MeatballDom

MeatballDom t1_je2uzs6 wrote

All the major gang syndicates are connected, especially when it comes to international borders, as they can help each other smuggle things in and out. So drugs are one of the major places that you see cooperation between the Irish and Italians still in Europe today. The more they can sell, the more money they make, so everyone's happy to help each other out.

In America, the Irish and Italian originated American gangs were often at ends with each other for control of territory, but since these groups were rarely united themselves they could easily convince one of the families to help them take out a rival so both sides benefited.

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MeatballDom t1_jdzgsyz wrote

That's still a lot of time.

You have the rebellion itself, but that's over by the mid 1780s. There's definitely still a lot of tension though and these come to a climax in 1812. This is because just because the war ended it doesn't mean all the involvement did, and all the money and investments went away. There's still a vested interest.

The Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s is the official notice of "stay away" I think this is the point to draw the line.

Now think about what happens afterwards in both countries. Think about what the Monroe Doctrine represents. It's not "America protecting its allies in the continent" it's "America claiming these territories as their own sphere of influence" England still has the other half of the world to push its own imperialist tendencies. We're no longer colonising, but we're still reaping the benefits out of every place we can find and bringing them home.

And sure, there are some disputes after this, but overall they're not really the end of days type stuff. It's a lot of chest bumping more than sword shaking. Even with the Second US Rebellion in the 1860s the British considered getting involved just to tip the scales a bit in their favour, but overall realised that diplomacy would win the day, and it was better to just sit back and wait and act accordingly afterwards.

This sparked a more open and diplomatic approach which had already been growing. Better to work things out, even we have to act a bit tough for votes, than have young people go die fighting each other. Especially as both were now monumental powers. It's easier to ally with them and use each others strengths and say "hey, look, we scuffled, but we're both from the same cloth" by this point people that fought in the American rebellion or the war of 1812 are no longer alive, or certainly not the majority of the population, there's not that same animosity. "You scratch my back, and help secure trade in the region, which we'll help make you a part of, I scratch your back and I help ensure a peaceful Europe beneficial to you"

So when WWI approaches, the US realised how important it was to keep the Brits as an ally, and to keep them powerful, if it meant a safer Atlantic for their own interest, especially against growing nationalist groups (in particular Germany). The actions of WWI consolidated the US's thoughts on Germany and similar groups, and shone the importants of an ally in Britain. After the war they had to work together to try and rebuild, strengthening them more and realising again the need for continued cooperation, which would continue to prove itself useful.

In short: It's easy to look back at big events of centuries and go "why aren't they hating each other?" but in reality, people care more about what's happening NOW than what happened before they were born. Yes, there are certainly groups which harbour some amazingly longstanding feuds, but even a lot of those still have some relatively diplomatic relationships. A lot can happen in a few generations.

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MeatballDom t1_jdyvygc wrote

There's a good reason most of those are in the 400+ page range.

And keep in mind that many of them are proper academic works, so they'll include a lot of pages on notes, bibliographies, historiography, abbreviations, and other things you can just skip over. In fact, if you're only interested in a certain set of years you can just skip the chapters that cover things before them, but you're getting a better overall product.

As for space, most books can now be found in digital format, but a 500 page book isn't as thick as you might think.

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MeatballDom t1_jdyfdhz wrote

How did you gain the general history you had before? Through years of sitting through courses, years of watching television, years of watching the news or hearing it discussed, there's no Matrix option of just uploading this stuff and large general histories are overall not very helpful and will leave you with more bad understandings than good.

So do you need to sit in a classroom for 10 years again? No. But you do need to start slowly, and build up the knowledge. Pick a topic you are somewhat familiar with as a base point. Read a book about it, figure out which parts of that were interesting to you, read a book about that. Look through the sources that were discussed, look through the historians that were argued against, read their works. Branch out or in depending on how interested or not you are.

Don't hyperfocus either. One common trap is for people to start reading a history book and feeling like they need to look up every single person, every single place, every single event mentioned that they don't automatically know. Instead, just take a note, and come back to it later if you feel like you want to. If you try and master every single page from day one you're going to get overwhelmed and more confused than anything.

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MeatballDom t1_jd6aqg2 wrote

Tattooing is not difficult, you can do it with a needle and a pen. You simply need ink, and something sharp to drive it under the skin. Maori use a chisel tattooing technique, "hammering" an ink chisel into the skin. See video here: https://teara.govt.nz/en/video/41239/chisel-tattooing

The modern tattoo gun does this automatically by driving the needle in and out of the skin, so no need to hammer it down, but it's still going in and out of the dermal layer.

As for ink, soot was very common and easy to make.

