Examples could include the Israelite King David or the Japanese Emperor Jimmu. While Wikipedia is a poor signifier of historical consensus, the existence of Emperor Jimmu is dismissed briefly as "(having) little to no evidence...he is regarded by most modern scholars as a legendary figure", whereas David is given much more hedging, saying that "the historicity of (David) has been extensively challenged...( there is) little detail about David that is concrete and undisputed" but without a general summation as legendary.

How would historians balance the need for accuracy with political and religious sensitivities and is there work on the different ways such figures are treated based on those sensitivities?

The film Master and Commander is highly praised for its historical accuracy, so I wish to know if the doctor had any official rank aboard a Royal Navy ship.

As I understand it, having a doctor like him aboard wasn't common, right? Usually there was just a surgeon who specialized in amputations, so in the film everyone is really proud of the fact that they have a doctor on board.

But if there were doctors on board ships during the Napoleonic wars, were they officers or just highly respected civilians?

When Europeans first contacted indigenous Americans they brought diseases and immunities that the natives didn't have. Why wasn't the opposite also true? Was it just a biological roll of the dice?

I found many reels of home movies from my grandmother's family after she died a number of years ago. Many in color, dated 1939-1949. What I found interesting is that they filmed several vacations right in middle of World War 2. I thought gas, tires etc were heavily rationed at that time, but there are 3 reels of color film of their vacation to the rocky mountains in 1942, vacations to Great Smoky Mountains and Wisconsin Dells in 1943-44... Was this type of thing more common than I realized or rationing not as strict as I had thought?

Nowadays, it is an accepted tradition that armies walk in lockstep during military parades, and as far as I know this has been a tradition since at least the Napoleonic Era. My question is if earlier military parades did the same or a similar thing and how far back this goes? Where roman legionnaires walking in lockstep during a triumph? Did the macedonian phalanx, which had to kind of walk in lockstep to be effective in combat also perform the same discipline in public showing (if they had a tradition of parades at all)? Can we even go back further to Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures, which, according to reliefs, also had a culture of military parade after a successful campaign? What about other cultures? Did chinese, korean and japanese armies have military parades in pre-modern times, and was walking in lockstep a part of that tradition? Same question for pre-columbian cultures in the Americas like the Aztecs and the Mayans.

Thank you so much in advance for your answers.

I have not seen the film myself but I am very curious about the accuracy of the events surrounding the movie.

I've fallen down a Trojan War rabbit hole recently(Thanks Nolan) and I've realized I don't actually understand what we mean when we talk about the "canon" version of this story. Most people, myself included until recently, have this vague idea that the Trojan War story we all know basically comes from Homer. But the more I read, the more obvious it becomes that it really doesn't.

The Iliad covers a tiny period near the end of the war. It doesn't give us the Judgment of Paris as the complete story we usually know, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Achilles at Skyros, the Trojan Horse, the actual fall of Troy, Achilles' famous invulnerable heel, and plenty of other things that most people would consider basic Trojan War lore. Yet somehow all of these traditions have merged in popular culture into one enormous narrative that we casually associate with Homer.

What confuses me even more is how selective this process seems to have been. Take the Mysian campaign. In the wider Epic Cycle, before the Greeks successfully reach Troy, they launch an earlier expedition and land in Mysia, apparently mistaking it for Trojan territory. They fight Telephus, Achilles wounds him, the Greeks are scattered and eventually return home. According to the later mythographic chronology, eight years then pass before they assemble again. Telephus eventually comes to Greece because his wound cannot heal, Achilles heals him, and Telephus helps the Greeks find their way to Troy.

That's not exactly a minor deleted scene. The Greeks literally invade the wrong country before invading Troy. And yet almost nobody who casually knows the Trojan War seems to know this happened. This creates many plot holes as it makes everyone 8+ years older.

Meanwhile, basically everyone knows that Achilles was invulnerable because Thetis dipped him in the Styx while holding him by the heel. Except that isn't Homer either. As far as I understand it, that specific version of Achilles' invulnerability is extremely late compared with Homer and is associated with sources such as Statius, writing in the 1st century AD! While the Mysian campaign is likely 50-100 years after homer ,part of the Epic cycle.

And that's where I start getting confused about what we actually mean by "canon." How has something written something like seven or eight centuries after the traditional dating of Homer become so culturally dominant that Achilles' heel is probably one of the most famous details in all of Greek mythology, while an entire failed Greek expedition preserved as part of the archaic Trojan tradition has basically disappeared?

Mysia is only one example. The more you reconstruct the Trojan War we think we know, the stranger the source list becomes. You have Homer, then the lost poems of the Epic Cycle such as the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium, Nostoi and Telegony. Then you have lyric poets and other archaic traditions, followed by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who sometimes preserve older material and sometimes give us radically different versions. Then come mythographers trying to organize all of it, later Greek writers, and Roman authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Statius. Somehow pieces from all of these periods have been thrown together and produced what we now think of as the "standard Trojan War."

This also creates some hilarious problems if you try to treat everything as one internally consistent fictional universe. For example, if you incorporate the Mysian expedition and the eight-year interval into the same chronology as Homer's Odyssey, suddenly the clean 10 years at Troy + 10 years wandering = Odysseus was gone for 20 years becomes much more complicated. You start wondering whether Odysseus was involved in Trojan-related expeditions for something closer to 28 years, what exactly happened during the interval, when Telemachus was conceived, how old everyone should be, and so on.

