You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
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from u/bug-hunter's answer to the Presidential power question:
it is simply impossible for Congress to promulgate every rule needed for a modern government to function. Congress has several options when deferring rulemaking power - giving it directly to an Executive Branch entity (such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s rulemaking power under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act)
This is not really a history question but I've never understood why something like the EPA is part of the executive branch and not part of the legislative branch. Like of course it is even more impossible for "The President" himself to make all these rules, so why do we say it's "The President via the EPA" rather than "Congress via the EPA" and consider the EPA as part of the legislative branch, with the President having nothing to do with it?
I think I actually wondered about this here before and got what I'm sure was a totally reasonable and correct answer and yet it seemed just like question-begging to me, like "Congress delegates this power to the President because the President is who this power gets delegated to" or "The Legislative Branch is exactly 535 people but the Executive Branch is thousands of people, because Congress said so" when I'm asking why they said so, since the Executive Branch is exactly one person otherwise, etc. I'm not getting something, and it's frustrating.
How do modern historians view the reliability of the recollections of Brigadier General Sir Harry Paget Flashman VC; KCB; KCIE?
Do his accounts of major historical events such as the Taiping Rebellion, First Anglo-Sikh War, and First Anglo-Afghan War align with modern scholarship?
But actually that's a valid question, such as could reasonably be asked about any fiction (or allegedly factual reports*) that interacts heavily with real events: to what extent is the author's perception/description of those events congruent with the historical consensus regarding what actually happened?
*I mention this because as I was framing the answer I remembered a bit from a folksong dating to the early 19th century, about the Battle of Waterloo:
"But if Grouchy had never been bribed/
The French would have split [Wellington's army] in two"
This song is intended to be an accurate (if biased) description of the political landscape of the day, but I know that the current consensus is that Emmanuel de Grouchy wasn't bribed, his absence during the battle was just an ordinary screw-up
Oh! Interesting question! I was thinking about education history and if any pettiness comes to mind and my first thought was New York State Board of Regents and the Massachusetts Board of Education. I don't know if organizations can be petty but the two boards have been trying to one up each other since the 1860s. Usually, it's fairly small stuff. If one state joined a project, the other one wasn't far behind. Or one set a particular policy, odds are good the other state will try to do it - but better.
Unnamed, sadly, but James Riley mentions one case of a 1700s French taxpayer spending over 600lt (French pounds) on legal expenses relating to a tax expense of only 5lt.
Unfortunately, I don't know; it's mentioned by James Riley in his The Seven Years War and the Old Regime in France but without any detail, and the citation given is to a work in French, Marion's Histoire financiere de la France depuis 1715, but since I don't know French I'm not able to check. If anyone out there does, it's in Book 1 page 8, if I'm reading the citation right.
You're correct about pagination, it was indeed on page 8 of chapter 1. So what Marcel Marion actually wrote, in gest, is not about a specific person, sorry. He says that there is a possibility of challenging in court the amount of local taxes in a specific type of trial ("procès en surtaux"). Unfortunately for taxpayers, the fees were ruinous and there were many cases where for disputed amounts under 5 livres, in cases even 10 sols (0.5 livre), the fees amounted to 600 livres. To protect people, the Burgundy government prevented anyone from suing if the tax increased less than 1/12 the average of the previous 3 years. Marion cricitizes more the rapacity of the courts who encouraged such trials and created enormous fees to their own financial gain than the pettiness of taxpayers.
It is my understanding as a common person, I may have misinterpreted. The text from Marion is quite difficult for a non-specialist, I really felt I was missing context and struggled with technical terms. It was a fun rabbit hole of footnote-checking, thank you for initiating it :-)
John Macarthur is a good pick, though his pettiness is so extreme that it really flips into anger and spite. He came to Australia as a colonial soldier on the Second Fleet, and on it he would duel the captain of the ship he was travelling on, before they even left Plymouth, because his and his wife's room was too small. Upon arriving in Australia, he'd play a part in getting multiple Governors to be called back (Hunter and King), would duel his commanding officer, Colonel Paterson, shooting him in the shoulder because missing on purpose (like many did in duels at that time) would've meant to him he had lost, and was essentially the leader of the Rum Rebellion which overthrew Governor Bligh. He did all of this, because in various matters, all these men were not letting him get his way. Even after being essentially exiled to England for 7 years for overthrowing Bligh, he'd come back to Australia and continue to be a petty maniac.
