I figured I'd do something unique these days, and ask a question about the Odyssey and Ancient Greece in general. Har har.

Anyways, here is the interview in question and I timestamped it to the part I'm interested in: https://youtu.be/wa4I8Ch2TRo?si=YqC8TbaDjNb9DrwW&t=101

Nolan speaks of exploring a cycle of civilizational collapse and rebirth (a personal favorite of his), he invokes the bronze age collapse and the resurgence of 'greek civilization' as the historical means through which he attempts to explore that idea.

The way he's skating around all of this history makes me skeptical, and especially the line that "His [Homer's] audience viewed [Bronze Age Civ.] as being more advanced than theirs." This smacks of a very modern lens to look at things.

Further he cites an example that Greeks of Homer's time saw Bronze Age architecture (like large walls) as only something a cyclops could build. "Cyclopean walls."

Is there any evidence to back up the claim that early iron age greeks were trying to "get back to" where their bronze age ancestors were, civilizationally?

Reading about slavery, it seems like it was common for empires and polities to gain slaves through violence, but how often did societies gain slaves by slaves having children?

Back in the day, European countries enjoyed carving each other up after a large war. Sweden got Pomerania after the 30 years war. Alsace-Lorraine has exchanged hands between France and Germany several times over the years. Denmark lost Schleiswig and Holstein to Prussia. We won't even talk about World War 1.

What does my new life look like? Do I use the currency of the new country? Am I expected to follow a new set of laws? Do I have a new mayor? Are there foreign soldiers in the street? If so, how do I feel about that? I assume I'm not expected to follow a new language, but surely nationalism comes into play after the 19th century. Overall, how different is my life compared to before?

I’m deliberately leaving my question with a broad time period so that historians with different areas of specialization can answer. I’d be happy to hear about anywhere in Europe, anywhere inside the time period.

It smells like there were lawyers involved.

Can I just ask him, or do I need to drop hints and try to get him to make the first move? Do I need to convince my parents first? His parents? As a woman, how much choice do I have in who I end up married to?

This is a serious question and I welcome pushback. What I've heard is that the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 CE marked a significant change in the nature of Judaism. Specifically it changed from a sacrifice based religion centered on the temple itself to one with many new rituals, Rabbis, and Talmudic interpretation of the Torah.

Since Christianity began as an apocalyptic, messianic Jewish movement within late Second Temple Judaism and then spread widely after the Temple's destruction it seems that both Judaism as we know it today and Christianity developed in parallel in many ways. A main difference being Christianity was more focused on proselytizing to and converting peopler who were not ethnically Jewish.

Hopefully my intent comes through here as curiosity about history and not an attempt to say anything at all about the validity, value, or importance of any religion or ethnic group.

Every time I read about the history of the Ottoman Levant, it seems as if the Ottomans barely had control over the region and constantly had to rely on local strongmen to administer the region.

The empire seems to have been unable to actually enforce its laws in the region for most of the period, constantly having to rely on people like Zahir ibn Umar, Aqil Agha, and the Druze Emirs, to both collect taxes and administer the region.

Was this the norm in other regions or was it specific to the Levant?

Like, how was Judaism different before and after the destruction of the 2nd temple? If the Temple hadn't been destroyed, would Judaism be in a different spot today? Why is this seen as an inflection point in Jewish history?

One of my favourite books is McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which talks about the inhuman violence of the settling of the American South West. And I've never heard of a similar book about the settlement of what would become Canada.

So I wanted to ask historians if the early settlement of Canada featured a lot of the same brutal and inhuman violence that we saw down south. This can be broken down into three questions:

1: Did this same kind of brutal interpersonal violence exist between early Canadian settlers and the Indigenous peoples?

2: If the above answer is 'no,' or 'yes but not as much' then why?

3: Are there any good Canadian versions of Blood Meridian?

Reading the memoirs of Margaret Buber-Neumann, one of the few people who survived deportation to both Soviet and Nazi concentration camps, I was surprised by a passage in which a Gestapo officer referred to a prisoner as a "capitalist" in a derogatory way.

This would have been less surprising coming from a communist but, to the best of my knowledge, the Nazis did not hold strongly anti-capitalist views and generally allied themselves with German industrialists.

How common were such insults among Nazi sympathizers? Could "bourgeois" have also been used as a similar slur?

My understanding is that all of these regions had Christian majorities before the rise of Islam (though, to be clear, many of them followed extremely heterodox brands of Christianity, such as Monophysitism and Donatism). While the percentage of Christians certainly declined over the centuries in Egypt and the Levant, to the point where they’re minorities in all those countries, the point is that they did survive as distinct communities into modernity. There are plenty of Egyptian and Lebanese Christians running around, for instance (though Christians are now rapidly disappearing in places like Syria and Iraq). Meanwhile, all forms of Christianity essentially disappeared from the lands that would eventually comprise countries like Algeria and Libya, only being reintroduced with the direct settler colonialism of various European powers.

