations. During the meeting Tord realized that Bjørn had made one more verse than he had. To rectify this Tord improvised a verse on the spot and the peace talks collapsed.
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Feb 8, 2022 19:44
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Perestroika posted:Yeah, a person's honor and dignity was considered a very real, measurable thing that would be respected in judicial matters in a number of places. Hey Guns over in the milhist thread had a number of fun anecdotes about soldiers in the 30 Years' War constantly suing the hell out of each other over insults. With one particular couple of enemies, it got to the point where the court ordered them to get to their trials on different roads, because any time they met on the road to or from a trial they'd get into a fight that'd lead to them suing each other all over again I loved the story of Hieronymus Sebastian Schuster. He was drunkenly shooting pistols out the window with his friends, when one of his pistols misfired. He gestured with the gun to tell his servant to fetch the key used for reloading it, and then the pistol went off and shot another soldier in the face, killing him instantly. Schuster fell on top of the victim, sobbing and begging forgiveness. A court martial determined that it was purely an accident and sentenced Schuster to a lecture on gun safety. Some time later, Schuster was carrying the company's banner on horseback when another horseman approached and insulted him, saying he wasn't worthy to hold the banner. Schuster politely tried to make the man back away, and the other soldier said "What are you going to do? Shoot me in the face?" Schuster leapt off his horse and tackled the other man to the ground.
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Feb 8, 2022 20:44
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This isn't fun - but it is with regards to the Nazi concentration camps and how they were taught about it Britain. Typically (at least as I remember it) in school we were taught that the Holocaust was targeted primarily against Jewish people (true) and around 6,000,000 people dies in the concentration camps - which isn't true. 6,000,000 Jewish people died in the camps - but around 10,000,000 overall died in the camps, because even though the majority of the people in these camps were Jewish, not all of them were, and indeed some camps were made specifically for other populations. Case in point: Potulice Concentration Camp. A camp designed to Germanify Poles. Specifically children. The link can provide greater details of what happened in the camp. But it is not pretty.
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Feb 13, 2022 13:37
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I wonder if British schools mention that the British Empire invented the modern concentration camp during the Boer War and that the Nazis explicitly cited the British model as the example they followed.
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Feb 13, 2022 14:36
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Cythereal posted:I wonder if British schools mention that the British Empire invented the modern concentration camp during the Boer War and that the Nazis explicitly cited the British model as the example they followed. Having grown up in the system, no, the Boer war didn't come up at all. Nor really any of the imperial wars. The Empire wasn't totally glossed over but it didn't really go much further than admitting that, yes, our ancestors did the slavery. That said, when I learned about the Holocaust in history we weren't taught it was all about the Jews; we were definitely taught about it extending to romani, black people, gay people and the disabled. That was at GCSE level though, so maybe not everyone would have learned that.
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Feb 13, 2022 14:39
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Yeah we certainly were taught about the other populations in the camps. Bearing in mind british schoolkids spend a LOT of time learning about WW2. Boer war: nope, not really. You get a bit about the Crimean war perhaps, just to talk about Florence Nightinggale/Charge of the Light Brigade. So, no talking about British Concentration camps - that would involve talking negatively against Saint Churchill and that is Not Allowed.
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Feb 13, 2022 15:12
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Samovar posted:This isn't fun - but it is with regards to the Nazi concentration camps and how they were taught about it Britain. Typically (at least as I remember it) in school we were taught that the Holocaust was targeted primarily against Jewish people (true) and around 6,000,000 people dies in the concentration camps - which isn't true. My grandmother got deported to Ravensbrück at age 5, to age 9. The camp for women. It's insane that some nazis sat around and decided "well this extermination of undesirables plan must go forward, but the small girls deserve the lady's camp. We will murder them with dignity." Ravensbrück casualties were mostly hunger and disease rather than Zyklon B and drugged up firing squads. So mission accomplished? Special shout out to the Vichy Milice who captured her too. Flee conquered Alsace, think you're safe, oops.
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Feb 13, 2022 17:38
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Samovar posted:6,000,000 Jewish people died in the camps - but around 10,000,000 overall died in the camps, because even though the majority of the people in these camps were Jewish, not all of them were, and indeed some camps were made specifically for other populations. Another lesser-known detail is that roughly 1.5 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust were shot by death squads, not murdered in concentration camps. Edgar Allen Ho posted:My grandmother got deported to Ravensbrück at age 5, to age 9. The camp for women. It's insane that some nazis sat around and decided "well this extermination of undesirables plan must go forward, but the small girls deserve the lady's camp. We will murder them with dignity." They tried to extract as much labor as possible from the victims first. The military history thread had some great posts describing how the tailored Nazi uniforms required far more manpower than other contemporary uniforms, so there were concentration camps dedicated to making clothes for the SS.