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MeatballDom t1_jcxep05 wrote

You might need to pull it apart further. There's a lot of threads with the rivalry for power. Who comes to power as a result of his death? What policies do they enact that differed from Lenin's? How did the Soviet Union change as a result of this? What ideologies were different? How did those that didn't win the struggle for power end up? How did this differ than before, how did this impact future power struggles?

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MeatballDom t1_jcqyaby wrote

Part of the problem is that a lot of recorded history focused on the "great men" the kings, the generals, etc. It's a relatively new (in the grand sense of things) movement to look actively at the more common people, the day to day grind.

But we can find you sources and material that can go further into these other areas. Is there a specific area, topic, hobby, something that you're really interested to learn more about? The further we expand our scope, the smaller we often need to make our overarching theme so specifics can help.

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MeatballDom t1_jcoi84a wrote

Sorry if you get two notifications, hit send too soon...

Yes, correct, the ram was not primarily used as a boarding device. But other boarding devices did exist that were primarily used for that purpose well before the First Punic War.

Polybius speaks up the beauty of the corvus, it plays a major role in a couple of battles, and then disappears very quickly, it's a bit of an enigma. Though we need to keep in mind that Polybius wasn't even born until 67 years or so after the First Punic War started, and not in Rome until about 95 years after. There's zero expectation that he's going to know the exact actions occurring during each naval battle (and this is the case for most naval battles in antiquity), but he can create a really good narrative. His objective is, after all, to talk about how Rome became the greatest power. He states this outright in his work so it's not exactly some hidden bias.

He also creates this dichotomy of where Rome is apparently only entering the sea for the first time at the start of this war, but also reportedly had naval treaties with Carthage dating back to the start of the Republic. As it is written, it doesn't make much sense. Perhaps he's speaking of Rome as more of a unified state, perhaps, but this story does match similarly to what other Greek historians did with navies (Herodotus and Athens for example). We definitely know there's more going on there though, and from the 70s onward we really start to question Polybius on this. But it wouldn't really be until with Steinby throwing down the gauntlet to challenge historians in 2007, and it picking up steam from about 2017 onwards with Harris and others that we started to really try and figure out what was going on if not what Polybius was describing. Projects like the Egadi's Island project and studies on iconography have helped to slowly morph our understanding but there's still a lot of unknowns; the evidence for this era was just not great. I know there's a few projects in the works at the moment that should hopefully make things a bit more clear though, but cannot comment too much as they are still unpublished.

As for the corvus: Campbell argues it was a grappling hook (he wasn't the first but he's the only one that comes to mind right now), and de Souza and others have discussed how similar hooks were called corvii in later Roman works but long after. I do think Lazenby is correct to say we need to be careful with these later named tools, but there's still plenty of reason to question whether it was a grappling hook in these earlier instances as we know they are using these in Sicily and obvious Sicily has a large impact on seafaring in the region. Polybius described some other siege weaponry almost exactly like he described the corvus later in his work, this may show where some of the inspiration for how he imagined the corvus came from.

This is not to say that we need to bin Polybius, again there's not a lot of evidence from the period and Polybius is incredibly important to our understanding of this period. But we do need to be a bit careful and not take everything he says as gospel. As stated before, Wallinga's work on the corvus and investigating Polybius from a scientific standpoint was a good step forward as well, but the era was still dominated by traditionalists and for the longest time Polybius was gospel.

Writing this quickly on my phone so hopefully not too chaotic, excuse any errors.

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MeatballDom t1_jcoayj7 wrote

Spike would likely be more brittle, considering the size and impact. I'd imagine it would snap more often than not.

Plus, the ram may have had a role in beaching of ships (which was necessary to do regularly). I could definitely see a spike becoming a bit problematic when pulling up a beach.

But, I don't know of any studies of anyone testing the pros and cons of a spike, so this is just first reactions.

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MeatballDom t1_jcmaw29 wrote

That's not accurate, as someone else mentioned the grappling hooks were very common, and the entire idea of the corvus being a specific boarding bridge comes only from Polybius, and is not really accepted as the mainstream theory anymore (though of course Wallinga was incredible for the work he did in regards to the theory). Polybius and the corvus is a bit of an enigma as a whole, can get into it a bit more if you want, but overall remember he's writing well after events.

As for boarding before the First Punic War, it was common. Look at depictions of Athenian naval warfare in the 5th century, which we have a good chunk of. Ships get stuck together, marines (ἐπιβάται) could then fight ship to ship. During the Sicilian Expedition we see the Sicilians prepare to use boarding hooks (one of the older, but still acceptable arguments for what a corvus was) and the Athenians already familiar enough of them to counter them with animal hides which would make it difficult for the hooks to grab on.

You also see these strategy employed elsewhere not long after Rome in areas that would not have been familiar with the corvus, typically with groups associated with piracy, the Illyrians, etc. who would deliberately plant traps to allow them closer access to ships to board them and take them over. These seem to have been the norm for them, and plays a major role in the First Illyrian War.

