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I would even call it Wales if the Welsh hadnt been conquered almost 1,000 years ago. I seriously doubt there is anyone in western England who can claim an unsullied Welsh bloodline. I am certain my English mother's folks took care of that long ago. I too, have seen Braveheart and know what the English did to pacify the country ;D
Cymru remains Cymru and has its own somewhat limited government. Why not call it Rome? I'm sorry you regard the english as so sullied, but do not otherwise understand your thinking. I hope it is clearer to you.
Did Christophe Colombus really discover America. There must of been others before him the vikings or maybe the chinese from the other side of the world. ❓
Ok i am only 13 but i know it was named after Amerigo Vesspuci
Where I live it is generally held that the place was called after a Bristol Merchant called Ap Meurig, a name the Bristolians, not a well educated people, pronounced as Americ. It is also contended that amongst the fairly numerous persons who managed to bump into the Continent it was our Prince Madoc. Once you realize that the Church forced all Europeans to eat fish on Fridays, it becomes obvious that no discoverer in his right mind would pass on the news of the incredibly rich shoals off Newfoundland to anyone else. How they must have cursed that Italian clown! Madoc was half Viking, but there was, for a long time, a sort of industry devoted to looking for native Americans who spoke our language, Cymraeg, since he was said to have taken a lot of our people with him They settled finally on the Mandan tribe, who conveniently more-or-less died out and lost their language. I'd guess that, as in so many such cases, the 'discoverer' was whichever show-off wanted to make his name.
Ah! The arrogance of the Welsh, Celts, Scots, etc. What is it about England that makes all the people there crazy about whatever tribal heritage they have and invest so much in proving their importance to world history? I recently saw a book in the states entitled: How the Scots invented the Modern World, That is what I call arrogance. Now you are making the claim that it was Welsh who named America through their bastardized pronunciation of a Bristol merchant? Come on, you are just pulling our leg right?
The Scots did invent the modern world, obviously, and the 'Welsh' were the first people to suffer from industrial capitalism, which is why we are poorer and sicker than most Europeans. I don't know much about England except that it is flat and easily conquered, but I do know that the Celts were a people who lived in southern Gaul in Roman days. How could I conceivably pull the leg of people with such a well-known sense of irony as the Americans, Duw duw?
Alright, without looking....who said this when he was asked to return to power?"If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn?t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed."
The only successful retiree, who had a palace in what is now Croatia, Diocletian, I'd guess, since he is the only cabbage-grower listed in the annals as well.
I think the post Civil War Realists wrote some very good historical fiction. Authors like Twain, Alcott, or Howells I think got the real feeling and sense of their time periods, and even though the stories were fiction it was a depiction of real people and what they did and were going through and what they thought in their everyday lives.
Fiction of the past can often be fine unless huge changes happen to distort memory (the reason I quoted 'Dr Zhivago'), and I agree with you about the above. In my local library 'historical fiction' means something like 'books written fairly recently to picture the more distant past'. I like Scott when he's writing about Scottish history, even if he's wrong on the detail, because he understands the national development embodied, whereas his English history seems just constume drama. 'War and Peace' is great, because ambitious to understand. The average bodice-ripper - very popular over here - is, however, just soft porn from which we can learn nothing. I am beginning to realize what an enormous subject we have got ourselves into here!
Well, sir, I almost give up ... but what is the point of any story, if not to teach us how our forefathers goofed. So, what is wrong with pieces like Herbert's "Dune"? as an educational study of our past and probable future? Rah, rah! Let historical and science fiction be an important part of reading lists for our young pups, if only in hopes that one of them will get it right in the future.
'Dune' has its moments and might perhaps give some notion of the 'language of swords' Islam once was, though what 'House Atreides' is doing in there Herbert alone knows. The average production of science fantasy - which is what predominates nowadays - merely indicates, however, how little grasp modern people have of myth, folk-story, saga or whatever they suppose themselves to be imitating and just vulgarise the past (and I'll trail my coat and include Tolkein, what's more). The historical fiction I can bear to read tends to be written by persons with considerable historical knowledge about periods of the past of which I am passably ignorant, I find. I think I know enough, though, to have some sense of when they 'get it right'.
