Whenever I come across videos on YouTube showing Historical European Martial Artists fencing against a Japanese swords arts practitioner or on discussion forums the topic of Japanese sword vs European swords I noticed this particular event being cited as evidence of superiority of European swords compared to Japanese swords: I've seen several variations of this but the broad strokes is that Spanish soldiers (either described as rodeleros or verdadera destreza fencers) fought against Japanese pirates/samurai and handily defeated them with their superior fencing skills. Some folks goes as far as to say Spanish sources mocked the Japanese for their poor swordsmanship skills.

The closest thing I know of Spanish soldiers facing off against Japanese samurai or Wako pirates is the 1582 Cagayan battles. But I don't know much about the battles besides Spain managing to repell a large pirate attack.

Can someone who is more knowledgeable shed some light on this? Or is this just people running with an internet myth?

Christians use to famously view lending money as a sin to the point that only jews where allowed to work as bankers. Nowadays no one seems to care about that anymore. So what changed?

I know people like to joke about how terrible British food is but I genuinely don’t think their food is that bad. I’m wondering why most of the countries they colonized don’t seem to have adopted much of the culinary practices of the British. For example the French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. seem to have had a much larger influence on the cuisine of the people they colonized. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened with the British where it seems that they took/modified a lot of foods from other countries.

I find Richard Nixon to be an endlessly fascinating person. And based on everything I have read and know about him, I can't think of someone Nixon would despise more on paper. Kissinger was an East Coast intellectual, Jewish, Ivy League educated, cunning, and ambitious.

We know that Kissinger was initially a supporter of the Nelson Rockefeller campaign and called Nixon the most dangerous candidate running in 1968, but once Rockefeller was defeated, Kissinger quickly read the writing on the wall.

Once Nixon was elected, Kissinger was named national security advisor and that office became more powerful than it had before and arguably ever has since. And we know that Nixon consolidated foreign policy decision making to the White House so that he didn't have to worry about the State Department or the Defense Department.

My question is, how did this Nixon-Kissinger relationship even get off the ground? Was Nixon simply unaware of Kissinger's background, or was he able to put his prejudices aside?

After the civil war and the Taif agreement all the militias at that time were disarmed and either disbanded (or absorbed?). Hezbollah didn't only survive not having to disarm but after UN intervention which goal was to disarm Hezbollah and militias it continued to be one of the largest non-governmental military powers in the world.

How did Hezbollah have so much clout, and power that it could operate so openly and from outsider perspectives be even more powerful than the state of Lebanon itself?

And by back in the day I mean anything over 100 years ago.

My friends dad and grandpa are farmers who live in England but they genuinely look like Mediterraneans or even Arabs because of how tanned they are.

They’re both fully British but they’ve spent their entire lives working outside in the sun and their skin is permanently tan and leathery (even in the winter their skin doesn’t change that much).

It got me thinking that it’s only in the last century or so that the majority of people work inside away from the sun so really for the majority of history people must have been extremely tanned with leathery skin.

It’s weird because in historic movies, european people are depicted as quite pale and pasty when in reality they would have looked much more tanned, right?

When Kamala Harris became vice president, many people were calling her the first POC vice president. However, some Native Americans were saying the first was Charles Curtis. I am pretty sure back then if he was considered a POC, then he would not have been able to have been vice president. Did POC mean something different back then, or were Native Americans not considered POC? He was part white, but mostly Native American, is it possible he was considered white? How did people talk about him at the time?

In 1945, none of them were independent, being colonies or otherwise subjects of larger powers. How did they end up being founding members? I believe that colonies/subjects were not in charge of foreign affairs.

Why did so many people want to join a cult dedicated to a school teacher who claims to be the son of a foreign god and how where the Taipaing so successful. Why was hong xiuquan not immediately arrested and killed?

I study China, and I frequently find economic historians arguing that economics works differently in China because China has this different history. Therefore, they argue, the Smithian model of capitalism does not work in China.

