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So I've been reading this 1963 US Navy history of the use of radio primarily from the perspective of its war and peacetime uses for the Navy up to that point ( History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy, by Captain Linwood S. Howeth, USN at http://earlyradiohistory.us/1963hw.htm ) I'm wondering if there's any similarly comprehensive studies on how radio and cable communications were used in the US Army, or other countries' militaries for that time period of basically "we've finally figured out how to reliably signal and receive" up to "we're remote controlling weapons in flight".
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Dec 24, 2017 18:18
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So I have a bunch of World War II currency from someone who must have been in the Pacific theater as it's largely stuff from Japanese occupation and then the time right after liberation:      But some of it has a bunch of signatures, some of which are dated, I assume tracking whoever this was' progress through the theater because I know these "short snorter" bills were supposed to be a thing you kept with you throughout your service:    How could I go about tracking down who this would have been? The thing is, all the direct family members I can remember talking to before they died who were around in the War are like my one grandfather who served in the Coast Guard or were people like great uncles who did serve in the Army or Navy but never ended up getting overseas during the war itself - so they weren't going to be on any trip out of Australia starting in 1943. I could scan the various bills in for higher quality imagery but it's tricky as I just have a flatbed legal-size scanner on my printer and these bills have been taped together at least since before I got them years back, so I'm a bit afraid of damaging them. For what it's worth a lot of the Japanese occupation money seems barely touched, like it'd barley been circulated before being seized by whoever.
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Feb 19, 2018 01:16
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Milo and POTUS posted:What was the reason for this? I mean why was it infeasible in the North/West? Growing season/soil types/ etc? Not physically, politically. Even before the 1820 Missouri compromise which set a line of "no new slave states north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana purchase territory, except Missouri", new states being formed in the north had routinely established themselves without slavery. The Missouri compromise line would end up voided later, but not with successful slave states north of it. And for the west, when all that land was taken from Mexico it ended up that slavery never really had time to penetrate into it beyond Texas. There was small scale slaving in these southwest territories and minor confederate sentiment later, but both were easily crushed by Union forces coming out of California, which had been admitted as a free state. So even without the civil war happening, the North was a hard barrier to slave expansion and to the west the California government wasn't in favor of it, making it very difficult to expand slavery more in the US. The slavers simply would need to look elsewhere. fishmech fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Feb 24, 2018 |
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Feb 24, 2018 18:25
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Cythereal posted:Blue was peacetime/defense. White was domestic uprising/civil war. Surely domestic uprising/civil war should have been Gray, especially against a Blue government force 
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Feb 28, 2018 04:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:It was updated to reflect the switch from grey and butternut for white sheets Fair enough. StandardVC10 posted:I'm curious what exactly was meant by this. Figuring on some kind of Indian war for independence scenario? Or is it just a further subdivision of British forces? At least under the initial War Plan Red, the colors were for the individual forces and how to deal with them. Eg basically any scenario with the UK going to war will involve partial execution of the Crimson plans for invading Canada - unless Canada actively swore to ally with the US and provided troops, even an officially neutral Canada was going to have US troops showing up in key places to monitor the situation. The plans mostly didn't focus on actually going and invading places like India or Australia, but did intend to provide solutions for harassing and blocking any forces based out of those locations. The places to be invaded were basically Canada/Newfoundland (still separate as of then) and any British island possessions or Belize that could be taken in the Atlantic/Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico.
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Feb 28, 2018 07:05
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Gort posted:Victor Hutchinson's POW Diary These days you mostly see "angel hair" in reference to UFO sightings, but that's the UFO people adapting the term from older descriptions people would use for anything weird and thin falling from the sky. In the old days people would think whatever it was was stuff from angelic visitations hence the name, and it stuck around in folklore for a very long time. In this context, they're probably using it to mean anti-radar chaff that's making it down to ground level.