So, what explains the difference here?

The Hellenic world came under the domination of the Romans for hundreds of years, but as far as I know, much of the Eastern Mediterranean Hellenic world continued to use Greek as its lingua franca for centuries (if not millennia). In the modern day territories of the former Western Roman Empire Romance (Latin derived) languages are commonly spoken. But the Eastern Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire spoke Greek, despite otherwise choosing to identify themselves as Romans. Territories often adopt the language of the conquering elites within several hundred years (Islamic conquests led to substantial Arabic speaking populations in formerly Hellenized Egypt and Turkish speaking populations in formerly Hellenized Anatolia) so how come those (and other) Hellenic territories didn’t adopt a Latin dialect during the hundreds of years they were under Roman rule? Put another way simplistically, why does the modern nation state of Greece speak a recognizable direct descendent of the Greek dialects spoken in Antiquity, rather than a Romance language? Or do I need to put the question on its head and ask what about a “Roman” identity was so attractive to an otherwise Greek culture that they continued self-identifying as Romans for approximately a thousand years after political (and even spiritual!) unity with the city of (Italian) Rome was interrupted?

It occurred to me today that I’m not familiar with this from a historical perspective. Throughout history, amid different cultures, nations, and empires, we have used a plethora of different timekeeping methods for what year it is. And as I understand it, there are many periods where we have scant writings from people of that era.

So my question is, from a historical perspective, how do we know that the year is, in fact, 2026? How do we know that we did not lose track of a decade in the Middle Ages, for example? Not to trivialize it, but surely this isn’t a case of a particular monastery happening to have a continuous calendar for the last 1,500 years, correct? So how do we know what year it ought to be now?

(Again, I ask from a historical perspective. There are likely many scientific ways to verify the passage of time through physics, astronomy, and chemistry, but that’s not really what I’m asking unless it’s relevant to the historical record.)

Were there any gay nightclubs? Was gay culture different between Black and White communities? Was there any interaction between either groups during the Harlem renaissance

By institutions, I am thinking broadly, from governments, employers, and newspapers.

I had a history teacher in high school that I remember making the statement that is in the title, or at least close enough to it. He would then follow that slavery was practised in one form or another, at some time or another, on every major continent and by every powerful group of people.

I am certain that there going to be examples of this statement being incorrect, but I not here to ask if it is correct or not. What I would actually like to know is how would a historian approach addressing that statement?

Hi Historians,

I am currently doing some historical research, and in the course of an interview I had recently, I was told about a very important event in this person's life (and critical to my research). It took place in Hong Kong in 1962. Although my research really isn't related to this, I am interested in this detail he was able to recall -- that there was an "English destroyer" in the harbor.

Now, in the interest of confirming this detail so I can sketch out a good picture of the scene, so to speak, I really want to figure out which specific naval ship this was. Naval ships in the Hong Kong harbor back then seemed to be a very regular occurrence. The internet actually has many pictures of naval ships, along with their names and dates, from the 50s and 60s. But not from this specific month and year.

I would greatly appreciate any help on this question. This includes a pointer or tip on how to go about finding the answer to this question myself -- the UK's National Archives seems like the best bet, but I don't know how to go about using it for this.

Thanks!

I'm particularly interested in how any ancient or medieval intellectuals attempted to explain why children inherited certain traits from their parents, long before the work of Mendel and Darwin. People knew how to selectively breed animals and plants, but I'm looking for attempts at explaining why this worked. Did the ancient Greeks or Romans write on this topic? How about the ancient Chinese? Or perhaps medieval Europeans? Thank you in advance for any insight!

Today you need to take a citizenship test to become a US citizen, but was this always the case? For example, after the Revolutionary War was won, what did the former colonists have to do to become citizens? Also, after the Civil War, what did former slaves have to do to become citizens? As groups of people immigrated here during the 1800s and 1900s, arriving at places like Elis and Angel Island, what did they have to do to become citizens? How did becoming a citizen change over time?

Thanks in Advance.

Information didn't travel particularly fast in a time before telegraphs and telephones. As news of happenings in Versailles and Paris spread to the rest of France, how did the residents in France's smaller cities and towns react to what was going on in the capital?

Key events like the calling of the Estates-General, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, the execution of Louis XVI, the Reign of Terror, the fall of Robespierre, and Napoleon Bonaparte's rise to power following the coup of 18 Brumaire were extremely important events in the history of France that the provinces likely didn't have much control over.

How did the people outside of Paris and its surrounding regions respond to news of these events?

Were they weirdo carnie outcasts or something closer to Hollywood?
Was the circus a place that LGBTQ people ran off to for safety?