History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII

[gay_Aleks]

My grandparents, alongside my parents, and our aunts and uncles?

All teachers. Only our uncle is a photographer.

 

[cybrxkhan]

My grandparents, alongside my parents, and our aunts and uncles?

All teachers. Only our uncle is a photographer.

Pretty much everyone in my family is a government worker/bureaucrat. Been that way since at least the 1600s, according to my dad. I, too, will someday continue this ancient, sacred tradition, and become a paper-pusher.

 

[JohannaK]

My grandfather was a chemist. My other grandfather was brn in the deep, rural country and had a myriad of jobs before he created a quite successful garbage disposal company running on not-very-legal practices and he sold it to an American company. He's been doing various investments since. My father and maternal uncles are all trained engineers, though my father works as a programmer I think and my uncles are both consultants for the same firm. My pternal grandfather's father worked at an electric car company, I'm not sure as what but possibly as a salesman. Maternals were all peasants, for what I know. My maternal grandmother's mother ran away from her town in the deep Aragonese Pyrenées to marry her stepbrother, then came here and survived as she could, while her husband caught the tuberculosis doing the military service and died soon afterwards, I don't know if before or after my grandmother was born.

Pretty diverse history.

 

[sophie]

Do we want to break this off into a "talk about your family history" thread? Plot?

Professionally -

Father's side:
Dad is a county parks employee. Landscape Architecture and Planning
Grandfather worked as an engineer planning projects in various places around the world. Apparently he was in Saudi Arabia for some time in the 70s and was in Chile when things were getting hairy with Allende
Again I know nothing about my paternal family beyond that other than the family moved to Great Britain from Nürnberg in 1871/2

Grandmother was a stay-at-home mom(?)
I don't know a whole lot about this side of the family either because - again - they never talk about their family, and my paternal family is extremely tiny to begin with. But this side of the family is from Cardiff. One of them apparently served in the Royal Artillery during WWI. We have a bunch of his service medals hanging on our wall. Another was a Classics Professor

Mother's side:
Mother worked as a business manager in various places in Chicago and the Bay Area before she quit to be a stay-at-home mom.
Grandfather worked as a carpenter and then as an engineer
My mom's paternal side of the family ran a fairly successful construction company. Apparently they built sizeable chunks of Sioux Falls, SD in the 1940s and 50s. Before that both sides of my mom's family were homesteaders in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa. A Norwegian branch came over in the 1840s and a Pommeranian branch came over in I think the 1850s or 60s? There's a Scots or Irish side of the family whom our family genealogist is still trying to pin down. Apparently they came over in the 17th century.

 

[cybrxkhan]

My maternal grandmother's mother ran away from her town in the deep Aragonese Pyrenées to marry her stepbrother

Oooh.... Hmm. Close enough.

But, seriously, that's kind of interesting. Sounds like some romance novel plot material.

 

[JohannaK]

Yeah, and then she actually lived off selling smuggled stuff in the streets, sometimes having to run away from the police. All this with her husband either dying or dead and a daughter to take care of. Definitely worth a novel or a movie.

 

[Future PM]

Pretty much everyone in my family is a government worker/bureaucrat. Been that way since at least the 1600s, according to my dad. I, too, will someday continue this ancient, sacred tradition, and become a paper-pusher.

The cycle of bureaucracy?

I agree with the idea of this becoming its own thread by this point.

 

[Traitorfish]

Do we want to break this off into a "talk about your family history" thread? Plot?

Took the liberty of starting a new thread here, save Plot the trouble of picking out which posts belong in in which thread.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Have there been any attempts by Jews to create a colony in America? Or, were there any major Jewish communities in colonial America?m

 

[Plotinus]

Took the liberty of starting a new thread here, save Plot the trouble of picking out which posts belong in in which thread.

Thanks!

