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Well, looks like we’re 19 years old today. It’s a ghost town here, but the compendium of knowledge is still in tact.
test post
Families with the highest of skilled workers in London ate formal meals, complete with napkins and rings and even disciplined children at tableside.[1] Distinctions in types of meals among upper- and lower-class citizens blurred after about 1870 as food was imported and food processing technology advanced. Foods making their way onto the Victorian table included margarine, jam, chocolate, tomato “catsup”, and biscuits.[2] As for the dining room itself in an upper-middle class home, it would be one of at least ten rooms in the house and contain an oval or circular table with a central support that would enable the whole family to gather around it. The chairs surrounding it would preferably be leather since chairs of velvet tended to attach on to the materials of ladies’ dresses. The room would also normally contain a sideboard with attractive dishes on display, and there might even be a dumbwaiter nearby to allow for easy transfer of items to the kitchen, located on a lower level.[3] Upper-class Victorian home design focused on segregating areas for specialized purposes, but it could also serve functional purposes. The dining room at Stoke Rochford Hall (1841-1845), for example, was connected to the kitchen by a corridor measuring almost 45-yards in order to keep the smells of food preparation away from the eating experience.[4]
[1]K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846-1886 [book on-line] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, accessed 24 December 2007), 345; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=35631984; Internet.
[2]Ibid., 346.
[3]Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England [book on-line] (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, accessed 24 December 2007), 111-112; available from Questia, http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=57191660; Internet.
[4]Hoppen, 334.Revisiting this question, is it almost like a chicken-and-egg scenario? Do great men influence history, or do cultural, technological, economic, and religious concerns influence larger society which then push certain men into the limelight?
Examples of this can be our last two presidents – Trump and Biden. Trump is a larger-than-life figure who objectively can be called a “great man” in the context of historical influence (regardless of whether you like him or not). The course of events in American history are no doubt changed as a result of who he is and what he has done. However, the case can very well be made that his election was only possible because of the growing dissatisfaction with the status quo that had been mounting for years in the background. The wave of populism then spread to other countries, which suggests that society makes the man, rather than vice versa.
We also have Biden, a rather unremarkable figure who occupies an office which he seems rather incompetent to fulfill. Nevertheless, the policies and pronouncements from his administration have been quite extreme. Is this an example of how the “Great Man Approach” is cast aside in favor of the more powerful ideological push by groups of unnamed figures? And perhaps his election was only the result of suburban housewives feeling “yucky” voting for Orange Man because they thought it legitimized his mean tweets?
In the end, I’m not sure which approach wins for sure, but I think the Great Man Approach is more likely to be the loser here.
I’m guessing that the modern word, “alderman” (used as a title for councilmembers such as in Chicago), derives from the word “eldorman”?
Here is what the AI had to say:
- Determine which document needs an apostille. An apostille is a certification that authenticates the signature of a public official on a document. Some documents that may need an apostille include birth certificates, marriage certificates, diplomas, and transcripts.
- Obtain a certified copy of the document. The document must be an original or a certified copy, which means a copy that has been verified by the issuing agency or a notary public.
- Complete any necessary translations. If the document is not in English, you will need to have it translated by a professional translator.
- Submit the document to the California Secretary of State’s office. You can submit the document in person or by mail. If you submit it by mail, be sure to include a self-addressed stamped envelope for the return of the apostilled document.
- Pay the required fee. The fee for an apostille in California is currently $26 per document.
- Wait for the apostille to be issued. The processing time for an apostille in California can vary depending on the volume of requests received, but it typically takes around 7-10 business days.
- Receive the apostilled document. If you submitted the document in person, you can pick it up at the Secretary of State’s office. If you submitted it by mail, it will be sent back to you in the self-addressed stamped envelope you provided.
That’s it! Once you have the apostille, the document is considered valid for use in any country that is a member of the Hague Convention.
Revisiting this thread after all these years, I’m a bit surprised that I intially did not include Constantinople on this list from the beginning. Fortunately, several others brought this up in the thread.
The original question I posed is a bit weak since I didn’t give the parameters of the question. What is meant by “great”? Is it size? Or influence? What about the concept of the nation-state that replaced the concept of the city-state over time?
Setting these aside, I think we can probably point to quite a few other “great” historical cities on this list, such as Amsterdam c. 1600s, Venice c. 1400s, several Chinese cities around this time, or even one of the Islamic cities in Al-Andalus (probably Cordoba).
Also, I want to correct something I mentioned in 2010 that seems like a downright rookie mistake to me now:
I have heard this before and in theory it makes limited sense. I say “limited” because Renaissance art, and even humanist thought (e.g. Petrarch) clearly had their beginnings prior to 1453 (at least in Italy). I will have to find out the extent to which Eastern migration did influence Italian culture.
My instincts were correct, but my history knowledge was poor. The catalyst for the Renaissance was not the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, but the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by crusaders during the Fourth Crusade. Byzantine artists gravitated to the Italic peninsula in the aftermath, helping to shape the development of painting there which eventually led to the “Proto-Renaissance” of the fourteenth century, the major figure of which was Giotto. Giotto brought about a “new realism” to painting, which would set the stage for the “actual” Renaissance period in Italy, which is traditionally said to have started around 1401 with the design competition for the doors of the Florence Baptistry.
