Do we know his religious affiliation, one way or the other?
“Alexander the Great conquered the known world and never lost a battle.”
His empire was vast and certainly impressive, but he didn’t even make it to western Europe.
As for battles, we have only Greek accounts of them and those from much later; he probably didn’t do as well in India as his reputation.
“Alexander the Great was gay.”
It’s probably way more complicated than that.
“Greeks and Romans were cool with male homosexuality.”
WAY more complicated than that, plus it varied widely from era to era. Anal sex between equals was always frowned upon, and for a man to be in the passive role, even consensually, was a bad thing.
“Abraham Lincoln was gay.”
Maybe he was, but there is far from conclusive proof. Only he knew for certain and for all the evidence on both sides there’s a “yes but”, so, fine to speculate but you can’t make a definite statement on either side. This is a matter for novelists more than historians since it’s impossible to prove and frankly it would probably not make a good novel.
“The Nazis lost in the East due to the ferocity of the Russian winter.”
The Nazis were better prepared for the Russian winter than the Soviet army. They lost in the East because of a combination of bad leadership and fact that the Soviets fought like caged tigers."
“The Civil War was fought to free the slaves.”
As ridiculous a contention as “The Civil was not fought about slavery” is in the south. Certainly there were individuals who fought to end slavery, particularly the black troops, but the vast majority fought to preserve the Union (and because there was a war on and that’s what people do).
The idea that the crucifixion of Jesus was something special and unusual in terms of the actual mechanics. Crucifixion was a common method of execution by the Romans - it was like the gas chamber or lethal injection is today. It wasn’t something super-special that was set up for Jesus specifically.
Actually he stopped at the house of the local organizer of the militia. Told them the Regulars are out, meet at Concord and then went to the next town.
What’s awesome about Paul Revere is that he knew all these people. He was such a great ‘networker’ that he met and befriend every rebellion sympathizer he could find. He build this network for years and then created a flash mob that started the revolution.
Paul Revere was freaking awesome.
Nitpick : not always. E.g. the Sacred Band of Thebes.
But yeah, I absolutely know what you mean. And the Greek phenomenon that is most commonly interpreted as “gay” today (pederasty) didn’t typically involve anal sex at all.
The Soviets must have been *terribly *prepared then, because it’s true that the Germans weren’t even issued winter gear the first year around (because Moscow would have fallen before that ever became an issue, natch !), and due to infrastructure and logistics snafus would face shortages of it throughout the war. Thousands literally froze on their feet. Example at Stalingrad (not gory, disturbing, probably NSFW), note T-shirt.
I agree that it’s not the (or possibly even an) operative factor in their defeat, but it’s not complete tosh either.
I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but back in my 20s, when I was supplementing my income selling stories to confession magazines, I was paid by the word. It’s certainly not unheard of.
Right, what is supposed to be remarkable about Jesus’ form of execution was its vulgarity: that the Son Of God Himself submitted to the vile death of a common scum.
The original definition was all nations unaligned with the West (e.g. NATO) or the East (e.g. …ern Bloc). It says nothing about the economy of the country or how developed they are. Ethiopia would’ve been Second World, for example. Thus it includes unaligned countries who position themselves as an alternative like Argentina, Communist countries who aren’t friendly with the USSR (Yugoslavia), and others like India and Egypt. Nowadays of course it implies poverty but that was not the intent.
Nominally Anglican, like everyone else at the time who wanted some semblance of respectability. I don’t know this particular myth, but presumably it posits he was closeted Catholic.
The Warsaw Pact?
I know that that’s the origin of the phrase, but I don’t know how often Switzerland has ever been referred to as a “third world” nation…
I’m bothered when “death camp” and “concentration camp” are used interchangeably. Both were evil and certainly many concentration camps had alarming death totals, but there is a big difference. Death camps were specifically built for immediate systematic murder.
A nitpick:
Henry VIII left the Catholic Church because the Pope would not grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
No. He could have gotten a divorce in England without ever having to appeal to the Pope. He left the Catholic Church because the Pope would not grant him an annulment, which would allow his heirs with a new wife to be legitimate. Also, Pope’s granted annulments for childless/sonless marriages all the time- Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage to Louis was annulled for that reason- so it was a reasonable request, but Henry’s was denied largely due to secular reasons, among them:
1- The Pope had granted special dispensation for Henry to marry his brother’s widow and to say that the marriage was invalid because she was his brother’s widow was a dangerous precedent
2- Catherine’s nephew had the Pope surrounded and it wasn’t a great idea to piss him off.
History is all about the bass, about that bass.
No, in fact history is sometimes about the treble.
I think this is an example of a myth replacing the fact. The New Deal did help beat the Great Depression. But modern conservatives want to deny credit to any government program so they’re rewriting history.
Too simplistic. First of all, we dont know exactly when the megafauna went extinct. Secondly, there much debate on when Humans arrived. So, the amazing coincidence is just a guess.
But the actual “OverKill Hypothesis” has been disproven.
" The survival of this hypothesis is due almost
entirely to Paul Martin, the architect of the first detailed version of it. In North America, archaeologists and paleontologists whose
work focuses on the late Pleistocene routinely reject Martin’s position for two prime reasons: there is virtually no evidence that
supports it, and there is a remarkably broad set of evidence that strongly suggests that it is wrong. In response, Martin asserts that
the overkill model predicts a lack of supporting evidence, thus turning the absence of empirical support into support for his beliefs.
We suggest that this feature of the overkill position removes the hypothesis from the realm of science and places it squarely in the
realm of faith. One may or may not believe in the overkill position, but one should not confuse it with a scientific hypothesis about
the nature of the North American past."