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Mar 15, 2018 23:51
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Acebuckeye13 posted:You should probably keep in mind the cost of healthcare in the 1950s wasn't anything like it is today, back then the bigger issue for the rural poor would almost certainly be availablilty instead of cost. There's also a whole thing going on where a ton of stuff wasn't meaningfully treatable. There's all sorts of stuff from cancer to heart attacks where most of the time in the 50s (no matter which country) the best they could do for you is give some simple medication and pain relief and hope you'd survive or just not die in too much pain. And even when there was an effective treatment there was often serious issues with proper dose administration and so on. Realistically there was a ton of stuff you're just not going to survive at all, or won't survive long, until we get into the 70s/80s. Conservatives of the time used this and an assumption it would never change to argue against bringing universal care to the US though of course, which was terrible. It'd also held sway in quite a bit of countries over time.
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Mar 19, 2018 01:26
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Milo and POTUS posted:What did the soviet's population pyramids look like after the war? I mean if you were a male born in say 1920 vs 1925 stuff like that. Well here's Russia's population pyramid as of 1989 (from a report being prepared in 1993 or so, post-Soviet collapse). You can really see the bite it took out of things by comparing the female and male sides, unfortunately it was already analyzed late enough that a lot of the easy to see same-gender effect was being wiped out by sheer old age. It's not full Soviet Union unfortunately, but one can safely assume you'd see similar effects in most of the other republics.
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Mar 23, 2018 02:22
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:you could probably make a long run argument that the autobahn was evil because it led to the rise of a car-dominant culture and spawned the American interstate highway system which furthered that end Can't really, as the late Weimar guys who started the projects adopted into the Autobahn system were inspired by existing American roads of the type, particularly in the NYC area - and for that matter fascist Italy's highways .
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Mar 24, 2018 20:14
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It's just pretty funny to see radios casually being referred to as 19th century tech, especially pre-Civil War. The first practical short-distance, 2-6 miles, morse code type transmissions managed to be carried out in 1894, with successful voice transmission at similar range coming in 1900 (Though we got morse code type transmission transatlantic in 1901 using extremely powerful broadcasting stations). As it turned out, all the things we needed to build the first radio transmitters and receivers that actually worked in the 1890s up to the World War I era did use technology that would be available before the Civil War, eg the early short burning incandescent bulbs of the 1840s and 1850s meant manufacturing techniques that turned out good enough for early vacuum tubes, electric generators were already around and so on. But it's put together in ways that just weren't figured out before the Civil War, much as incandescent bulbs and home electrification weren't really figured out in a mass usable way til the 1870s. I believe I linked this earlier in the thread, but the Navy's history on electrical communications methods published in 1963 has a lot of detail on radio in general, and its use for the NAvy in particular, including how the Navy sought to monopolize radio broadcasting in the US as the government agency in charge of it before agencies like the FCC were created to ensure the airwaves would be in civilian hands for the most part. http://earlyradiohistory.us/1963hw.htm " History of Communications-Electronics in the United States Navy with an introduction by FLEET ADMIRAL CHESTER W. NIMITZ, USN Prepared by CAPTAIN L. S. HOWETH, USN (Retired) under the auspices of BUREAU OF SHIPS AND OFFICE OF NAVAL HISTORY WASHINGTON: 1963"
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Apr 12, 2018 06:00
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Reiterpallasch posted:Sorry for circling back around to the 1632 arguments, but a Chappe-style mechanical semaphore would have been technologically viable basically as soon as somebody built a good optical telescope, right? Was lensgrinding a developed industry by the 1600s? If so, that seems a lot more viable than rigging up a long-distance electric telegraph line. Telegraphs can operate with very low power on either end, and had to by necessity when they were first invented and well past the mid-19th century. The only sort of way to have sustained electrical power then was to build a bunch of wet cell batteries in large glass jars that produced low voltages and low current. All you'd need was the ability to spin some cheap iron wire and some porcelain or glass to insulate the wire against whatever you're mounting them on in combination with those simple chemical batteries, and you could easily send signals between stations hundreds of miles apart. To give a perspective on just how little power was needed, go grab 16 AA-size batteries. You have enough voltage potential and enough current output capacity, with enough storage, that you could operate a pair of classic 1840s-style telegraph stations anywhere from 25 to 100 miles distant and the power would be enough to stand up for a month or so of use (approximately 60 hours of active signal being sent, and since you're not going to send any messages most of the time, and even when you send messages you don't need to continuously send current, it'll last long). The glass jar battery racks you'd use then were nowhere near as compact of course. Here's a civil war reenactor with a more or less correct telegraph setup for that time period, those two glass jar based batteries would be enough to send a signal quite a few miles back to a command post or relay point even with the relatively rough conditions of hastily assembled battlefield lines instead of nicely run wire on a nice insulated pole:  Of course that's part of the issue - a system of telegraph lines is a pretty easy thing for enemy forces to go and knock down or cut. The optical telegraph and sighting equipment method is a bit more robust that way, since it's easier to defend a few large structures rather than hundreds thousands individual poles along the way.
