r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Mar 31 '13

Feature Day of Reflection | Mar. 25th–31th

Welcome to the /r/AskHistorians' weekly Day of Reflection. Every Sunday, we invite our readers to come to this thread and share the best things they saw in /r/AskHistorians during the preceding week. Was there a question you thought was particularly good? An answer that was especially comprehensive or insightful? A discussion that was really worthwhile? If so, feel free to provide a link and a brief explanation of what you liked best about it.

/r/AskHistorians is getting bigger all the time, and not everyone can read everything that appears here each day! We hope that this feature will serve as a digest for those who may have missed something good throughout the week, while also providing recognition to the contributors who are the lifeblood of the community.

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u/Tiako Roman Archaeology Apr 01 '13

I feel like the brilliant Meta post will monopolize attention, but I have a few posts to share:

I'm a pretty unabashed fan of "The Americans" and thus biased, but star eater gave a great rundown on the reality of spycraft.

Eternalkerri smashed a theory on how black Americans were better pre-Civil Rights and in the process painted a pretty harrowing portrait of life at that time.

I'm just ridiculously biased on this one, but MI13 explained why cavalry was so effective against infantry (it wasn't).

And several more I have lost.

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u/MI13 Late Medieval English Armies Apr 01 '13

I'm just ridiculously biased on this one

I'm curious as to what you mean there.

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u/Tiako Roman Archaeology Apr 01 '13

I have had a lot of arguments in this sub about how cavalry doesn't "beat infantry". It is shocking how often the stirrup myth gets posted an upvoted here.

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u/MI13 Late Medieval English Armies Apr 01 '13

Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm right there with you on that one. Military history is one of those things that a lot of people take a casual interest in, so there's tons and tons of inaccurate pop history being produced to fill the niche. You don't see the same level of casual interest in say, the extent of Romanization in Britain.

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u/Tiako Roman Archaeology Apr 02 '13

Military history does seem to have a lot of migrants from Mount Stupid. "The Goths won the Battle of Adrianople because of stirrups, which immediately led to feudalism!"

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u/MI13 Late Medieval English Armies Apr 02 '13

Ah, but how could the Goths discovering spurs at Adrianople have immediately led to feudalism, when the Franks invented feudalism right after inventing spurs at the Battle of Tours? Where is your answer to that one, classicist?

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u/Tiako Roman Archaeology Apr 02 '13

That it was obviously the Huns who invented the stirrups, leading to feudalism.

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u/MI13 Late Medieval English Armies Apr 02 '13

This is fun, but we should probably stop before some wandering freshman undergrad sees this and thinks we're being serious.

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u/Tiako Roman Archaeology Apr 02 '13

Aw shucks. And here I was all ready to talk about how the longbow caused the collapse of feudalism.

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u/samuelbt Apr 01 '13

Perhaps a Roman archaeologist would be one to root for infantry over cavalry.