History questions not worth their own thread III

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Woops, missed a syllable, thanks. That's fair enough. Although, in my mind, emphasizing a switch to Greek at the split deemphasizes the continuity between the Eastern Empire and the so-called Byzantine Empire. Completely arbitrary, I know. I usually just use common English usage anyway :p
 
Ah, that's very, very different. The spears I'm talking about are made of more plyable wood, which allows for some bending, but also for it to snap back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfB2Djimrok
Watch the video especially around 0:05.


I don't think "bending" is the right term for what you are describing. The lightweight wooden shaft has some flexibility, rather than being entirely rigid. But that is an artifact of the design, and not intentional part of it. And likely has no effect on the utility of that form of spear.
 
In the Malay World, at least, there's a clear distinction made between flexible and inflexible spears. The two stress different approaches to fighting.
 
My first visit and post in this forum...

My son has a GCSE (UK national 16+) exam coming up this year in history and one of the areas for study is Vietnam. He needs to prepare notes for a series of essays written under hybrid exam conditions.

The first of these is the My Lai massacre, and what actual, or perceived, or both, influences and effects it had on the US (civilians, military, or in general).

Alternatively, to what extent was it a symptom of changes already in process...

Anyone have any reputable sources for this kind of discussion?
Anyone have any input?

Many thanks..
 
Inspired by a recent thread, can anybody tell me exactly how widespread the use of Greek was in the Roman Empire? I know it was used in Southern Gaul, but did it spread further north? Also, why didn't the Romans attempt to enforce Latin? Most other empires in history have required at least the ruling elite to learn their language, but the Romans seemed happy to do business in the local language everywhere they went.
 
The first of these is the My Lai massacre, and what actual, or perceived, or both, influences and effects it had on the US (civilians, military, or in general).

reputable source is the last word many here would use to describe me , though the reason only one person was charged with anything and that only because he was seen throwing a baby that had crawled out back into a heap of dead bodies some other place some other time , is taken to be a link that it was not frustation but orders from high up that caused the massacre .
 
bathsheba: I wish I could help more, but what little I know about either My Lai or the Second Indochina War in general is kinda...skewed, based almost entirely on late 1970s and early 1980s US Army postmortems.
Inspired by a recent thread, can anybody tell me exactly how widespread the use of Greek was in the Roman Empire? I know it was used in Southern Gaul, but did it spread further north?
There's basically no evidence for it. Greek was spoken widely in southern Gaul because of the Greek colonies there (same reason it was spoken along the Iberian coastline), and that was mostly during the earlier period of the Empire - there's no evidence for it later. There'd be no point to learning it as a trade language further north because Greeks wouldn't, ah, be trading there. It wasn't necessary to learn it for government or to be part of any sort of elite. So outside of the odd traveler I can't imagine that it was very widespread at all.
Lord Baal said:
Also, why didn't the Romans attempt to enforce Latin? Most other empires in history have required at least the ruling elite to learn their language, but the Romans seemed happy to do business in the local language everywhere they went.
The Roman elite was defined by its knowledge not only of Latin, but of an archaic "classical" Latin from the first centuries BC and AD. Membership in such an elite was contingent on one's knowledge of the language. Furthermore, Latin was necessary, at least in a rudimentary sense, for service in the army, which considering its size and its recruitment policies must have spread the use of the language extremely far over the imperial centuries.

Insofar as the Romans 'did business' in other languages (basically just Greek), they did so in meaningful but limited contexts - usually meaning just that, business, as in trade. In the East, Emperors coined in Greek (imperator replaced by strategos autokrator and the like). This is not particularly unique for its time, though. The rulers of the Iranian states - the Arshakid, and Sasanian Empires, as well as the Baktrian and Indohellenic states - coined in the local language in certain contexts, Greek for the Arshakids and Sasanians and Kharoshthi for the Baktrians and Indo-Greeks. So too did the Yuezhi-Kushans, who employed a sort of semi-Greek on their coins. Vaguely, I might hypothesize that this was because in each case the local group that spoke that language was highly likely to be using such coins. The reason Rome did not coin widely in, say, Brythonic may be because people who spoke that language were unlikely to be trading with currency, uninvolved in such an economy as they were. It's not a very good guess, because it relies pretty heavily on the [Romans, Yuezhi, Parni, etc.] being more aware of the linguistic situation than they are likely to have been and sort of distorts the record of coinage in pre-Roman Western Europe, but it's a guess, at least.
 
Thanks for the answer Dachs. But you raised another question in the teeming maelstrom that is my head. I remember reading in one of Winston Churchill's books - not a very reliable source, I know - that the Romano-Britons minted their own coins. Any truth to that, or did Winston have the timing wrong? Because I know they coined themselves after the Anglo-Saxon migrations began.
 
Constantine III certainly minted coins, though that could have been after he invaded Gaul.
 