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Apr 13, 2018 03:57
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Cythereal posted:Honestly, I'd expect significant attrition to any force legit invading the US. We are kinda infamous for our civilians having a shitload of guns, and with the vast regions of undeveloped wilderness I'd expect partisan activity to be a real pain in the rear end - not even so much Wolverines as just civilians with guns taking potshots. Less than 25% of Americans personally own a gun (and even when you count up being in a household with a gun that's ~40% and a lot of those will be cases where there's just one gun around). There's just more guns than people because out of the 20% who do own any guns at all, a small fraction own an absolute ton of guns which they couldn't possibly use themselves in a war scenario plus would be unlikely to let other people use who don't already have guns. And then you also need to consider that a lot of guns simply aren't in usable condition or anything like that. Some estimates out there say that it's 3% of Americans who own over half of all the civilian guns in the country, while half of the people who own any guns at all own just 1 or 2, and the remaining chunk before you reach the 3% own 3 or 4 each. Note that these mark radical changes from gun ownership 50 or more years ago. A comfortable majority of Americans personally owned a gun say back in the mid-60s, with a supermajority being in a household with one, and with gun ownership being so relatively spread out people who were stockpiling a whole ton of guns (sometimes literally) were a much smaller share of the guns in civilian hands.
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Apr 22, 2018 02:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:Do modern armies worry much about adapting to the local rail network? It was a big deal in the early 20th century, but now with what can be done with non-railed vehicles, it seems like something that wouldn't matter except for some slight convenience if you were setting up shop for the long haul. If I've got control of a rail line and tanker cars, I can send forward a whole lot more road vehicle fuel at once and more consistently, and using less fuel to get it there, than attempting to arrange such transport by other means. The only thing that'd be better is if you could seize control of a pipeline that can flow in the right direction, and be flushed out for the particular liquid you need. I'm also having a much easier time sending up food or other supplies, or even if I'm just there to rob the place I can send all my plunder back homewards easier and more reliably. A modern force would still try to seize as much local rolling stock as possible for their own purposes (and to deny its use to the enemy) in case of invasion, but standard 1435 mm gauge is much more common these days which means if you're brign ing your own equipment over it can run just fine on the rails for the most part:  On the map, the main country color is the most used gauge, and the other colors if any are other major gauges there. Eg for Japan a lot of the local and slow speed services still run on narrow gauge but stuff like the high speed trains run on standard gauge. That would have interesting consequences in some sort of land invasion naturally. Edit: And consider that rail lines are way more vital to prosecuting a war in some countries than others. The United States, China and Russia in that order move the most of their internal freight about by rail, all at over 40% of the ton-mile. So if you're bombing or seizing rail lines, it's way easier to cripple internal movements when you invade them, none of them could fully replace that capacity with other transport modes. On the other side, the UK only carries like 1% of its internal freight by rail. Wrecking the lines would more cause problems with commuters and general getting around, but the internal economy would still be able to shift stuff around. And of course some countries barely have rail service to speak of, so an invading force is going to need to build any rail service they want to use. fishmech fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Apr 22, 2018 |
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Apr 22, 2018 06:46
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Zereth posted:Wait, 2 feet? That seems awfully narrow for a train. EDIT: I mean, to stay stable, I'm aware that's not the width of the train cars themselves. The basic thing at work there is that narrow gauges tend to be tied to overall smaller rolling stock, especially down at 2 foot and below. Typically narrow gauges were used in mountainous areas and areas where the builders were on tight budgets - you need to clear and level less land, you can use weaker and lighter rails, you use less material holding them in place etc. These properties were also behind the use of narrow gauge on things like trench railways too.