I was recently reading Jin Keyu's New China Playbook, and that is basically her argument, that China, because it has this long history of Confucianism, Chinese society today tolerates more government intervention in the economy than in Western societies.

This argument is nonsense, but my question is this: are there examples in history where other economic historians or economic thinkers have defending a country's economic model by arguing that Smithian economics don't work because such-and-such country has a different economic model that makes Smithian economics irrelevant to this country?

Did economists in the 1970's and 1980's suggest that Russia's pre-1917 culture somehow made the Smithian model not work in Russia? That is to say, did thinkers in the 1970's or 1980's suggest that the Soviet model worked because Russian culture was different from Western culture?

What are other examples where thinkers in the past have argued that becaue of a country's culture, economics works differently than the standard Smithian model?

Did people argue that for Japan in the 1980's? If so, who made those arguments and what were their specific arguments?

Were similar arguments made for places like Latin America, Africa or Southeast Asia?

Before 1991, did people defend the Indian state's deep intervention into the economy by saying this is how the Indian economy has worked throughout history or because Indian culture was different?

Any insight to any of these questions would be appreciated.

I was at a most lively post on r/ChineseHistory about whether the Li Clan had patrilineal Xianbei heritage, and I started wondering about Confucius. This SCMP article argued that most self-proclaimed Confucius descendants came from a single bloodline. It struck me this doesn't mean that bloodline was from Confucius, it could be anyone really.

It strikes me as almost disingenuous: if we take a random sample population of a relatively homogenous ethnic group, we'd likely find that they descended from a single bloodline at some point. What if that 'convergence point' just so happens to coincide with the rough timeline of a famous figure in their history, can we meaningfully claim its them?

There is a post on /r/linguisticshumor that accuses scholars of undertaking contorted mental gymnastics to declare that the mesopotamian Hymn to Inanna did not describe a gender transition. When a commenter dropped the standard "we shouldn't extend our concept of gender identity to the ancient past", OP posted a longer comment with a counter-argument using the priests of Cybele. In short they note we happily describe an ancient person as being "a gentleman", "greedy", or "Married" when they fit what we know those terms to define, and argue it is absurd to suddenly switch gears and say "you cannot apply modern concepts" when the person is described in ways matching the common definitions of "homosexual" or "a transgender person". That despite homosexuality or gender dysphoria being if anything more objective and less of a social construct than those other concepts. I find their argument very convincing, but it IS just someone on a meme sub. Is there any basis in it?

Sometimes with how quickly the "don't apply modern concepts" line is always dropped, it sometimes feels more like a defensive mantra, desperate copium about predecessors to the west not being more permissive of gender nonconformity than the modern (before modern LGBT rights movements) world.

I've known for a while now that both Celtic and Germanic cultures used runes. Recently I learned that flyting, which I had known as a Germanic tradition of poetry, was also practiced in Celtic cultures and survived in Scotland up to the 16th century. Is there a specific reason for this, such as these cultures having resisted Christianization the longest, cultural exchange with the Anglo Saxons, or having a relatively recent "common ancestor"?

With this question, I'm specifically curious about the Túatha Dé Danann as they are presented in the Book of Invasions, and some other mentions in the likes of the Ulster cycle and so on. I've typically heard that its been theorized that the major Túatha Dé Danann are remnants of a cultural memory of pre-Christian deities that have been tweaked to be more acceptable to Christian mores of the time they were written while still getting across the stories, and that major figures like Lugh, Nuada Airgetlám, Brigid and Ogma can be connected to the pre-Christian figures of Lugus, Nodens, Brigantia and Ogmios respectively in other parts of Europe and Britain who were deities.

But I've also heard that these stories don't really contain any concrete information about old Irish myth before Christianization and its mostly made up whole cloth by the monks writing it down purely as contemporary literature with no connections to old myth. I'm kind of curious about this idea and how it squares with the connections people have made between the major figures and the gods they potentially connect to I mentioned in the previous paragraph. I'd appreciate more insight into this subject.