So this is why I was confused in my last post. I just didn’t know!
I’m revisiting this thread because I saw some incredible lectures which discussed how Jews behaved at the time of Christ. Basically, it was quite different from the way we think of Judaism today. To be a “good Jew” 2000 years ago meant that you followed the Jewish law. In other words, Judaism was based on practice. Contrast this with Christianity, which is based on belief, or a creed.
The Jewish law contained a list of rules/regulations by which one needed to abide. Breaking ritual purity laws may require purification, but it did not necessarily mean that a person did anything morally wrong, or even voluntary. Touching a corpse, for example, led to ritual impurity, and those of the priestly class were required to be purified before entering God’s presence. This seems to be part of the context to the story of the Good Samaritan and why the Levite and the priest avoid the person who appeared to be dead.
Well, it’s about 10 years later, and the Elgin Marbles situation hasn’t changed. Looks like they’ll stay in the British Museum for a nice long time.
Interestingly, you can google “Elgin Marbles” at any point in time and see news stories about the latest happenings in the ongoing drama. Here, for example, is from less than a day ago:
Mendoni meets with committees for return of Parthenon marbles in Sydney
I’d like to point out that the Masaga.com site is up for sale. Looks like people might have paid their 35 Euros in vain.
I’m going to revive this thread by saying that of course the Treaty of Versailles went too far!
First, it forced Germany to pay France and Great Britain huge amounts of payment while at the same time stripping Germany of some industries which could have helped them generate cash for repayments.
Second, it happened at a time when France and Britain both raised tariffs, which meant that Germany had a hard time making payments without being able to generate enough money through exports.
Third, because of its difficult position, Germany had to figure out a way to make its payments, and the way they did this was magic! Well, not really – they just printed more money, which led to higher and higher inflation. Eventually, this led to a depression in Germany.
Of course, there were other things making matters worse, such as the need for Britain to pay back what it borrowed from the U.S. to pay for the war. But how would it get money from Germany if Germany was in a depression?
The entire situation must have taught the victors a great deal, so that in the aftermath of World War II, the Marshall Plan did not seek to cripple Germany the way Versailles did, but instead to help rehabilitate victor states and vanquished states.
I see this thread is 15 years old, but I’ve been doing some research on this topic recently and want to update my answer.
It’s still hard to rank the “worst villain” of all time because “worst” is undefined, but I’ll define it as the “most brutal”. Here goes:
1- Stalin: the scope of his terror over the course of about 24 years, and the number of lives he affected through murder or other oppression, was astounding. If people were fortunate enough to escape murder or starvation, they might be forced to labor in a gulag.
2 – Mao: like Stalin, Mao affected massive numbers of people and turned them into victims. Mao’s long tenure in China meant untold damage to Chinese in the form of direct murders and starvation (up to 40 million were reportedly killed during the Great Leap Forward famine alone in the 1960s).
3 – Hitler: he did not kill the most, and didn’t bring his country to starvation, but he systematized killing like no other, and did his killing in a relatively short career which lasted about a dozen years.
4 – Pol Pot: the ambitions of his terror were crazy by any standards, and the fact that he annihilated such a huge percentage of Cambodia. Even though absolute numbers of his murder were not nearly as high as those of other dictators, Pol Pot was able to do it within a relatively short time span of about four years, and didn’t have to pay for his crimes at the end of his life.
According to Tacitus, Christians were hated because :- The originator of the name, Christ, was executed as a criminal by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius
I don’t know that I was aware of that. It seems like an obvious theory now that you mention it. Even through Christ would have been a very political figure on the part of the Romans, the Romans may have re-circulated stories of the Crucifixion as Christianity became more well-known.
So if Christ really was considered a political insurrectionist by Romans, it leads me to wonder what they thought when they eventually decided to convert to Christianity, and how they reconciled belief in an “insurrectionist” with what they themselves did.
Well, after thinking about this question for 15 years 😂 I think I may have an answer. Trotsky was a more “revolutionary” type and desired “constant” revolution. Stalin, in contrast, wanted to strengthen the homeland first. Trotsky seems to have been the more charismatic figure, while Stalin was more of a bureaucratic thinker.
Had Trotsky been victorious in succeeding Lenin in the late 1920s, my guess is he would have tried to expand the USSR too fast. He would have been unable to secure economic development at home to support long-term expansion and would have tried to do something drastic in order to suppress kulaks from gaining power. Basically, Trotsky does not seem to have had the economic knowledge to support the USSR at home while also expanding militarily abroad.
With that said, his natural choice might have been to invade China to help Mao’s Communist forces against Chiang Kai-shek, which could have made China a Communist country Pre-World War II. I suppose he might have invaded Germany in the late 1920s/early 30s, but I wonder how the League of Nations would have responded. A collective response from Western democracies could have utterly crushed the Soviet Union at that point in history.
I have been debating with some other students who claim that secularization was simply a way for the Jacobins to solidify their power. I say otherwise.
I think that totalitarian control requires elimination of other influences which explain the world in competing ways, so religion is a natural target. At the same time, it appears the Jacobins must have recognized that total control over a person’s identity requires control over that person’s traditions, so replacing religious institutions and practices would have been top on their list.