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Apr 22, 2018 17:52
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occamsnailfile posted:Jamaican steel drumming originated from the US Navy's immense number of castoffs. Fukushima is leaking tiny amounts that are easy to clean away and dilute in the ocean to insignificance. Especially since they've been able to go and build a whole system of containment stuff in the areas to make sure anything dangerous is collected properly. Some of those nuclear test ranges are still pretty dangerous, but they also got absolutely pounded with dozens of bombs or more in relatively constrained areas, or they were even tests of deliberately extra-radioactive bombs to find out, well, what effects would that have? Well we better build some and find out (or hey, oops, this design we were testing turned out to put out way more radiation than we expected)! Because that's just how you did things back then.
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Apr 26, 2018 03:42
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Tomn posted:
It would have worked out fine, if it weren't for the fact that the Depression ended up hitting the US and completely hosed up all the American investment in Germany that was keeping things going fine. But that was many years later and hardly something that would have been foreseen by then, and all the damage from the hyperinflation had been long restored by then. And so the hyperinflation becomes something various groups can point back to and claim as the inevitable result if you don't join up with me and my guys.
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Apr 30, 2018 23:02
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MANime in the sheets posted:How close was the Graf Zeppelin to being ready to conduct operations? I got the vibe the Germans realized it was a huge waste of time/materials pretty early on. It was a realistic threat. After all, the Nazis had already firebombed a Naval Air Station in New Jersey in 1937.
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May 3, 2018 04:05
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Trench_Rat posted:Been reading a lot about the american civil war lately and what are junctions and turnpikes? Besides what others have told you, it's important to remember that turnpike routes often were more direct shortcuts crossing terrain that the other roads took circuitous routes around. For instance, in marshy areas, the regular roads which didn't have tolls on them would tend to follow the dry ground with minimal building of bridges or anything, as funding was low. The turnpike company however might spend a bunch of money building a good direct path through the marsh and the surrounding lands that flooded easily, piling up fill and paving with gravel and logs/planks to help distribute the loads to keep the path passable. In hilly areas, a turnpike company would be a lot more likely to have done cutting and filling to make it easier/more reliable to pass through ridges and such. This has very massive implications for who gets to hold and use such roads and junctions between them and any other sort of road. Sometimes the alternative routes would be near-impassable for heavy military equipment such that the forces who couldn't use the turnpike road would have to go even farther out of the way between two points than those who simply wished to avoid a toll in peacetime did. You can really think of them as a lot like holding rail routes - indeed many turnpikes would have their paths and grading reused directly for rail later on, and I think in the civil war in particular a few had rails installed to help support particular military campaigns. Outside American usage, turnpike type roads, including some outright called turnpikes, were known from ancient history. Britain of course had a ton in the past and American styles of building and tolling such roads derive directly from that, but they were also used widely on the continent for millennia (with, however, long stretches of time and place where they weren't used for various political reasons), and disputes as to who had rights to build and operate them could spark serious fighting.
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May 8, 2018 03:17
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So are there any good sources on how long it would take for people to train as cavalry, going from inexperienced riders to capable and going from capable riders to competent at cavalry-specific skills, especially from the Early Modern period to the mid-19th century? Especially info around major raisings of military force, like the French Revolution's levee en masse, or others like that.
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May 9, 2018 05:54
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Lake Effect posted:So what happens when the US fights a nation technologically advanced enough to jam GPS satellite signals ... or is this a moot question since most everybody with that kind of skill also has nukes and the world would end if we got into an actual shooting war with them? Advanced? There's nothing advanced about it. Just blast a shitload of noise at high power over ~1.1 GHz to ~1.7 GHz and you knock out all GPS in the area. But also all GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo, etc positioning systems too. So, hope you weren't relying on ever having satellite navigation for your own stuff, and the attackers can still use their satellite navigation from outside your broadcast range to get very good location info before venturing into your territory.
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May 14, 2018 01:25
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Fangz posted:I don't know how much you expect the average American to thresh........ Probably about the same as I'd expect them to need scythes for anything but a sweet halloween costume?
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May 16, 2018 15:51
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V. Illych L. posted:do yanks not use scythes for rough gardening or allotment work? even my massively middle-class parents own a hand-scythe for dealing with large clumps of weeds or what have you Can't say I see what use I'd have for a scythe in a small allotment or in a backyard garden, over power weed whackers or hand-pulling/clippers.