What do you think Rome could have done (if anything) to preserve its empire or to postpone its decline and fall? Also, at what time in history should Rome have done this?I look forward to hearing what people think.
Avoided inviting the Westerners to help fight the Turks.
Who was the chief enemy of England during the reign on Henry VIII?(I hope you don't consider this spam. I am new to this forum and I decided to create some questions for discussion. If you want me to combine all of these trivia questions into one topic, please let me know. I will usually give the answer within the next 1-4 days, depending on how many people reply)
I can't see that there is 'an' answer: surely this is a value-judgement, to which one could as easily reply 'Scotland' or even (at the end) 'The Empire'?
The fundamental problem with historical fiction, as I see it, is that you're not entirely sure which information you can file away as historical fact. You don't want to engage in a discussion with someone and refer to some trait of figure X from the 19th century when your knowledge is built on an author's creativity more than the record of past events. That could get embarrassing.
Oh, I don't know; why not any questions one may have spur research?
It seems to me that even 'factual' popular history is all too often full of specific mistakes and vast ideological misunderstandings (it's very difficult to get back to the mood of a past time - take 'Doctor Zhivago' - when you've suffered the experience that time gave rise to). I think 'creative' literature is far too free to get anywhere near what the past was really like (the way attitudes to religion, class, sex and the like change, let alone different degrees of knowledge involved. The average early Victorian Methodist teenager could run rings round a modern 'fundamentalist' pastor when it came to theology; a modern teenager is much more informed about sex than most Victorian parents. I read a novel once in which people carried a baby in a carry-cot long before such things were available. The novel went dead for me at once - but for others the 'facts' will have changed. The current British tv series on the Tudors, I'm told, had to change the costumes because it was essential that females show cleavages in historical drama. It is extremely hard to hang on even to our own pasts, without this deliberate distortion.
But how has most of those tyrants throughout history risen to power? By promising a new dawn of freedom and prosperity only to never follow through on those promises. People don't choose slavery, they are tricked into it.
I'm not sure that's true. China - Jong Gwo, the Central Country - suffered a century of dreadful humiliation (in Shianghai, 'No dogs, no Chinese') from the barbarians. Then they stopped the 'UN' (Americans and British) in Korea, and have gone on from there. No Chinese I've ever met but glories in this fact, though most of them look for more freedom, certainly. People who are proud, I think, prefer respect to a 'freedom' like that now enjoyed in Iraq.
The next step to this question becomes does it matter if King Arthur were ever true? It's fun to believe so, plus it sure generates a lot of cash for certain places in England i.e. Tintagle Castle and other places claiming to be Camelot.Next post: Paul Bunyon, fact or fiction?
Yes, it does matter, because we need to make sense of a prolonged resistance to the barbarians that didn't occur elsewhere. As I've said, there was never a 'king' Arthur - that would be totally anachronistic. There was obviously no such place as 'England' either, for some centuries after this resistance, and the Romans detested kings. The racist fantasy of 'Anglo-Saxon' ethnic cleansing, though, has been very powerful in helping to kill of various hunter-gatherer populations elsewhere, so it seems important to knock that drivel on the head - and the story (as far as we can now reconstruct it) of the resistance is very relevant to that. One of the German leaders in the alleged racist invasion, for instance, bore the name of the major leader of anti-Roman Britain, Caractacus/Caradoc/Cerdic. How likely is that, given the racist script, and what does it tell us about racist history in general - a question we might also ask about Paul |Bunyan, I imagine.
At fault undoubtedly. Willing this mass mortality, no. They believed in good capitalist things like the reduction of State interference and keeping the rates down, just like worthy American Republicans! They were also insensitive idiots of course, but Free Trade and the like were rather the flavour of the month back then, after all.
For instance: shipping in Indian Corn... something that was totally foreign to the Irish, to solve the problem. They couldn't even mill it due to the kernel size (far different than anything they were using at the time).
No, but the logic was impeccable: since no-one ate it, it couldn't interfere with 'market forces'.
It's not really imagining anything to say the British wanted to maintain full authority over Ireland. And it's not really off the wall, conspiracy stuff to say the British did whatever they thought was necessary to keep it that way. History shows that the British had some human rights issues during their days of imperialism.