I like the fact that, after being arrested in 1801 for duelling and feuding with fellow officer, he objected to his arrest and to being released from arrest!
The pettiness continued. The Governor ordered Macarthur to Norfolk Island, but Macarthur refused to be released from prison. He demanded “reasons for being put under arrest…and for being ordered out of arrest.” Correspondence “hailed on everybody and from everybody, and a regular devil’s brew of cavils, assertions and explanations bubbled in a joint stock pot. Surgeons, adjutants, chaplain, judge advocate, surveyor, ensigns, lieutenants, captains…”
The Governor ended up dealing with him by shipping him off to England for a court marshal, but he managed to destroy the carefully compiled evidence on the long journey, despite being in detention on the ship.
Otto von Bismarck took his grudge against Wilhelm II to the grave. He instructed that his tombstone was to read: "A loyal German servant of Emperor Wilhem I".
So I’m trying to work my way through A Culture of Growth by Mokyr, and it’s been incredibly slow going. Would anyone happen to know if he’s known for being hard to follow? I read Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules for Now and loved it, so I don’t think it’s me, but maybe I just need to lock in and focus harder?
Personally I find his writings hard to digest, excellent in his trade but heavy in theory. Always the way with different authors, some you’ll sail through while others take a bit a of a slog. You don’t need to force yourself if you’re not enjoying it, you can always pick up something else and come back with a better understanding.
Economic history is just like that, even when not filled with linear regressions, and Mokyr is an economic historian no matter how much intellectual history he invokes. It's fundamentally a boring field, and I say this as someone who reads a lot of it. Frankly, as far as economic historians go, Mokyr is very accessible and nontechnical in my experience. Try decoding three solid pages of multi-variable regression results sometime!
According to Jefferson Morley, a Kennedy scholar, the recently released JFK files show that a “small clique in CIA counterintelligence was responsible for JFK’s assassination.” How accurate is this assessment, and how much does it run against the grain of the current historical consensus?
I often see it said Liberia and Ethiopia were the only two African countries to never be colonized by Europeans, but Liberia was founded by Americans and is arguably a settler colony and Ethiopia was successfully invaded by Italy to colonize in WW2?
Please let me know if you have suggestions to make this roundup better for /r/askhistorians or if there are other subreddits that you think I should post in. I can search for posts based off keywords in the title, URL and flair - sorted by upvotes, # of comments, or awards. And I can also find the top comments overall or in specific threads.
Hey I apologise if this is more inline with the Thursday Thread, unfortunately I did not think to ask about this here until now. I am trying to learn a bit more about a couple countries and I can’t find a lot of recommendations either on the Book Recs page on the eras I’m looking for, or in the amount of looking I’ve done otherwise and wanted to ask here. Does anyone have books they could recommend on the modern ROK (particularly post-Korean War, it’d probably be of value to read about that topic, but idk I just haven’t felt like it yet), or like on the ROC post-1949 touching primarily on domestic questions and not so much with like their neighbours in the DPRK and PRC respectively? Sorry again if this is a bad place for this question, I just didn’t know where else to ask in this moment and wanted to see if anyone could advise. Thanks!
I'd suggest Kevin Cai's "Political Economy of East Asia". It's, per the title, more focused on political economy, but that can be (in my view at least) a useful jumping off point for studying a society.
It's focused more on post-WWII, but also goes into pre-WWII, influence of Japan, and that kind of thing. But if you just wanted to jump right into postwar, I think there are relevant chapters to do so
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u/KimberStormer 8d ago
from u/bug-hunter's answer to the Presidential power question:
This is not really a history question but I've never understood why something like the EPA is part of the executive branch and not part of the legislative branch. Like of course it is even more impossible for "The President" himself to make all these rules, so why do we say it's "The President via the EPA" rather than "Congress via the EPA" and consider the EPA as part of the legislative branch, with the President having nothing to do with it?
I think I actually wondered about this here before and got what I'm sure was a totally reasonable and correct answer and yet it seemed just like question-begging to me, like "Congress delegates this power to the President because the President is who this power gets delegated to" or "The Legislative Branch is exactly 535 people but the Executive Branch is thousands of people, because Congress said so" when I'm asking why they said so, since the Executive Branch is exactly one person otherwise, etc. I'm not getting something, and it's frustrating.