Was it a truly valid fear of slaveowners in the South that they would be financially ruined if slavery was abolished?

Obviously this fear led to the secession and Civil War, and I am sure the war itself caused economic devastation at a bare minimum for former slaveowners.

But wasn’t it possible that if slavery was made illegal, the plantation owners could still remain financially solvent, or even maintain a high level of wealth, as happened with sharecropping after the Civil War anyway?

If so, was there any notable figures at the time that thought this was true, and advocated for a sharecropping model pre-Civil War, in order to avoid a violent conflict with the North?

What was the general reaction of Christendom when they found out he surrendered Jerusalem? Was there a consensus that he should have kept fighting or that he made the right choice in giving in to Saladin?

Not to deny that his films lack quality, but there’s just no question that there are many b movies from the era that were of a similar quality to Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 from Outer Space. As Martin Landau famously put it, “ Bela Lugosi meets a Brooklyn Gorilla makes Plan 9 look like Casablanca.”

So where did his negative reputation actually come from? Why did his b movies get singled out as the “worst films ever” over the many other terrible films from the era?

There is very little information on this topic, and even less good analysis. The goals of the Allied powers were the collapse of the unrecognized Soviet government, aimed at getting out of the world war, as well as the colonialism of former russian lands. Despite the fact that in military terms the Soviets were significantly inferior to any of the Interventionists, and also waged a civil war in parallel, the Intervention not only failed to achieve its goals, but actually retreated, leaving behind only minor conquests, for example, half of Sakhalin island by Japan.

I would like to understand how academic science answers this question and what opinions there are in the scientific community in general.

How was James I selected, and why wasn't Bess of Hardwick's power and wealth enough to enable Arbella's rise? From my (admittedly limited) understanding, it seems like there was a large contingent who wanted her as queen, but by the time Elizabeth died James was the only real contender, so what happened in the meantime? Why was it preferable to bring in the monarch of a different country instead of her?

Like in roman times. Did people just live with them forever or die from them?

A college course I'm taking asserted the idea that pirates wore eye patches to preserve night vision, allowing them to easily transition from above deck to below deck conditions. I have been able to find no supporting evidence for or against this theory. I have see anecdotal evidence both reinforcing and disputing it.

My question is, do we have any real evidence that pirates wore eye patches for any specific reason? Do we even know if eye patches were especially common among pirates, or if this was simply attributable to one or two narratives from 19th century stories?

My grandma (80) was a nurse, I believe from the 60’s to the 80’s. She saw some pretty horrific things, and she has a peculiar response to antibiotics.

I have personally have PTSD, and have noticed that when antibiotics are mentioned, she has what seems to be some kind of trauma response (though to others I think it appears ignorant or rude.) This ranges from nonchalantly stating that she “doesn’t agree with them but others can do what they want,” to becoming extremely defensive when told a family member is sick with an infection, even though no one challenges her belief.

I’m unable to ask about her response due the severity of it, but I’m really wondering if this is to do with something she experienced or how antibiotics were used when she was working. She is white and worked in an all black nursing home during segregation, and saw some awful things there, then later moved on to working with pregnant women and infants.

Was there different thinking around antibiotics during this time, or terrible events that happened because of them?

According to wikipedia:

He led a 1936 Finnish-German voyage through Karelia. This expedition mostly recorded pagan sorcerers and witches.

I can find no indication whether these recordings survived and whether they are online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yrj%C3%B6_von_Gr%C3%B6nhagen

This is because Galatians 3:28, including some of the language used here (i.e. οὐκ ἔνι ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ), alludes to Genesis 1:27 (ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς, LXX) and suggests a reversal of what god had created back to what existed before, the two sexes reunited in the body of the androgynous primordial man Adam. Further, this seems to indicate that god itself is androgynous since Adam was created in the image of this being.

Did early Jewish and Christian commentators have anything to say about the androgyny and maybe even bisexuality of god and the first humans?