Thanks for the answer Dachs. But you raised another question in the teeming maelstrom that is my head. I remember reading in one of Winston Churchill's books - not a very reliable source, I know - that the Romano-Britons minted their own coins. Any truth to that, or did Winston have the timing wrong? Because I know they coined themselves after the Anglo-Saxon migrations began.
The pre-Roman British Celts also minted (very infrequently and probably largely in copper, which has not lasted); there exist coins purportedly of Cassivellaunus, noted pre-Augustan "big man" of the southeast.

We have basically no evidence of widespread coinage from before the sixth century or so (seventh century is probably more accurate), when sceattas start to appear. One of the problems with sceattas, though, is that it's almost impossible to tell who was minting most of them in the first place. I find it difficult to believe that they were confined to the migratory elements, and some historians have proposed that they were an indigenous (i.e. Romano-British) development. They do appear in Jutland and Frisia around the same time, but that's hardly evidence of anything - they could very well have been an insular development that carried over through the North Sea integrated trading zone, or they may simply be improperly classified as the same thing.

The lack of discovered indigenous coinage from the fifth and early sixth centuries is one of the primary supports for the idea of the "Great Simplification", the collapse of British (and northwestern European in general) trading networks in the wake of the end of Roman authority.
When did the Holy Roman Empire begin to widely use ducats?
Depends on what part of the Empire you're talking about. The KoB and the Archduchy were using them at least as far back as the fourteenth century, but there was no Imperial approval of their use until the mid-sixteenth century.
 
The pre-Roman British Celts also minted (very infrequently and probably largely in copper, which has not lasted); there exist coins purportedly of Cassivellaunus, noted pre-Augustan "big man" of the southeast.
Interestingly, some of them feature the ruler with a torc perched upon his head like a Roman laurel wreath, which has been interpreted as representing both a willingness to imitate the Romans in some respects and a hesitance about importing Roman culture wholesale. It would have been interesting to see how a Roman-influenced British culture developed in the absence of direct rule (the Hen Ogledd not offering the most bountiful evidence in that regard).
 
The coins minted by Carausius and Allectus in the 280s-90s - when Britain basically declared independence from the Roman empire - were the best coins of the entire century, far superior to any "official" Roman coins or the miserable bits of metal made by the earlier breakaway faction known as the Gallic empire. In fact most of our knowledge of the British rebellion comes from the coins.
 
I want to educate myself as I wait for my conscription to start.

I remember someone talking about Henry Kissenger's Diplomacy as a good starter to International Relations theory on this forum. Aside from that, are there any other good books on Diplomacy that will give me a good basic pre-university education? Such as the different theories and such? Books that focus on the UN will be nice too. Anyone have any good suggestion?
 
I want to educate myself as I wait for my conscription to start.

I remember someone talking about Henry Kissenger's Diplomacy as a good starter to International Relations theory on this forum. Aside from that, are there any other good books on Diplomacy that will give me a good basic pre-university education? Such as the different theories and such? Books that focus on the UN will be nice too. Anyone have any good suggestion?
Diplomacy isn't that good. It's a decent start, but you have to remember that it's pretty out-dated by now. Then again, most international relations texts written before the 1980s are failry out-dated by now.

A good place to start would be The Globalization of World Politics by Bayliss, Smith and Owens. I have the 4th edition at home, but there may be a newer one. At any rate, between the main text and the book of case studies it comes with it's pretty much required reading for any introductory course to international relations. Other books you should read for historical perspective are Machiavelli's The Prince, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant's []. You should alsos read "The Melian Dialogue," which is an excerpt from Thucydides' History of the Pelopponessian War, but I think there's an excerpt in The Globalization of World Politics. You might want to read a more detailed version though.

Other great texts for theory are Hedley Bull's Anarchical Society, Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics, Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations and Alexander Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics. I'm a Neo-Realist myself, so maybe someone else could help you with good works on Liberalism and Marxism (like any exist :p), but all these texts will give you a good grounding in IR, even if you disagree with them - as I do, actually. Robert Keohane has written some good stuff as well, but I don't recall the name of his text I read at university now.

This stuff will get you up to university level. You don't really want to stop at a pre-uni level; most pre-uni stuff on IR is nationalistic bullcrap. Good luck, you should be able to track most of this stuff down fairly easily. Machiavelli, Hobbes and Thucydides are probably even online.
 
A good place to start would be The Globalization of World Politics by Bayliss, Smith and Owens. I have the 4th edition at home, but there may be a newer one.
Wow. I was going to suggest this myself. 4th edition and all! :scan:

There's also Theories of International Relations by Burchill, Linklater, Devetak, Donnelly, Nardin, Paterson, Reus-Smit and Jacqui True which I found useful. I have 4th edition of this one as well. I seem to remember its chapter on Marxist theory to be quite good, in particular.
 
I haven't read that book, but Linklater is pretty good. I think I may have read his chapters in excerpt form at uni.
 
Thanks! The input is great. But what do you mean when you say 'Diplomacy' is outdated? Do you mean that since publishing, new historical sources have been accessed/discovered/included in the theories of IR that has changed world view points on both Liberal and Realist theories?
 
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