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May 16, 2018 17:16
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Ensign Expendable posted:Amazing loving scanning job, thanks guys It looks like an old pair of underwear that had a document written on it.
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May 17, 2018 05:18
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bewbies posted:It is bizarre to me that there are still so many old airfields, navy bases, assembly areas, supply depots and whatnot scattered all over the South Pacific. Like, two huge industrial powers fought this massive total war and then just sort of left, and the land itself was so devoid of value that most of what they built just got sort of...left behind. And there it sits. Aren't a lot of those in some manner of use though? Locals making use of them for storage and the airfields usually in working order for emergency use when they haven't been adapted into regular services. Even the ones on typically uninhabited islands, local fishermen often end up using them for shelter or storage when needed. And some of them were explicitly kept in usable condition for things like cross-Pacific flights to use for refueling or a safe airstrip.
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May 18, 2018 22:04
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Yeah you gotta remember that the French only get a National Guard force in 1789, and you know exactly what sort of stuff was already going down by that time. And consider that the original name the group was founded under was the "Bourgeois Militia" before being renamed to the National Guard within days, which is a pretty good indication of the sort of role they'd hold for much of the 19th century, even though they spent plenty of time being forces of the entire public - naturally they spent much of the height of the Revolutionary period lead by decided leftist radicals before Napoleon et al would gradually drain the powers they had and reduce the membership back to the wealthier middle class. So when you're someone in like Germany who wants to bring about a constitution and some manner of representation for people like you, well of course you're going to say you want a National Guard like France (and probably hastily emphasize something to the effect of 'oh not a 1793 national guard that's just too far'). There's a certain amount of the fact that National Guard units were mostly used for things like garrisoning and protecting state property and buildings that used to be guarded by soldiers of the normal army, that builds into a view that a Guard means you as the successful shopkeep are both proving your usefulness to the state and also showing that maybe you get to defy the rulers a bit because you are accountable to your friends and business partners, after all.
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May 24, 2018 04:56
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HEY GUNS posted:the fact that they're not super great at war is glossed over, just like machiavelli's call for a citizen militia did The truest military service is to make sure the city hall of Toulouse is never sullied by vile foreign boots! 
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May 24, 2018 05:39
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Squalid posted:I’ve never really liked efforts to define ideology like Eco’s ur-fascism. You can apply his features of fascism to practically anybody if you squint hard enough. That was much of the point of the essay - that things fascism would highly elevate are also present in a wide range of positions and beliefs, often quite innocently, often with real hatred behind them without themselves being fascist. That indeed each different fascist party in different places would accumulate more to some of the aspects than to others, and that is why, say, Nazism looked rather different from the straight up Italian Fascists. That is why the title is Ur-Fascism, not Fascism. Because Fascism didn't come out of nowhere, and merely having some aspects doesn't mean you're a Fascist.
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May 25, 2018 21:59
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Ensign Expendable posted:Logistics is the real superpower. Historic accuracy strictly adhered to, I see.
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May 28, 2018 02:11
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The idea of South Africa and New Zealand not being nuked in a full on US-USSR World War III scenario seems rather wonky. Both of them were direct major allies and for like a decade the South African military had a full on nuclear arsenal.
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Jul 15, 2018 22:41
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Alchenar posted:Uh, even if it did (not really), it had no way to deliver it. If you're tossing tens of thousands of nukes around already, why risk the South Africans having slapped together a way to use it on some local Soviet ally?
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Jul 15, 2018 23:08
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tonberrytoby posted:Were there ever any nuclear tests, where flying planes were being hit? Not that I'm saying they did it for nuclear tests, but there were all sorts of planes rigged up with remote control gear which allowed for some quite complicated flying. Especially once the portable TV camera and transmitter equipment improved throughout the 50s. Of course if you go ahead and use these craft for tests, most of them would lose all the fancy extra equipment you'd have fitted them with for the flights and then they're just gonna become uncontrollable and crash somewhere at random if they stayed airworthy. So you could have had a lot of different sorts of airframes up there, including captured enemy equipment, and see what happened from afar, and they had the equipment to do it since during World War II even.