Also, I have a question that I suppose counts as history. Has there ever been (as far as we know) a murder like one from an Agatha Christie novel or a Columbo episode - i.e. where the killer uses devilishly clever tricks and subterfuge to cover their tracks and is only unmasked through the brilliant use of little grey cells? Or are the situations Poirot finds himself in just impossible fantasy, and real murders are always much more straightforward?

 

[sophie]

Thanks!

Also, I have a question that I suppose counts as history. Has there ever been (as far as we know) a murder like one from an Agatha Christie novel or a Columbo episode - i.e. where the killer uses devilishly clever tricks and subterfuge to cover their tracks and is only unmasked through the brilliant use of little grey cells? Or are the situations Poirot finds himself in just impossible fantasy, and real murders are always much more straightforward?

Uhh

I guess the Zodiac Killer? Although he was never caught, some theorizing has come to light recently as to his true identity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy

Ted Bundy's another fairly famous example.

 

[Flying Pig]

Thanks!

Also, I have a question that I suppose counts as history. Has there ever been (as far as we know) a murder like one from an Agatha Christie novel or a Columbo episode - i.e. where the killer uses devilishly clever tricks and subterfuge to cover their tracks and is only unmasked through the brilliant use of little grey cells? Or are the situations Poirot finds himself in just impossible fantasy, and real murders are always much more straightforward?

Funnily enough, the Poirot model postdates it actually happening for real. The book in question is a novelistic retelling of quite a famous case, but could have been an episode from a detective novel had it not taken place before them! I read another book - Damn His Blood, by Peter Moore - which recounts another true crime, this time from about 1805, which was almost a serious version of Hot Fuzz.

Of course real murders are usually 'straightforward', and the vast majority of police time is not spent interviewing butlers and the like...

 

[Browd]

Although most murders may be "straightforward" in form, a disturbingly high percentage go unsolved: http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2013/01/rates-of-unsolved-murder-by-state.html

 

[Traitorfish]

Have there been any attempts by Jews to create a colony in America? Or, were there any major Jewish communities in colonial America?m

There were established Jewish communities in the major trading cities of colonial America, especially in Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, Providence and Boston. They were mostly were Sephardic Jews of English and Dutch origin, although there were a few German and Dutch Ashkenazi among them. Charleston, surprisingly, had the largest Jewish community in colonial America, a reflection of its centrality to commercial life in the Lower South.

There was one proposal to start a Jewish colony in North America, "Ararat", on a small island in Upper New York. It wasn't really a "colony", as we'd think of it, more a utopian community, and like most such plans it never really got off the ground. (The thing to remember about Jews is that before the 20th century, there wasn't really an impulse towards unification. Diaspora was, for better or worse, the Jewish lot; the debates were mostly about how far they should assimilate to local society and in what ways.)

 

[daft]

Is Assyrian influence the reason for Babylon turning from a rather peaceful empire (under Hammurabi) into a more aggressive and militaristic one (Nebuchadnezzar)?

 

[Truthy]

What are some good books on the political economy of the Holocaust?

 

[Lohrenswald]

Is Assyrian influence the reason for Babylon turning from a rather peaceful empire (under Hammurabi) into a more aggressive and militaristic one (Nebuchadnezzar)?

From what I know those were two different empires. And I believe Nebuchadnezzar lived 1000 years after Hammurabi.

 

[Traitorfish]

Yeah, there's not actually a lot of continuity between the Babylonian and neo-Babylonian Empires. They seem similar because the new rulers made a point of reviving old, pre-Assyrian customs and institutions to present themselves as the "original" rulers of the region. (And, in all likelihood, because they took the Babylonian legacy quite seriously for its own sake.)

 

[Flying Pig]

What are some good books on the political economy of the Holocaust?

The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze is supposed to be very good, though I haven't yet got round to reading it - it's on the Nazi economy as a whole, though.

 

[Cutlass]

What are some good books on the political economy of the Holocaust?

You could try Wages of Destruction.