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MeatballDom OP t1_jcjoszk wrote

I don't know who's telling you archaeology is dead but it certainly isn't historians, we're moving more and more towards archaeology. Traditionalists are pretty much all dead or retired in most fields, and we're more and more embracing archaeology and noting how important it is.

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MeatballDom OP t1_jcd7dyk wrote

>What's with the deleted posts?

About 80% of them are people asking why the comments are being deleted.

It's a super secret method, only few know about it, but I'll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else: Want to not get your comment deleted? Read the article, comment on the article. Tada.

How to get your comment deleted: "Archaeology is a scam!" "I heard from my cousin's sister's cousin's dad's son's only sister's sibling that Rome isn't real" "lol guys I'm practicing for my first standup routine, check out this one" "insert overused quote from a movie" "WhY aRe ThE ComMeNTs AlL DeLetTeDeDEDd"

It's really not that hard.

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MeatballDom t1_jbwbxhu wrote

If it was evident that they couldn't see (blindness was very evident) they might be exposed (abandoned and left to die). The extent of how often exposure actually happened, and what its actual intentions were, is debated though, but it is something that pops up often in common myth (Moses, Romulus, etc).

But then you have to consider what we might actually use glasses for today. Not everyone is near or totally blind, most people just need them for things like reading road signs while driving, or reading books. But, in antiquity these things might not have been as necessary (especially driving). So a lot of these people would have lived fairly normal lives.

And once you lived past a certain age, you were expected to live a life into old age, so teeth would fall out, eyes would weaken, and other parts of the body stopped working as well just as they do today. But you would stay as part of the family, live with them, and be taken care of.

As for things to help people read, certain crystals, and glass, can magnify things (hence a magnifying glass) and these things were known and used for reading and other purposes since antiquity.

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MeatballDom t1_jbvdghu wrote

Your confusion on this makes sense, because there is no universal agreement on the number of continents.

You'll learn a number in school, but not all schools are going by the same system. There can be as many as seven, and as few as four continents. The main disagreements come down to the Americas, and Europe, Asia (and even Africa). There's no wrong way to divide them though. If you view a continent as one continual landmass, then: America, Eurasia, or Afro-Eurasia are all totally acceptable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Number

How else can they be viewed, and why? Well, a large part of viewing them as distinct and separate comes down to cultural views. With Eurasia there has been a strong divide between East and West since antiquity. While Greeks, and Romans, both made conquests into the East, these territories have always been harder to hold because of the large extent of land and the amount of powers that traditionally have existed, which also means it's been harder to extend cultural imperialism into the region, which makes them different. They would then view them as "the other" and othering cultures is incredibly common. Whether it's Persia, or later the Ottomans, there's a strong "us" vs "them" in history.

Historians and sociologists have long looked at this phenomenon, and works like Edward Said's Orientalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book) brought the problematic nature of these views to the forefront of academia in the 70s, which has resulted in some change in academia at least, but there are still cultural hangarounds.

Funnily enough, it's the opposite in regards to the Americas which was seen as one continent for quite some time, and the US would lay claim over the influence (to put it very kindly) of the entire hemisphere with the Monroe Doctrine. But, by the middle to end of the 20th century you see a shift where there is a desire to disconnect from (what we would call) South America, and a desire to other them. And while Canadians might not like being called American because of the term's association with the USA, people in the southern countries can get annoyed with the term's more popular meaning in English because they see themselves as American because everyone on the/both continent/s are by their nature American.

In short: there's no wrong way to view the number of continents, the separations other than just connected landmass are mainly due to geopolitics, historical isolation, culture, and othering.

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MeatballDom t1_jbuxj6x wrote

We regularly find new information through archaeology. Once archaeologists can dig up new evidence it can be examined, and it can be added to our understanding of all the relevant fields.

History isn't like a jigsaw puzzle, there is no final missing piece, it's more like a never ending brick wall. Sometimes there are bricks missing in the middle that need to be replaced, sometimes there's new information found that makes the wall higher, or wider, but it's still very sturdy and isn't going to fall over just because a new brick is found.

There's no "status quo" to shake up, finding new information, adding to understanding, and arguing for new perspectives is what academics do. Anyone who is telling you that there's some grand conspiracy has a reason to be lying to you. Go on down to your local university library and read through some historical journals (or see if you can get free access on Jstor) and read some recent articles on new finds. Academia is constantly telling older historians that they got things wrong, it's part of the process. There's no point in publishing a work to say "good job, chaps, nothing's changed" it's a necessity of the job to continually make new arguments, new positions, and change the field. It's a requirement for getting a PhD to do work that no one has done before. And that's a good thing!

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