Nessus posted:

The Vatican as a nation-state is actually much younger than the USA, although the Roman Catholic Church is of course much older. The modern conception of the state did not burst upon the world like Athena from Zeus's brow

BalloonFish posted:

But in terms of institutions with continuity of power the Spanish monarchy only goes back to 1975. The current political iteration of the French state only dates to 1958. Germany has only existed in its current political and geographic form since 1991 and so on.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

my brother the status ecclesiasticus began in 756

BalloonFish posted:

Libluini posted:

you're confusing states and institutions again

the Federal Republic of Germany in its current form was founded 1949, and if simple geographical changes are enough for discontinuity, the USA were founded in 1946, when they lost the Philippines

this is of course silly

MikeC posted:

The rank and file are in no position to tell if their commanders who made real decisions were competent or incompetent. Orders for regiments to move forward into an ill-conceived attack or to stick around for a forlorn defence are made at levels so far removed from the common private that you wouldn't even really know who to shoot. Most of the time the blame fell on the commanding general or his immediate subordinates and they wasn't really standing around in the line of battle where you could cap him unnoticed. Everyone else from brigadier on down usually just followed orders and after the first few volleys there was too much smoke to tell what the hell was going on. If a regiment or brigade is told to advance, the colonel or brigadier goes and orders his men to advance. If they are told to hold a position they deploy their men into line of battle where they are told. Its not exactly their call to make. If they were complacent and their men weren't well drilled enough to execute the basic maneuver then they would get canned by their superiors well before you got around to capping him yourself. Same thing if they were insubordinately slow with acting on orders that put their unit in a dangerous position or left another unit in a dangerous position by not being where they were supposed to be.

The most damning mark on field officers usually were if they were cowardly and wouldn't lead their men into battle or displayed cowardice on the line. That was something that was very frowned upon by the men in the ranks. If it was a go-getter colonel who insisted on trying to keep an attack moving after the ranks decided it wasn't going to happen by either going to ground or falling back, well the go-getter colonel is usually the one standing tall waving his sword around trying to keep his men moving and would promptly eat musket balls.

zoux posted:

I always enjoy your excellent naval posts, looking at Bligh's bio, it seems that being among the most famous mutineered commanders of all time didn't hurt his career much, as he made admiral, served as the governor of NSW, and so on. So what was the contemporary reaction to the event among his peers and naval leadership?

BalloonFish posted:

The court martial that examined the loss of the Bounty exonerated Bligh, so in pure professional terms it was not much of a wrinkle on his reputation. His peers and superiors generally (if privately) acknowledged that the expedition had been badly-resourced and that Bligh had been dealt a bad hand and generally played it as best as anyone could be expected. It's very telling that almost as soon as the investigation into the Bounty was over he was promoted Commander, given a largely token command and was then made Post-Captain just a few weeks later and given another token command just to make up his seniority, and then he was put in charge of a second breadfruit expedition to Tahiti with two ships, both larger and better-crewed than Bounty which went off without a hitch. So the Admiralty clearly didn't think he was either a liability in command or someone who needed to be kept back from the spotlight.

Whatever problems of personality or leadership he had when in command of the Bounty don't seem to have surfaced again. So either he learned from the experience or that just shows what a distinctly unhappy combination of people and circumstance the Bounty voyage was.

The other two 'mutinies' ascribed to Bligh where the one onboard HMS Director, which was part of the much wider Nore mutiny. Although Director was one of the more militant ships (the crew fired on ships that were ending the strike and proceeding to sea) there is no evidence that their actions had anything to do with Bligh or his command. Shortly afterwards the Director and her crew acquitted themselves very well at the Battle of Camperdown, still under Bligh's command. The Rum Rebellion was a flashpoint as New South Wales transitioned from a remote open air prison to a governed civil colony and Bligh was specifically appointed to go in and (figuratively) bash heads together and impose discipline on behalf of the government in London. he was up against powerful vested interests and his purpose was to depose them and open up the colony for new settlement and free trade. Neither of these 'mutinies' were really due to any specific failure of leadership on Bligh's part. Again, the Rum Rebellion was investigated, Bligh's actions were condoned and he was promoted to flag rank afterwards (back-dated to before the hearing) so he clearly wasn't in disgrace with those in power.

The one constant through his career seems to have been strict personal morals, a short temper and a somewhat acid tongue when that temper was up. But he could clearly be tactful enough to climb his way through the politicking of the 18th century Navy, and his professional abilities as a seaman are self-evident.

Elissimpark posted:

Thanks for the Bligh-posting, BalloonFish. I like the feeling of him just being a regular guy who just happened to be the one There when poo poo happened.

Regards the Rum Rebellion, apparently William Bligh <surname> was popular as a boy's name at the time, so he was probably liked well enough by people not in the Rum Corps or named MacArthur.

Kvlt! posted:

hello I hope this is the right thread for this but I have received excellent reccomendations in the past from this thread regarding naval history books: can anyone reccomend a good book about American aircraft carriers? I have always been fascinated by them and would love to read about their technical history and/or people's experiences on them.

Kvlt! posted:

hello I hope this is the right thread for this but I have received excellent reccomendations in the past from this thread regarding naval history books: can anyone reccomend a good book about American aircraft carriers? I have always been fascinated by them and would love to read about their technical history and/or people's experiences on them.

Urcinius posted:

For US carrier developments before the war:
Hone, Thomas, Norman Friedman, and Mark Mandeles. (1999). American & British Aircraft Carrier Development.

For US carriers in 1942:
Lundstrom, John B. (2006). Black Shoe Carrier Admiral.

For US carriers from 1943 to the end of WW2:
Reynolds, Clark. (1968). The Fast Carriers: Forging an Air Navy.

For a bit of color from a memoir:
Coyle, Darcy. (1989). Censored Mail.

Kvlt! posted:

like I said this thread always comes in clutch with great book recs, thank you!! I just ordered the first one and am gonna work my way through the rest

BalloonFish posted:

Bligh clearly wasn't a 'people person' and a lot of his actions were well intentioned but counterproductive. He was very concerned with the health and morale of his crew (which is admirable) but his men chafed at the daily mandatory ration of sauerkraut (an experiment in warding off scurvy) and Bligh's reaction was to line up the men every day and personally ensure every one ate his ration, which was seen as humiliating. Similarly, Bligh imposed periods of 'mandatory fun' in the evenings where the men were required to dance, sing and sky-lark which was entirely counterproductive.

Phy posted:

Woof. Morale will continue until the beatings improve.

But seriously thanks for the navyposting, y'all are helping to fill in the blanks for me on the stuff I've already absorbed from Aubrey-Maturin.

How'd the sauerkraut experiment work out, anyway? I know ascorbic acid is pretty fragile and doesn't survive cooking, but pickling?

Phy posted:

Woof. Morale will continue until the beatings improve.

But seriously thanks for the navyposting, y'all are helping to fill in the blanks for me on the stuff I've already absorbed from Aubrey-Maturin.

How'd the sauerkraut experiment work out, anyway? I know ascorbic acid is pretty fragile and doesn't survive cooking, but pickling?

Phy posted:

How'd the sauerkraut experiment work out, anyway? I know ascorbic acid is pretty fragile and doesn't survive cooking, but pickling?

Cyrano4747 posted:

Most of Bligh's poor reputation comes from a couple of books written decades after the fact by people who were friends and family of Heywood. He's a pretty interesting character - he was a young son in an influential family who got a berth on bounty as a junior officer at 15. He was claimed to be one of the chief mutineers by Bligh and was eventually sentenced to hang. He got a royal pardon, got back into naval service, and was a Captain by the time the Napoleonic wars kicked off. He had a pretty long and distinguished career himself. If you read between the lines it's pretty clear his family was politically connected. My half baked two cents are, given that he greeted the ship that picked them up as rescuers, he was probably a moronic 15-16 year old who got caught up in some poo poo, chose to stay with the mutineers rather than embark on what was a likely suicidal trip across the ocean in a small vessel, and had a serious case of teenage reality check when he realized what he got caught up in.

Anyways, in the 1840s (50 years after the mutiny and 10 years after Heywood was dead) a friend of his family writes a book about the Bounty that sets a lot of the tone for the popular interpretation of the mutiny today - Bligh as a tyrant, etc. There was another book written by Haywood's daughter 20 years after that that further entrenched the basic version of events that you'll get in the pop culture sources like movies etc.

Basically Bligh had the ill fortune to have one of the mutineers be a young kid from a connected family, and the family and their connections spent the next half century waging a largely successful campaign to shift the public narrative and not make having a mutineer in the family something they had to be ashamed of.