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Jul 17, 2018 22:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:How old is the phenomena of chickenhawks? It feels like before the 50s, most everyone pushing for war would either have to put up or shut up, but maybe there's some big examples I never heard of. Minimum age to be president and thus command US armed forces: 35 Maximum age to be drafted into war when drafts were in effect before 1950s: 35 or less. To say nothing of how even though you can be a senator as young as 30 and a rep as young as 25, the average ages for those are way higher, just as the average president is much above 35.
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Jul 19, 2018 23:07
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ilmucche posted:Wouldn't civilian casualties in wwi have been limited by the fact it was a static war? The war didn't roll through cities like wwii or mobile armies. Civilians weren't going to stroll up to the trenches and have a wander about. Is 7 million dead civilians limited? Also it totally rolled through a bunch of cities. Remember that a lot of places in say, World War II only had the armies march through wreaking havoc once, maybe twice, as the war washed over that area and then through the duration you might catch a few stray bombs meant for somewhere else. You then died because of shortages, of being called forward because it was decided you were going to either fight or haul supplies to the people fighting and you didn't have a say, etc. Exact same thing happens in WWI.
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Jul 21, 2018 00:05
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StashAugustine posted:speaking of civilian casualties, is there any sort of approximate death count for sherman's march? i know it wasnt nearly as bad as people say but idk if it caused serious famine. suppose the same goes for sheridan's valley campaign, though no one remembers that The closest I've seen to a reliable count is estimates that the civilians who can be said to have died from it would be no more than 3000 if you were really trying to total things up, and likely a thousand or less. Many of the associated deaths were from local residents who decided they might as well become camp followers, especially former slaves, who were not provisioned by the Army on the way.
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Jul 22, 2018 05:21
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StashAugustine posted:thanks, do you have a source for that? There's no single source, it's just the totality from the offhand mentions of civilians being around the Army as it marched, and of course the descriptions of the issue at the river. Combined with reports of how civilians handled the areas left behind after the march if they came back - which was mostly that what got destroyed wasn't too important to day to day survival. Nobody seems to have covered the general topic in detail, but it was something one of my college history professors had put some stuff together on for his classes, so I'm drawing on stuff I remember from then. One thing that's notably absent is reliable reports out of Confederate and confederate-leaning press about any mass casualties along the route, except soldiers. Which indicates it really couldn't have been too high, on top of how there wasn't very much of a population in danger on the route until they got to Savannah - and Savannah was mostly taken without deaths from the civilian population.
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Jul 23, 2018 01:09
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Cessna posted:There were all sorts of weird theories floating around. One of the more common ones was that the Native Americans were descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Another was that they, specifically the Mandans, were descendants of an expedition of Welsh from the 1070s. You completely misunderstand what Great American Desert means. Desert didn't just mean empty hot sands and then a few arctic places that don't even get snow, it meant land not suitable for use (especially traditional European farming use) in general. And the whole middle of America has that sort of low rainfall/not super great topsoil thing going on that meant it really was a desert in the older sense, before people showed up and started tilling the soil seriously and doing irrigation projects. There was also the near total lack of trees, which mostly resulted from the lack of rainfall and prevailing soil conditions, which was particularly visible sign of unsuitability for people who weren't exactly waiting around a year jus tto check what yearly rain looked right. This area was variously inclusive of the huge modern-use deserts of Nevada and Arizona and the like, other times those were considered their own deserts split up by the mountains, while the "Great" one ran down into Mexico and up into Canada to the east of the Rockies, where there was no easy breaks from mountain ranges. This preciptation map gives a good idea of the areas that were considered part of the "desert":  See those areas of 10-20 and 20-30 inches of rain a year, to the east of the Rockies? That's basically what they considered unusually dry and poorly suited for farming. As things moved on, they slowly considered the wetter portions of the 20-30 band to no longer count, but the 10-20 or drier areas remained under consideration until the term died out around the 1880s. So basically the idea that all of it was Sahara-like sands is a modern misunderstanding based on how language changed, since it was already becoming popular to restrict "desert" to mean the modern way by the middle of the 19th century. Also as an aside, a lot of the native americans in the US by the time English speaking people were really talking to them en masse? They often were relatively new to their area, and would have no idea what previous people had built this or that thing that was