What I had in mind was:
But, in reality, the operations and the motives in both cases were, and are, something quite different ? namely, the persecution and terrorism of the unarmed population, and the attempt by economic destruction, famine, and violence, to `make an appropriate hell' in Ireland, in the hope of breaking up the organised National Government and undermining the loyalty of the people.
As you say, this comes from someone deeply involved in the political struggle. Collins was an excellent guerrilla leader and a great patriot: historian, however, he was not. what he says there is, at almost any time, simply not true. When I look at our own history, I find it all too easy to hate 'the English' for what happened. To imagine distributing individual guilt in court, so to speak, is, on the other hand, rather another matter.
Yeah, to make money for the British, not the Irish. The Irish were basically British serfs. Their farms were no longer their own, Britain claimed ownership and stole them.
No farms were owned by 'Britain' obviously, but by individual landlords or - sometimes - peasant proprietors. This was the case all over the UK, and some farmers still made money, as some clearly did in Ireland too, and the Irish had the vote, on the same basis as others in the UK. Certainly the landlords' claims depended ultimately on the idea that the King of England was also King of Ireland, but that had been a Papal decision, hadn't it? It's important not to make a caricature out of the past, I think. Political conditions were different in Ireland in the 1840s from what they had been in the penal years, but it was desperately overpopulated and dependent on a single crop, and when that failed some very dim and not-at-all sympathetic English aristocrats didn't have much idea of what to do.It seems to me that the quotation from Collins comes from a different period again
No, Collins was speaking of the plight of Irish culture and civilization that was wrought by the British over the past centuries. The British thought it was Gaelic tradition that was the cause of poverty and the British did everything possible to erase that tradition, including even the Irish language. Protestants, by the beginning of the 18th century, owned over 90% of the farms. There was no choice or vote by the people..the Act of Union and Poor Law Act of 1838 made sure of that. The British wanted Ireland to remain in a weakened state in order to assure no further uprisings. The British underestimated the Irish spirit of independence. Those natives who owned any substantial amount of land were only those who renounced Catholicism. The native Irish Catholics were treated as second-class (or worse) citizens. This is why many of them left and came to America. This is not caricature, this is fact. Most of those who were poor in Ireland prior to the Famine were the native Catholics, and that was due to poor British policies. The poverty levels were quite severe. Pro-British historians try to ignore or sugar coat all this, but they cannot any longer.
Yes, Roman Catholics were discriminated against, very heavily, largely because they were seen as disloyal to the Monarchy as were Roman Catholics and Nonconformists in Britain. It is a pity the Papacy had supported Henry 11 claim to be king of Ireland, unfortunately, just as it supported William of Orange - it didn't do much for its Church members in Ireland. The Irish Parliament prior to the Act of Union was, like the British, a Protestant body. The treatment of RCs was equivalent to the way Communists were to be treated in the United States, clearly, but Catholic Emancipation was a fact by the famine time, surely? If you regard the Roman Catholic Religion as equivalent to being Irish, you can see why this problem came about, and why there were such troubles in the North. The usual trick was for the head of the family to become Church of Ireland and for the rest of the family to remain RCs. As in my own country and in Scotland, English was the official language, and anything else was certainly seen as inferior. This is the imperialist view everywhere. I note how keen the US is on having Spanish schools, for instance. The people who suffered in the famine were the very poor, particularly in the West, where the language was very strong. Those in the Midlands and the North-East did a great deal better. The problem was very large families dependent on a single crop, with no big industry close at hand. We were lucky in that the coal mines opened up in time to save us from a similar situation, which was developing in our West at the time of the campaign against the toll gates.Nobody could see the past relationship between the UK Parliament and Ireland as other than disastrous, but I don't think it helps to imagine vast plots or pretend the people of the past could have been other than they were. I think, on the whole, they did what they thought was right: it should serve to make us less self-righteously certain of our own views, I reckon.
In fact, I reckon we could go further than that: at least from the beginning of the Empire 'Rome' was in essence a Common Market favouring the rich and powerful in every territory that would accept membership, and gradually extending the citizenship to more and more people. We tend to think of the Roman Empire as analogous to the British or French Empires, but where was the 'metropolitan country' – not the city of Rome, surely, which was eventually dropped as the capital? Roman diplomacy consisted of offering a choice to the powerful: join or else. Most joined and became Roman, wherever they happened to live.