Zorak of Michigan posted:

I'm also a big fan of Friedman's US Aircraft Carriers: An Illustrated Design History. It's expensive but it gives a real feel for how quickly things changed during the axial deck period, and how hard it was to come up with good answers for the full spectrum of jet operations in the angled deck era. https://www.usni.org/press/books/us-aircraft-carriers-revised-edition

Gnoman posted:

The funny thing is that most of what I've read from this vein puts Bligh in not that bad a light overall. The most common argument I've seen for "Bligh was the villain of the piece" versions of the Bounty mutiny make it seem like Bligh was a brilliant man under pressure and in a crisis - but could not handle situations where there was no crisis.

BalloonFish posted:

It wasn't entirely right to call in an experiment - Cook had proven that sauerkraut worked at preventing scurvy and Bligh had seen its effectiveness first hand, which is one reason he was so keen on it. Cook didn't have a single case of scurvy in a voyage that lasted three years, which at the time was frankly miraculous. Bligh also emulated Cook's fastidious standards of shipboard and personal cleanliness, which also proved to be another source of conflict with certain people on the Bounty. But whatever other problems the voyage had, no one on it ever got scurvy.

Sauerkraut is a good antiscorbutic - cabbage has good VitC content and when fermented in its own juices the effect is increased.

Apparently the problem that Cook and Bligh had was that the Navy procured large quantities of sauerkraut prepared in iron cooking vessels, which gave it an unpleasant metallic taste. That's why the men had to be almost forced to eat their daily ration of the stuff, and one reason why lime juice became the preferred method.

Frankly I'd have thought that "this will stop your body disintegrating into its constituent materials" would overcome some metallic-tasting cabbage portions.

SlothfulCobra posted:

It also was discovered and forgotten after ships got faster and had more regular stops so sailors could eat fresh food, so it had to be rediscovered again after arctic expeditions and people who just ate a lot of canned food wound up getting scurvy.

So now people are extra aware of vitamin C and pass it off as a miracle medicine.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

It's also important to note that despite knowing that certain foods and drinks prevented scurvy, the actual mechanism (vitamin C deficiency) wouldn't be known until the early 1900s. This was one of the factors that led to the Franklin expedition disaster. Franklin stocked plenty of citrus juice aboard Erebus and Terror, but couldn't know that cold weather degraded the juice's vitamin content.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Wasn't it the preservation method of the juice rather than the cold that hosed up the vitamin content?

Cyrano4747 posted:

You can really see this in things like laws, where big chunks got carried over from the Kaiserreich into the German Reich and into the Hitler years.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Gotta plead ignorance here. I know from a quick google search that high temperatures can destroy ascorbic acid but I'm not so clear on low temperature. My instinct is a little of column A and a little of column B but do not cite me on this.

My source on cold degrading vitamin C is passing references to this from Andrew Lambert's biography of Sir John Franklin. So if he's wrong, I'm wrong.

Saukkis posted:

When talking about the continuity of laws I'm immediately reminded of the current Finnish criminal law, which begins with: "We Alexander the Third, by the Grace of God, Emperor and Sovereign of all of Russian land, Tsar of Polish land, Grand Duke of Finland, etc etc. Make it known:"

Just how hard can it be to change the foreword of a law during the hundred years of independence.

Cyrano4747 posted:

I'm not going to plant too firm a flag on this, but my hazy memory is that they were boiling the juice as part of the canning process to kill anything that might cause it to go bad, and that was destroying the vitamins.

Cyrano4747 posted:

I'm not going to plant too firm a flag on this, but my hazy memory is that they were boiling the juice as part of the canning process to kill anything that might cause it to go bad, and that was destroying the vitamins.

Cyrano4747 posted:

I'm not going to plant too firm a flag on this, but my hazy memory is that they were boiling the juice as part of the canning process to kill anything that might cause it to go bad, and that was destroying the vitamins.

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

That doesn't make sense. It was Nicky II who was Tsar when Finland gained independence.

Comstar posted:

So was the Breadfruit worth all these troubles and expeditions?


I sadly don’t recall ever eating it.

The Lone Badger posted:

As a food technologist professionally I can you that
A) Canning involves high heat (applied after the can is sealed)
B) Ascorbic acid is very vulnerable to heat

Even much less intense processes can destroy the majority of vitamin C. Modern orange juice is pasteurised for risk-management reasons, and as a result they have to add ascorbic acid back in to replace what was destroyed.

BalloonFish posted:

Apparently the problem that Cook and Bligh had was that the Navy procured large quantities of sauerkraut prepared in iron cooking vessels, which gave it an unpleasant metallic taste. That's why the men had to be almost forced to eat their daily ration of the stuff, and one reason why lime juice became the preferred method.