around, and they'd say as much to the Europeans talking to them. Because that whole European diseases devastating populations all over the continent from Spanish contact a hundred plus years and several thousand miles away had caused a lot of moving around, and destroyed a lot of cultures. And as time went on and more groups were being pushed west it got even worse. So people wanting excuses for "this isn't their land" and "this isn't their stuff" would use these things the natives said to justify it being theirs to take. And even people who weren't trying to make poo poo up would take the natives at their words that they weren't from just there and didn't know who made x thing, and try to come up with what other people must have done it if the natives didn't know. A lot of those "these must be built by the white man" people? They had interests in proving connections to the bible. A lot of people were downright angry that they couldn't find any clear ancestry from people and races mentioned in the Bible to these natives they found, because after all the Bible told where people came from. This was used to justify that there must have been some sorts of Mediterranean/white race that had originally settled the area because if you read passages x and y you can kinda say the whatever group must have had the Americas. And then these natives you see around must have just been degenerates from another race who showed up in mysterious means to kill those off and take it over, which is why the Bible hadn't mentioned them. This all got to the point where people were making hoaxes like this and planting them in known native sites to help keep "proof" of ancient Eurasian people owning the place alive while researchers tried to find real proof - kind of like when people who sincerely believe in a faith healer help lie about failures to keep the image going - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark_Holy_Stones
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Jul 25, 2018 03:55
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Epicurius posted:You also want to take a look at Yale President Ezra Stiles' 1783 Election Day sermon "The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor", which includes his theory I'm kind of impressed with how that narrative postulates that settlement took place from Asia along basically the route of areas that actual Asia-Americas migrations went. But of course in his view all of those people were secretly Jewish tribesmen which spoils the prediction a bit. SlothfulCobra posted:I've heard about weird theories that the Native Americans are one of the lost tribes of Israel, but actually demanding to be able to trace their lineage back to biblical peoples? What, did they try to do that with all peoples back in the old world too? The Jews got around a bit back in the day, but they didn't get around THAT much. What about the Germans, Scandinavians, Slavs, Celts, and Gauls? Yes they did. You know those big lists of begats and so forth in the Old Testament? Those mostly function to list off the names of other peoples or mythical characters who represent them, and to expound on how the ancient Hebrews believe they were related to the Hebrews, and to each other. This basically amounted to things that mapped fairly well to the peoples known in the eastern shores of the Mediterranean down to the Sahara, west along the Mediterranean, and east towards India and north towards Europe and central Asia. So for example there were tribes named and known to be living in modern day Greece and Italy, and tribes named as living north of there = most of Europe can trace their lineage to one of those without much effort. Tribes were named for all of Africa above the Sahara, and of course for black Africans ancient Israelites encountered in trade from Ethopia and south - that maps onto the rest of Africa pretty easy. Then there were tribes names up into Iran and central Asia that were extrapolated to account for farther peoples. But the Americas posed a serious mystery because after all "we" only got here when using smart new ships how could those people get there? Naturally, a lot of this proved great fodder for justifying war.
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Jul 25, 2018 05:55
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Cessna posted:Interesting post, but you’re correcting something I specifically did not say. Read my post: The Great American Desert was not a theory, it was a fact. Because again desert meant something different then,and that whole arid to semiarid area qualified.
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Jul 25, 2018 16:16
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:On Okinawa and Saipan, soldiers were running around coercing civiliansinto suicide or outright murdering them, but the battles on those islands were loving cramped, like fighting in an elevator. Your fears are different when you're in walking distance of the war. What would it even have looked like if say 90% of the population had committed suicide or died in the fighting? Would we be seeing the US just straight up annex vast empty spaces for future resettlement?
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Jul 27, 2018 12:42
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ponzicar posted:Developer is a gamergater, directed abuse towards the wonderful https://twitter.com/medievalpoc?lang=en when she asked about diversity in the game, and has the following perks in the game. Even if the game is good, it doesn't deserve anyone's money. "Medeievalpoc" is an idiot who while they may be well meaning, constantly fucks up their history and ends up doing more to erase people of color depictions of history than they do to promote it. Others have gone deper into how they do it but their base is just not understanding history beyond a modern history channel level.
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Jul 31, 2018 17:39
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