For those who haven’t seen:

https://youtu.be/QuQbus0xfhk?si=rj-XjaOhCt-evltR

Don’t get me wrong the song is chock full of campy charm. But I have to ask how did this wind up getting made and made in this way? Like what on Earth possessed some music producer to say—“people want a musical summary of The Hobbit and they want Leonard Nimoy to headline it. And it must be preserved on film.” As far as I can tell it was not tied into any other derivative IP from Tolkien. And Tolkien was alive when this came out! Any idea what he thought of this project either before or after?

Discovering things like valerian root, ginko, ginger, makes perfect sense, given enough time and randomness someone sick will ingest it, become better and word of mouth will start to spread.

But then there's things I just reasonably cannot comprehend - how they were even considered to be mixed in the first place, let alone prepared in such oddly specific ways, applied or ingested, and then found to have medicinal properties. Like this I saw earlier, a book containing a recipe for an eyesalve made of vine, garlic, leeks, and bile from a cow’s stomach. Then it has to sit for exactly nine days in, specifically, a brass bowl. A test from 2015 showed it had a similar effect to modern antibiotics.

Like, how does that even happen?

Had a conversation with my mother while she was cooking oxtail, about how it was $100 for a single pack since it’s a luxury. I go “Crazy how it’s a luxury now, you know the history right?”

She just nods. “Tough meat that white people didn’t have the patience or know-how to properly cook down.”

That made me think, back then. My ancestors probably didn’t have much free time, and slave masters weren’t that concerned with our health and wellbeing, even if it lead to us working harder for them. So a lot of our cooking culture revolved around shit we could find in the soil or leave slow roasting over the day or even overnight until we were able to come back to it.

The oxtail in particular. The toughest, least flavorful part of the animal that they threw at us like trash because they felt wasting it was a sin (But owning humans wasn’t 🤔)

Did slave masters behave like class A school bullies everytime slaves tried to arrange a proper meal for themselves or did they just not care?

Did they provide food for “Better performance” or “Upkeep”? Did they copy or learn from it? Did they force us to eat a certain way for our sake or theirs? What kind of jobs could I have gotten that revolved around feeding/maintaining slaves if I were born white and educated back then?

I’m asking for all of the Americas. United States, the Caribbean, etc.

But If you’d like, feel free to delve into other instances of slavery. Like Roman slavery, Slavs, South Africa, Vikings, etc. in fact I feel there’s more records on those than this.

I've always wondered how you would be able to prove your identity and therefore your claim to land, property etc before you had pictoral records of what people actually looked like. For example, if you went off to war and came back after X number of years, how could you prove you were you, especially if there was no one left to recognise you....

I'm currently reading Oscar: A Life, by Matthew Sturgis and one thing I'm curious about is how someone like Wilde, living alone or with a roommate after graduating Oxford, got food.

As a broke bachelor myself, I have to go grocery shopping a couple times a week, then cook and do the dishes every day. That takes a considerable portion of my time. I cannot imagine Wilde doing the same and still having time for attending a litany of social/cultural events, reading, writing poetry, theatre plays, updating his wardrobe, etc. I know most of those soirées served food but surely that wasn't happening every single day.

So how did people like him do it? Were they just eating out at restaurants and allowing their debt to grow?

I recently watched a documentary on the boshin war and from what I gather both sides wanted to modernize and made use of modern firearms. And both sides claimed to also be protector's of japan traditional culture and values. So what where they fighting for?

Is there a substantial difference between the titles “king of *land” and “king of *people”? For example “King of France” and “King of the French”

So, I went to a HandsOff rally yesterday. Posted about it. A semi-prominent "leftist" account called them, pejoratively, "liberal counterinsurgency". It reminded me of what little I know about antifa forces in Spain, with infighting between the anarchists & communists. My only knowledge of this comes from Homage to Catalonia, so appreciate any sources that would help.

A lot of shows that I’ve seen will have the underdog protagonist “heroically” feign surrendering to an enemy in order to get the upper hand in an ambush. I’ve even seen it done on a show for children.

This is odd to me because perfidy is an actual war crime under international law. I’ve tried to look up what legal consequences this action would bring the perpetrator(s), but I can’t seem to find many cases where someone was officially accused of this in a trial, and I haven’t seen any convictions of it.

Has anyone been tried and convicted of perfidy? And is there a reason that it’s treated so lightly in popular culture?

One of the funnier jokes in Hercules or Shrek is when they have branding like Herc having Nikes or Far Far Away having Starbucks, as well as both having famous figures who are treated like celebrities. Of course, these are fiction. But in Ancient Rome, I understand that Gladiator sweat of all things was often sold to the crowd.

Were there any societies that had famous stories, restaurants, stores, etc. that took so much hold on the public's attention that they had merchandise, chains, or anything akin to how our franchises today are viewed? Were stories like Beowulf or the Odyssey considered as works of fiction or were they considered factual accounts, and even so were they out in the streets selling Siren figures or Excalibur replicas to the kids and nerds of the time?

I am an expat living in South Asia, I frequently make and clarify my own food stocks. Generally, working class South Asians are horrified by the practice, because it involves throwing away all the solid matter and leaving only the liquid. And that makes a lot of sense for any calorie-scarce food culture - why throw food away when you could eat it instead?

So where do food stocks come into the historical record? And why - and for whom - are they clarified? My hunch is that it became fashionable with the invention of north Italian and later French haute cuisine, it was invented for the upper class and only became more generally fashionable with increase in living standards first with the industrial revolution and later innovations like refrigeration and canning.

But hunches can be deceptive. So: how old are liquid and salt based stocks, and who used them?

To my understanding early Anglo-Saxons spoke western Germanic languages and practiced Germanic paganism which included the worship of gods such as Woden (Odin), Thunor (Thor), and Tiw (Tyr) and belief in concepts like Valhalla and Hel.

Even after Christianization, did the Anglo-Saxons recognize some aspects of the language and religion of the Norse/viking raiders and settlers?

Hello. This question has bugged me for a long time and I'm hoping someone can illuminate this mystery for me?

I grew up in a cult called the Jehovahs Witnesses. When I was a child, this piece of information was given to me as 'proof' that the originally Yahweh/Jehovah (now known as 'Jehovah' or the modern day Christian god, once part of the canaanite pantheon) actually existed because the 'native americans knew him' before the Jehovahs Witnesses were established in 1931.

Obviously, I have left the cult - and well religion all together for obvious reasons- but I am still somewhat boggled about how they knew this name.

I wondered if maybe there were old cherokee or other nations stories with a god or folkhero that happened to carry the same name but there is surprisingly little information about it?

In fact the one published article i could find wasn't about the trail of tears at all, it was a 2023 article/study done on the aboriginal nations having a large number of jehovah witness conversions in Canada.

Searching for this specifically only brings up the song recorded by calhoun or the Jehovahs Witness website. Other than that there's only brief mentions of the native americans crying out to a 'Jehova' on the trail.

Frankly, Jehovahs Witnesses cannot actually be trusted with factual information as anything that disregards their cult propaganda is considered 'apostate' material. They also have a history of fudging numbers so I don't trust their literature as much as i can throw them.

Does anyone have any factual knowledge about this? I do remember reading about this in my history books in public school so it can't be made up right?

During the late bronze age, it could be possible for example for a person to reach the Middle East from southern Germany and get back? How long would it take? I've read that we know about goods that made the trip from one place to another, but I doubt there is any proof of a single person from Europe found in Asia or the opposite.

Giving we know so little about that era, my thoughts are that is very unlikely but not impossible if you followed the trade routes.

Are there any clear time periods where this shift is observable, and how did it go in different cultures? Are there any cultures today that still see fatness/shapeliness as a positive feature rather than how much of the modern world has coveted skininess? I'm not reaching for a "fat good/skinny bad" argument but I'm just curious how, when, and where this shifts in perception occurred.

During the final years of French colonization of Indochina, modern-day Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, there were uprisings which led to events like the First Indochina War and the Second Indochina War/Vietnam War. How did the region become unstable after years of French and briefly, Japanese rule?

I just recently finished a book "Lost in Mongolia" by Colin Angus. He and his team speak to a Nenet man in Siberia who takes them to an island located in a delta on the outflow of the Yenisey river. The Nenet man states that during Stalin's reign he sent 2000 Russians with Germany ancestry to the remote island. He gestures to a tall white cross posted onto the land. Men, women and children starved to death and in the book the author states that human bones can still be seen across the island.

This really piqued my curiosity and I tried looking it up to read exactly what had happened. I can find no record of it occurring. Have any of you heard of this event?

Grozny was famously indiscriminate, but I don't think its inhabitants were systematically targeted as such (despite war crimes there were no accusations of genocide, IIRC). We obviously saw widespread slaughter in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Nanjing, but as far as I'm aware not a systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure that resembled progressively erasing a city from the face of the earth.

The firebombing of Dresden and the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki feel like candidates in terms of the scale of devastation, but they weren't carried out by an occupying force.

Are there other examples from WWII or WWI that might fit the criteria or do we have to go back farther? Under what circumstances might this have happened?

To put it another way, I can think of examples of:

*"I want to conquer this city, so I'll put it under siege and starve the inhabitants until I can breach the walls";

*"I want to punish my enemy and scare people, so I will raze this city to the ground"; and

*"I occupy a city inhabited by a different group of people who I don't like, so I will kill or displace them and keep the physical infrastructure of the city for myself."

But I'm struggling to think of cases in which all of these have coincided (apparent effort to eliminate a group of people as such and also wipe a city off the face of the earth, by a power that already effectively occupies that city, controlling everything going in and out more than decade, able to strike anywhere in the city at will, able to force relocation of inhabitants without credible resistance, etc). On top of that, I’m struggling to imagine even why they would coincide, considering that you would presumably want to keep the buildings, if only to save yourself the work of building your own houses and libraries.

So to what extent are the circumstances Ive described historically unique vs commonplace? If not unique, are there any common threads linking the examples we have?

In a broader sense, this is also a question of difference in how race/ethnicity was conceptualized in the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Mexico had the idea of 'castas,' which of course were idealized by the Spanish elite and did not represent how plebeian society conceptualized 'race' amongst themselves. But, I am more unfamiliar with the Portuguese empire and colonial Brazil. Did the Portuguese also have a conceptualization similar to 'castas'?

These books seems valued by early christians, why (some) jews despised Josephus just because of treason his day?

So I am currently reading Geffoey Wawro's 'The Vietnam War: A Military History'. He paints an exceptionally unflattering picture of the ARVN and the South Vietnamese government in general. I can't help but notice there seems to be a pattern from China to South Korea to South Vietnam. That being these right wing, nationalists movements seem laughably corrupt and incompetent in comparison to their communists opponents. While I'm sure the communists had to have their fair share of nepotism, corruption and incompetence, they seemed to somehow mitigate it more effectively. Why? How?