History questions not worth their own thread IV

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I don't believe anybody's managed to make a serious dent in that story.

What isn't true is the claim that hookers were named after Burnside's successor as general commanding, Army of the Potomac, Joseph Hooker. Fighting Joe did have a reputation as a womanizer, but the term predates his fame by a few decades.
Then the most important question is: where does the term hooker come from?
 
Presumably a reference to 'fishing' for customers by the sort of tactics you see just about every Saturday night (or used to, anyway) in any decent-sized city.
 
It would have been pretty difficult for Lincoln to launch an invasion of Cuba when the nearest Union state was Delaware.

Well, the idea was to declare war on Spain and then the secessionist states would change their minds and join in.
 
John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (1859) defines hooker as a strumpet, a sailor's trull. He also said that the word was derived from Corlear's Hook, a district in New York City, though this us disputed...

"...Although the term hooker did not originate during the Civil War," wrote Bruce Catton, "it certainly became popular then. During these war years, Washington developed a large red-light district somewhere south of Constitution Avenue. This became known as Hooker's Division in tribute to the proclivities of Joseph Hooker and the name has stuck ever since."

...It is most likely that hooker is, etymologically, derived simply from "one who hooks". The term portrays a prostitute as a person who hooks, or snares, clients
. - American Heritage Dictionary

So it appears that while word did not originate with General Hooker, the Union soldiers may have spontaneously adopted and popularized it. This is commonplace with some words like Borked, after Robert Bork. (OED: the verb Bork - U.S. political slang, with this definition: "To defame or vilify (a person) systematically, esp. in the mass media, usually with the aim of preventing his or her appointment to public office"). As in; the NOW tried to Bork Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court.
 
Presumably a reference to 'fishing' for customers by the sort of tactics you see just about every Saturday night (or used to, anyway) in any decent-sized city.
How am I meant to tell hookers apart from regular old skanks in times like this? It's an outrage.
 
I have no idea where that line of discussion is going.

Anyway, can someone give me examples of real maps scribbled on by representatives of powers to outline spheres of influence, such as the map used for the Sykes-Picot Agreement?
 
Is it apt to group Luther with guys such as Hus, Wycliffe, and Waldo in terms of their status as Christian theologians and/or heretics?

Why was Luther able to "succeed" when others (see above) failed?

Maybe a political situation in Germany that was more congenial to religious reform and conversion than the situation that Luther's predecessors dealt with.
 
Is it apt to group Luther with guys such as Hus, Wycliffe, and Waldo in terms of their status as Christian theologians and/or heretics?

Why was Luther able to "succeed" when others (see above) failed?

Hus, Wycliffe and Luther were heretics; the formal definition of which, for the Catholic Church, is an individual, baptized within the Catholic Church, who publicly teaches a grave falsehood in theology or ethics, and continues to do so after a reprimand from an appropriate authority figure (usually a bishop). So your average lapsed Catholic isn't a heretic, since they don't receive individual censures from their diocese (though they may hold heretical beliefs, which is technically not the same thing). Note the difference between "heretic" and "apostate"; a heretic claims himself to be Catholic, despite demonstrating the contrary, whereas an apostate is an individual baptized within the Catholic Church, who formally renounces the faith.

Does Waldo refer to Ralph Waldo Emerson? If so, he's not a heretic since he was never baptized within the Catholic Church.

Why was Luther's movement more successful than Wycliffe's and Hus's? A combination of the political atmosphere in Germany at the time and the printing press being a really useful tool for propaganda.
 
Plotinus, IIRC, believes that Luther was more successful not merely because of the printing press, but because his theology was significant more solid and appealing than that of previous men who disagreed with Rome.
 
Plotinus, IIRC, believes that Luther was more successful not merely because of the printing press, but because his theology was significant more solid and appealing than that of previous men who disagreed with Rome.

I would have to let Plotinus defend that thesis himself, but it's unconvincing to me. At its core, Lutheranism suffers from basically the same errors as the heretics that preceded him; and then when you fine-comb his beliefs, there's nothing of substance. It's mostly a lot of political flip-flopping (such as his brief endorsement of polygamy), rabble-rousing ultra-antisemitism, and a lot of weird one-shot stuff that you might come across in the Tischreden.