You didn’t happen to hang out in a bar where “I Am My Own Grandpa” was on the jukebox?
Yes them too, lots of overlap. I think it also includes China and their sphere, but I don’t know how many people would go to that association immediately.
Right, but the part I quoted specified “undeveloped.”
Uh, I lived in Moscow in 1977. It was not as advanced as the US, but it was by no means a third world country.
Thank you for posting this, it saved me the trouble of typing up a similar post. In a related vein, I hate the myth that the Soviets won because “Russians are tough.” Millions of Soviet soldiers surrendered during WWII. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens actively aided the Axis powers.
Another myth that annoys me: “The Viet Cong rebels chased the Americans out using little more than punji sticks and gumption.” Actually the Southern Vietnamese rebels in the Viet Cong were almost completely destroyed during the course of the war and the victory belongs to the North Vietnamese military, who were equipped with surface to air missiles and MiGs.
On the Negro Baseball Leagues and Jackie Robinson.
First, Jackie Robinson is not that big of a hero. Truth was that while he was good, he wasnt even the top choices of the major leagues. He was chosen because they knew he could fit in the best.
Second, black baseball players were NOT happy Robinson left, nor did they ever want the top Negro talent to go to the majors. What they wanted was a Negro League - Major League MERGER. Where say the entire Homestead Grays, players, coaches, trainers, everyone, would as a team play right along with the major league teams like the Yankees and White Sox. The negro players knew that if they lost their top talent they would lose their fan base - the negro community. Which is exactly what happened. When Robinson left the black newspapers quit reporting on Negro League games and soon all the talent left and everyone left was out of a job. Thats players, coaches, managers - only thing left was to sell peanuts.
Third, what the majors wanted was a monopoly on baseball. MLB had been granted immunity from the trust laws and they soon drove every other baseball league out of business. The Negro leagues was the final one remaining.
Sidenote: According to Ken Burns there had been around 400 games over the years between MLB teams and NBL teams. The negro teams won about 3/4 of them.
So really, MLB when they retired Jackie’s number 22 and made him such a hero, what they were really doing was a business decision. One to drive away their competition and at the same team, increase their audience. Their was nothing noble or altruistic about it.
This one pisses me off because of a personal connection:
Rosa Parks was a setup.
The personal connection is that having gone to school in and lived in Montgomery for many years and known many people, white and black, who were alive at the time, several of whom knew the key figures on both sides of the Bus Boycott, I’ve heard this many many times from white people (including some in my own family who were there) and accepted it’s truth into adulthood.
Totally true: It was a set up. Rosa Parks was a Timelord who traveled in time first to set up slavery and then Reconstruction and then Jim Crow all just so that she could get arrested and be catapulted to worldwide fame and middle class.
It is true that the NAACP (of which she was a secretary) and several civil rights activists were looking for a test case. It is true that she was perfect:
-Intelligent
-Articulate
-Free of scandal (no illegitimate children or criminal record or Communist affiliations like previous would-be test cases)
-NAACP connections
What was not a set-up was the bus driver trying to force her to give up her seat by changing the seat she was in to white’s only.
Rosa Parks, like several other black people, had been kicked off the bus before by that driver and other drivers.
On this particular day (December 1, 1955) she did not feel like getting up or getting off the bus. I’ve read conflicting accounts as to why: she was tired, she was indignant, she felt “enough is by God enough”, she felt this was the case, etc… The correct answer is probably bits and pieces of all of the above.
As Rosa knew, there had been talks of a test case but, as mentioned, the people arrested had proved problematic (Claudette Colvin was too young and then got pregnant, the Alabama State professor who had Communist party ties, and others). She did know of the need for an unimpeachable person to try it.
A piece of the puzzle that’s often missing is the Emmett Till connection: Rosa Parks had just that past Sunday been to a special memorial service for Emmett Till at which some of Till’s relatives had spoken and pictures of his famous mangled remains were shown. Add to this the murders that did not get nearly as much press as Emmett Till, such as the black voter in Mississippi who had recently been shot to death in front of witnesses on a courthouse square without any charges ever being pressed against his murderer: I don’t have the slightest problem believing her when she said “I was tired… tired of giving in”.
So it was not a totally impromptu “Hey let’s start a civil rights revolution on this old bus!” moment, but it also wasn’t a “set-up” or anything like.
And what was Rosa’s reward?
She immediately got fired. Her husband got fired from his job on base because he mentioned something about “my wife” and that was said to be violating a warning not to discuss the Bus Boycott. They had to live on charity because they were unemployable. They had constant death threats and had to live in the back of their house with their windows boarded up.
Rosa sometimes spoke about her bitterness against members of the movement: there was a lot of misogyny in the black community and she was largely shoved aside by men in the movement while having to deal with the hate of the white community that ultimately forced her and her husband and mother to move to Detroit where they moved in with her brother and his enormous family (wife, 13 kids) in a small house until they could get on their feet financially. Add to this that the stress gave both her and her husband ulcers and her husband developed an alcohol problem. If it was a set up then she was the damnedest masochist in history.
Altho that’s true, the number of black slaves in Texas at that time was small (Maybe 5000?). Really what caused the break was the * Siete Leyes* (Seven Laws) of 1835, which also caused several other Mexican states to proclaim independence. The Mexican government had also offered immigrants a exemption from Property taxes for 10 years, but rescinded it. Also of course people of American descent outnumbered those of Mexican descent in the area by more than 4-1.
So, no doubt slavery was part of it, but it’s not like that was THE core basis, as in the Civil War.