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Feb 14, 2022 07:43
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Samovar posted:This isn't fun - but it is with regards to the Nazi concentration camps and how they were taught about it Britain. Typically (at least as I remember it) in school we were taught that the Holocaust was targeted primarily against Jewish people (true) and around 6,000,000 people dies in the concentration camps - which isn't true. I do have to cynically wonder how much of that was because the other victims included roma, LGBT+, trade unionists and socialists.
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Feb 14, 2022 08:06
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I do have to cynically wonder how much of that was because the other victims included roma, LGBT+, trade unionists and socialists. Last time i checked the Washington D.C. Holocaust museum which has the 'First they came...' poem up on one of the walls omits the first couplet of 'First they came for the communists...'
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Feb 14, 2022 08:50
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I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
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Feb 14, 2022 09:43
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Samovar posted:Last time i checked the Washington D.C. Holocaust museum which has the 'First they came...' poem up on one of the walls omits the first couplet of 'First they came for the communists...' That is not the only organization in Washington, D.C. to pull such a stunt. 
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Feb 14, 2022 10:31
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Tenebrais posted:Having grown up in the system, no, the Boer war didn't come up at all. Nor really any of the imperial wars. The Empire wasn't totally glossed over but it didn't really go much further than admitting that, yes, our ancestors did the slavery. Yeah, from what I remember about going to school in the UK we didn't get taught about the UK invading other countries really. It covered a lot of different time periods but it would mostly be focused on what things were like in Britain at the time, or in the case of the WW1 classes it was a mix of evacuee children stuff and living in the trenches stuff. I remember we had a class about the Aztecs, too, that was pretty neat. Again, it's anecdotal, but my parents' generation (so 1960s-ish) apparently did get a lot of teaching in school about the negative sides of colonialism and imperialism. Maybe it was because decolonisation was going on at the time, so the government put the reasons for decolonisation into the curriculum.
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Feb 14, 2022 20:54
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Cythereal posted:I wonder if British schools mention that the British Empire invented the modern concentration camp during the Boer War and that the Nazis explicitly cited the British model as the example they followed. As for the history I was taught at school, it stopped at Henry VIII and started again in the summer of 1914. I reviewed my textbooks a few years ago, and it's amazing seeing the flat-out falsehoods we were taught about WW1. Some examples: We ignored the treaty for Belgian neutrality that Britain went to war over. We ignored the origin of 'The Hun' as a term for the Germans. We were told that the US went to war when the Lusitania was sunk, despite it being torpedoed in 1915 and the US entering the war in 1917. No mention of the Zimmerman telegram. We then did a module on the rise of the Nazis that never mentioned either the German Socialist or Communist parties. Based on my experiences, if I wanted people to learn about key moments in history then I'd do my best to ensure they don't get taught at schools. At least then people can pick it up later in life.
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Feb 21, 2022 06:27
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Plucky Brit posted:As for the history I was taught at school, it stopped at Henry VIII and started again in the summer of 1914. It must vary a lot from school to school. We spent two terms on the industrial revolution, and another on the Civil War/Interregnum/Restoration. I dropped history at 14, but if I'd done the GCSE then it would have covered the American Revolution, Tsarist Russia + Revolution, and I think something about China.
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Feb 21, 2022 12:13
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Our high school offered an insanely comprehensive history program, but the two biggest wildcards thatbI am eternally grateful for were during the final year. We started with the Cold War from both American and Soviet perspectives, then did the entire history of China in the 20th century, and finished it up with a deep dive into the Israel-Palestina conflict. I don't know anyone that walked away from that class without at least some sympathy for the Palestinians, and it kickstarted a lot of political awareness amongst my friends. Then again, could have done with a more thorough look into our own colonial history. While we did cover how Dutch greed sparked a mass starving in Indonesia, it was more of a sideline than a main chapter.
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Feb 21, 2022 16:41
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I was lucky enough to have a world history teacher that was Armenian and obsessed with the Armenian genocide. My high school divided it in two: World History I from pre history to 1900 and World History II from 1900 to present. The WHII class went into some... interesting directions. We were then split into groups of four and assigned a 20th century decade to present a deep dive on. My group got the 1900s so I learned a lot about the Boer War and the Panama canal. Howard Zinn's A People's History was also the textbook for my US History class
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Feb 21, 2022 18:35
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Soul Dentist posted:
drat man that's hardcore.
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Feb 21, 2022 19:08
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I understand how unique my public school education was lol
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Feb 21, 2022 22:10
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Soul Dentist posted:I was lucky enough to have a world history teacher that was Armenian and obsessed with the Armenian genocide. My high school divided it in two: World History I from pre history to 1900 and World History II from 1900 to present. The WHII class went into some... interesting directions. We were then split into groups of four and assigned a 20th century decade to present a deep dive on. My group got the 1900s so I learned a lot about the Boer War and the Panama canal. Likewise on that, though it was AP US History for me. I'm pretty sure we wound up spending more time discussing things that weren't at all on the exam and had to cram everything like two weeks before the test date.
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Feb 23, 2022 05:01
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