I really have to attribute the widespreading of Lutheranism to a really good PR campaign and contemporary politics. His earliest allies were not theological zealots or devout reformists; they were German princes that were investigating if they could use a demagogue like Luther to spite Kaiser Karl V. The news of Luther's condemnation in Exsurge Domine came out only a week after the Papal condemnation of another German populist author (name escapes me)*, so the initial traction that Luther got from the theses was largely an overlap with a general perception of Italian preferentialism in the Catholic Church (primarily the reason why Erasmus initially sympathized with Luther but backed away as Luther's theological insanity became more and more apparent).

EDIT: The controversy between Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen against the German scholar of Hebrew manuscripts, Johann Reuchlin, is what I was thinking of. The Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum case had been settled in virtually the same week as Luther's condemnation, so the Germans outraged over Reuchlin's manifested injustice spilled over into defending Luther, allegedly then a poor German monk being wronged by Rome just like Reuchlin was. The contingent events that coincided with the Protestant Reformation are so often forgotten, but so important in the outcome.

@light spectra: Peter Waldo of the Waldensians

I actually had to look this up, because the name given to this person when I studied it was Petrus Valdes. Unnecessary anglicizations aside, yes, they were a heretical sect. Although they appear to be a protofranciscan organization at first glance, Valdes was (according to all information available about him) quite dead-set on denying the apostolic authority of the Catholic Church and the Sacrament of Holy Orders.
 
I would think that Luther's teachings also benefited from an extra century or so of general church corruption.

But I would agree with others above me that the main reason it was not stamped out at the time, and thus remains widespread today, is that it was politically attractive to rulers looking to flip off the Pope/Emperor.
 
But I would agree with others above me that the main reason it was not stamped out at the time, and thus remains widespread today, is that it was politically attractive to rulers looking to flip off the Pope/Emperor.
The whole Peace of Augsburg makes that claim look like the steaming pile of dung that it is.

And the only person who's made that claim other than you is one of this forum's two noted blinkered papists, so. It's like using Traitorfish or Cheezy as a reliable source on soshalizm.
 
The whole Peace of Augsburg makes that claim look like the steaming pile of dung that it is.

Could you clarify this please?
 
Could you clarify this please?
Because it promoted something that was very obviously and inescapably a consensual, federal, and stable system of government that didn't involve mutually destructive Imperial-Evangelical conflict? If there was a consistent aim among the evangelical princes of the Empire from Worms and Speyer to Augsburg, it was seeking the ability to reach a settlement with the imperial authorities that either reformed the church as they believed necessary or finding a place in the imperial political-religious system that permitted them to retain evangelical modes of worship. When things happened outside this framework, like the convulsion in 1552, they were outliers.

It should be somewhat strange to see you, of all people, employing a purely materialistic approach to this sort of thing. But then again, popery is supposedly so superior that the motives of any fool who could possibly disagree with it must be disparaged.
 
Because it promoted something that was very obviously and inescapably a consensual, federal, and stable system of government that didn't involve mutually destructive Imperial-Evangelical conflict? If there was a consistent aim among the evangelical princes of the Empire from Worms and Speyer to Augsburg, it was seeking the ability to reach a settlement with the imperial authorities that either reformed the church as they believed necessary or finding a place in the imperial political-religious system that permitted them to retain evangelical modes of worship. When things happened outside this framework, like the convulsion in 1552, they were outliers.

No, I disagree with this interpretation. By the Augsburg Settlement in 1555, there indeed had blossomed devout Lutherans that were more sincere about the spiritual elements of the Reformation than the political. So I don't dispute that. But to trace that all the way back to Worms in 1521 is a retroactive interpretation of something that took thirty years to develop. In 1521, Luther's allies weren't spiritually fanatical, they were either opportunistic nobles like Friedrich III, Kurfürst von Sachsen, who had a clear anti-Habsburg agenda in escorting Luther to the Reichstag.

The fundamental question is why was Luther successful where Hus and Wycliffe were not. The answer is, contingent events in the political atmosphere that initially made Luther useful, in addition to good PR and rabble-rousing on Luther's part.
 
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