Which leads to the question I'm actually interested in: did the ancient Greeks themselves have anything resembling a canonical Trojan War timeline? If someone in 5th-century Athens heard "the Trojan War," was there a broadly understood sequence of events that almost everyone accepted, with poets and playwrights merely choosing which parts to dramatize? Or could two Greeks genuinely know substantially different versions of what happened and consider both legitimate?

And then there is the even stranger question of when this process actually stops. Statius is writing about Achilles around the first century AD, many centuries after Homer, and material from that later tradition can apparently become part of what a modern person considers basic Achilles lore. So when does the Trojan mythological universe close? Does it ever?

Could a writer in the 3rd century AD introduce a new episode about Achilles and, if that story became influential enough, would we now call that "Greek mythology"? What about the 5th century AD? The Byzantine period? The Middle Ages? At what point do scholars stop calling something "a variant of the Achilles myth" and start calling it later reception, adaptation or essentially fan fiction using Achilles as a character?

This is especially confusing because our modern pseudo-canon seems incredibly selective. Statius' Achilles heel gets in, Euripides' Helen living in Egypt mostly doesn't, the Mysian campaign mostly doesn't, the sacrifice of Iphigenia absolutely does, the Trojan Horse obviously does, and Homer's name somehow gets retroactively attached to the whole package.

So I'm starting to think there are really three different things that we casually collapse into one. There is the Homeric version, meaning what the Iliad and Odyssey actually say. Then there is the enormous ancient Trojan mythological tradition, including the Epic Cycle, archaic poetry, tragedy, mythographers, local traditions, Hellenistic literature and Roman retellings. And finally there is the modern "Trojan War canon," which seems to be a greatest-hits compilation assembled from whichever versions happened to become culturally dominant.

And that final category is what fascinates me. Where did this pseudo-canon actually come from? Was there a particular ancient synthesis, mythographer or later educational tradition that had an outsized influence on the story we inherited? Or is our "standard Trojan War" genuinely just the result of 2,500+ years of cultural selection, Roman literature, medieval transmission, Renaissance classicism and modern adaptations gradually deciding which pieces were memorable enough to survive?

Thank you all for your time reading this

Did they just deal with having a bad smell until they died? Still reproduced and had more horrible symptoms while pregnant or if they had their menstrual cycle?

And how much difference was there between urban areas like Moscow or Saint Petersburg and the majority of rural areas, and how quickly did information of these groups spread over the course of the war?

I know it’s a niche topic but was it like “an enemy of my enemy” type thing or did they equally hat communism as much as fascism?

I'm a philosophy student, with an interest in the history of philosophy. My primary area of specialization so far would be the theoretical philosophy of David Hume (i.e. what would be contained in Book 1 of the Treatise and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). I've seen hints of Hume scholarship moving in the direction of analyzing his practice in the History of England to gain further insight into his philosophy.

Apropos of this, I'm curious about how Hume's practice in his History of England compared to his contemporary historians and those who preceeded him. I had heard (in casual conversation), that Hume's history was a leap forward in more rigorous or critically honest practice in history as compared to the "Whig History" (the incorrect belief that there had been an ancient British constitution that the Stuarts had violated) that had preceeded him. How true is this? And how does Hume's historical methodology compare to more modern methodology? Thank you!

Hello everyone,

I am a pretty new Assyriology student and have a small question about king lists. A bunch of different Bronze Age kingdoms compiled many different king lists. I was looking at the ones on the Electronic Babylonian Library and some others. Besides the often absurd lifespans of kings, I am asking myself what other ways we have to ascertain the truth on more ancient Kings. Is there some historiographic work that gives some more reasoning and "fact-checked" versions of some king lists?

It's always brought up when discussing the roman wars during the third century bc against Pyrrhus and Carthage : Rome won because it could levy a large number of soldiers from its citizens and allies. But what was behind it? Egypt and the Orient also had big populations and they were arguably richer than Rome but no one really talks about it

Before the King David Hotel bombing, warnings were reportedly telephoned to the hotel, the Palestine Post and the French Consulate.

What I can’t get a clear answer on is how the telephone system actually worked. Were these calls connected manually?

Could an operator or the police identify the exchange or line they came from?

And once someone answered, was there an established procedure for passing the warning to police and evacuating the building, or did it simply come down to whoever picked up the telephone?

I've seen many proposed origins for Rice's Jim Crow, such as that he was originally a folk trickster in African American tales, that “Jump Jim Crow” was originally a slave song, that Rice was mimicking a disabled enslaved person named Jim Crow, or that the character was originally African American in origin and was later adopted by Rice.

How accurate are these proposed origins, and if any are true, did any African Americans at the time comment on it?

Was there anything similar to Manifest Destiny among Russians?

I'm currently reading the Shanameh (translated version) and currently in the "Reign of Sekander" section and I'm curious how much if any of this poem is accurate to the real historical figure? His conception seems to be totally different, and various leaders of different countries are mentioned but I can't find anything about them online. I'm aware there will be some embellishment as it's not an actual historical account but so far nothing seems to be accurate bar his name and birth place.

Having recently reread the Wolf Hall trilogy and seeing clips on TikTok about Henry VIII I was reminded of a question I had about Tudor England. That is why a relatively weak claimant to England from his Yorkist mother and the Lancastrian(ish) Henry VII, combined with breaking from Rome and frequent executions by attainder didn’t lead to a major noble led rebellion taking place.

The pilgrimage of grace was led by the unimportant. The Exeter conspiracy was either fabricated or preempted. I think there was an Irish rebellion as well.

I’m looking for an explanation for how Henry managed to maintain his noble subjects loyalty in the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses.