This is not entirely false. Somewhat false, I’ll grant you.
When Dickens published his works serially, as he did for all of his major novels, his publisher expected him to fill a certain amount of space. I’ve never heard of a particular minimum word count, but if he’d given them an installment that didn’t reach the customary inches of copy space, they wouldn’t have been happy. And also, his contracts generally required he publish at least X installments of the story. These factors combine to create a de facto word minimum, so it’s not entirely wrong to say he was paid by the word.
On the other hand, his novellas were not published serially, and thus had no such constraint. This includes, of course, A Christmas Carol, which is probably the most popular Dickens work to read in school, and thus the work most likely to have high schoolers grumbling the myth that the author was paid by the word.
And on yet another hand, at the height of his popularity, Dickens was like George R.R. Martin and the Beatles rolled into one. If he’d decided he was going to make one of his installments of Little Dorrit half the length the publisher wanted, he could have done it and there wouldn’t have been much they could do about it. I guess they could have threatened not to pay him, but then he could have threatened not to give them the next installment, and then the publishers would all get lynched by an angry mob.
Not only that, but those Egyptian (and Syrian) Christian heretics openly embraced “conquest” at the hands of Muslim invaders. They had a choice between on one side religious persecution and violence ; on the other complete freedom of religion without any state intereference as long as they recognized the authority of their new Muslim elites and paid taxes… that were still not as high as what they had to pay under the Byzantines.
“Oh yes, boss, they totally overtook our defences, don’t know how that happened at all, we fought like lions and things. Coulda been the doors we left wide open, but that seems far fetched. Anyway, we’ll miss you, boss.”
And here someone posts one of the myths that most annoy me: that the Soviets would have won WWII all by themselves. Without American involvement the Soviets and Germany almost certainly would have hit a stalemate. This is true for several reasons:
Without America in the war, it’s essentially a one front war. Britain lacked the resources to threaten an invasion of Western Europe and thus Germany would have been fighting a one front war with the Soviets. I think this by itself would have given Germany the capacity to at least have fought to a stalemate.
Large amounts of food aid was given to the Soviets by the United States. The Soviet Union was legitimately at risk of mass famine had this not occurred, well, beyond the famine that did occur. Starving armies do not win wars.
Basically the entirety of the Soviet transportation force came from the United States, locomotives, Studebaker trucks, and additionally oil. While the Soviets had decent oil production we had the best oil production in the world and unlike the Soviets our supply infrastructure was untouched by an invading Nazi army, so we could easily ship them petroleum products.
Some key notes:
-In total during WW2 we shipped almost as many tons of material to the USSR as we sent over supply the entirety of our forces in the European theater during the war, so we literally sent basically as much to the Russians as we used ourselves in Europe.
-We sent almost half a million trucks to the Soviets
-We sent almost 2000 locomotives
-Over 10,000 rail cars for those locomotives to pull
-2.5m tons of petrol products
-4.5m tons of food
-15,000 combat and service vehicles
Logistics was basically the focus of my career in the Army, the concept that the Soviet Union could have done what it did with such a massive portion of its supply removed from the equation is simply not possible. Armies aren’t little plastic figurines on a Risk board needing only the player’s hand to guide them, armies need supply to function and without supply armies do not function and wars are lost.
Offensives in particular require greater amounts of supply (more complexly delivered) than simply holding a defensive position. Which is why it’s really unlikely that just because the Russians likely never would have fallen to Germany (same for Britain, since Germany had no meaningful way to launch a sea invasion) it’s basically impossible that Russia which was basically the most destroyed country in WWII would have just rolled over Eastern Europe against a German Army fighting on one front sans the enormous amount of supply support from the United States.
I should point out though, that I am a strong advocate that we owe a lot to Russians as a people in WW2. We may have given a lot economically but they gave rivers of blood, excluding China all the other Allies combined did not lose anywhere near as many people as the Russians. The European War truly was won on the backs of millions of dead Russians, possibly even more than we know (Stalin had some desire to minimize a count of the dead so as not to make Russia look any weaker in the post-WW2 world.)
In fact, while extensive planning was made for Operations OLYMPIC (invasion of Kyūshū) and DOWNFALL, almost no real preparations were made and many planners considered it to be an almost hopeless logistical effort for the same reasons the Japanese had such difficulty defending Okinawa despite being so heavily dug in. Japan by that point was entirely cut off from outside supplies and wouldd not have made it through the winter without mass famine and freezing; what drove the US to use atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the fear the the Soviets would invade the from the Kuril Islands and the US would end up in a stalemate in Japan analogous to the which occured in Central Europe.
In fact let’s just expand that to the notion that Aboriginnal Americans were a homogenous hunter-gatherer culture of “noble savages”; while sparse records remain of pre-European contact, archeological evidence points to sophisticated trade and agriculture societies. That the “Indians” did not have access to domesticated beasts of burden (Equus and Bovidae) and the bronze and iron tool metallurgy which allowed Eurasia to thrive is largely an accident of fate.
It is fair ro say that by opening the Western Front, the US and Britain sapped military power and prevented the Germans from fully utilizing resources,in Europe. But yes, the Soviets were going to prevail, or at least fight Germany to a stalemate at pre-WWII borders. If the US and Britian hadn’t entered the war and Germany hadn’t colapsed, the landscape would probably have looked similar by replacing NATO with the German Reich, except that Germany would not have the logistical resources that the US brought to bear to shore up (and dominate) NATO for as long as the US did.
Speaking very naively, that makes no sense at all. Germany had at its height conquered HUGE swaths of Russia. Why would the Soviets have enough strength and momentum to push the Germans all the way back to those borders, but not enough to go any further? Stalin doesn’t seem the type to have momentum on his side and then suddenly decide to just stop at the pre-war borders.
This discussion comes up a lot, and purely based on the map Germany seems to have come within a hair’s-width of taking Moscow. I know that some set of plans existed to relocate the Soviet government to the East, but it’s hard to see how losing the national capital wouldn’t have been a MASSIVE blow, psychologically, militarily and logistically.]
Well, saying that Dickens was “paid by the word” is a bit like saying the producers of a weekly TV series are “paid by the minute” because they’re expected to fill 42 minutes (or whatever it is nowadays) in each episode.
In fact, it’s a pretty good analogy: a lot of TV shows these days will have about (and this is generous) 30 minutes worth of plot, and put in 12 minutes of filler for the rest. Because they’re required to fill out their time slots. If they had no such requirements, one can imagine TV shows with a range of running times, but with much tighter scripting.
I hear this much more frequently now that we have more tea-partying history-rewriting people with a microphone. Clearly they’ve never read Mein Kampf or noticed the SS belt buckles with “God With Us” engraved in German on there.
Any and all “noble savage” myths annoy me. Ancient people weren’t “in tune with nature”, or blessed with increased wisdom, and CERTAINLY not plugged into mystical healing magic. They were just people. They were trying to eke out a living, wherever they were. There found zillions of different ways of doing it, some of which may seem odd to us, but they were JUST PEOPLE like you and me. Some individuals were pretty good, some were pretty rotten, and some civilizations worked better than others. You know, just like today.
On a related note, my (very uneducated) opinion is that archaeologists tend to leap to the “oh, this artifact/building/space we don’t understand must have been important to some sort of religious ritual” explanation far too quickly.
They might not have been drawing on the wall to convince their gods to bring them buffalo - they might have just been bored during a rainstorm and started doodling.
Yes and no. “This might have been a cultic or ritual object/place” is more often than not archaeologist talk for “bugger if we know what the hell that is”, true enough. But then it’s also generally self-aware talk.
You have to say something, right ?
It’s probably an unresolved question what Hitler truly believed. Anybody claiming Hitler was an atheist should probably cite some evidence (and maybe also tell what meaning they’re ascribing to the word “atheist”), but there’s nothing inconsistent between truly believing God doesn’t exist and using references to God or religion to further one’s own ends.
I agree with the bolded part. But it implies something that most claimants of Hitler’s atheism would probably disagree with. Namely, that a lot more than 5% of people might be atheist in their heart of hearts, but pledge belief in order to get what they want (e.g., peace with a religious spouse, a job as a schoolteacher in their rural hometown, elected to public office, etc.)
Paul Revere did not say this. Everyone was British. All the people in the army were considered British. It would have made no sense. By his own accounts he called out, “The Regulars are coming out!”
As annoying are atheists who try to lump in The Holocaust with The crusades to make their ‘religion has killed more people’ meme work. The real hardcore ones try and stuff Stalins purges in their too.
