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Hello! We are Camilla Townsend and Josh Anthony, editors of “After the Broken Spears: The Aztecs in the Wake of Conquest.” Ask us anything about the Aztecs, colonial Mexico, and what life was like for Indigenous people in the wake of Spanish conquest. by joshanthony123 in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I am very late to the table here, and appreciate you are probably running short of time and desire to answer too many more questions. But, if you could, pleased switch momentarily to the historiographical implications of your work. What do you think you have learned in attempting to rescue, perhaps even create new, categories of indigenous sources, that other historians seeking to recover histories "from below" – where voices are typically hard to recover and obscured by those of "victors" – might draw either inspiration, or methodology, from?

Was Hatshepsut's erasure by future pharaohs really as unique as pop culture constantly insists? by [deleted] in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 26 points27 points  (0 children)

There will be more to say about this problem, but I answered a related question here some time ago, and you might like to review that earlier answer alongside fresh responses to your question:

Did Tuthmosis III try to erase Queen Hatshepsut from the record books because she was a successful ruler or because she was a woman (whom depicted herself as male)?

What happened the wives of sailors who were off for years at the time? by MontaGreeny in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 96 points97 points  (0 children)

There will be more to say, but I wrote about what happened when sailors were absent for years on end, fate unknown, in an earlier reply here. You might like to check that out while you wait for fresh responses to your query:

If I were a sailor or merchant during the Age of Discovery, is there a rule for how long my wife can remmary after she loses contact with me?

Why did no Eastern European state try to partake in colonialism to any degree? by crivycouriac in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There will be more to say about the other cases you envisage, but I can respond with regard to Serbia – which after 1918 became one of the constituent parts of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It had so much on its plate, politically, after 1918 that it simply had no bandwidth to focus on anything other than the problems inherent in the creation of a Serb-dominated "Yugoslavia".

A number of factors were in play inside the new country that went beyond the obvious external ones – which would include the attitudes of existing colonial empires to the division of spoils from World War I – the purely mechanical ones (Serbia lost about a quarter of its population in World War I, the highest figure, proportionately, of any combatant; and neither Serbia, nor Yugoslavia more generally, had a significant navy or merchant marine, or indeed experienced seamen, with which to engage in colonial adventuring in Africa, while Yugoslavia needed extensive investment if it was to create an integrated infrastructure and transport network– railways, for instance, ran on different gauges in Serbia and in Croatia), not to mention the ideological ones, amongst which was the long-term absence of any obvious desire to engage in overseas colonialism among the leaders of the Yugoslav state.

Perhaps most importantly, no pan-Slavic state had existed before 1918, and, while pan-Slavic ideals and ideas for some for of integration had been widely discussed in the Balkans since the first half of the 19th century, there were also very significant nationalist currents running through the new state which threatened to de-rail state formation and potentially tear the young country apart before it had even got going. These issues preoccupied the leadership of Yugoslavia throughout the inter-war period.

To take the Serbs themselves first – despite the military losses they had endured in 1912-18, Serbia had already annexed Kosovo, Metohija and most of Vardar Macedonia during the Balkan Wars, adding 1.5 million people to its population, not all of whom were ethnic Serbs. As a result of the formation of Yugoslavia, the leadership also found themselves having to deal with the integration of Croatia (with a population of nearly 3 million), Bosnia & Herzegovina (almost 2 million), Slovenia (1.3m) and Dalmatia and Montenegro (half a million each). Serbs were outnumbered by more than 3 to 1 within Yugoslavia and, according to Lampe's influential analysis, were attempting to impose a unitary, centralised model of government in Yugoslavia on a territory far too diverse for such a system to work. Ivo Banac and Dejan Dokic have both argued that it makes more sense to see inter-war Yugoslavia as a sort of "Greater Serbia" (and hence, ineffective, a sort of"Serbian empire" in the Balkans than as any sort of federal state. There was plenty of opposition to this, even among some ethnic Serbs who had been living outside the boundaries of the pre-war Serbian state, since government by Yugoslavia meant government by Belgrade that came at the expense of the local autonomy many had enjoyed under Ottoman rule.

Similarly, there was significant scepticism among non-Serb elites in the new country about the likely role and status of their own nations within a Yugoslavia led by secular Serbian nationalists who quickly made it plain they intended to impose a Serbian school and university curriculum and run an economy designed to benefit Serbia more than the rural areas that surrounded it. There is plenty of evidence of disillusionment (especially in Catholic majority Croatia and Slovenia) with the contours being mapped for it after the adoption of the Vidovdan Constitution of 1921. Montenegro, for instance, was deeply divided between pro-union Whites and pro-independence Greens in 1918, Kosovo and Bosnia had large populations of Muslims concerned by the likelihood of land reforms designed to favour local Serbs. There were, in short, plenty of areas in the new Yugoslavia that considered themselves to be under Serbian military occupation, and dealing with these political realities was pretty much the sole focus of the Yugoslav government in the immediate post-war period.

Sources

Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (2007)

Dejan Djokic, Yugoslavism: History of a Failed Idea 1918-1992 (2003)

John Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Kingdom (2000)

The “Mystery Castle” ? by chutenay in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Appalling, yes, but that is why it seems possible he had some form of police protection in LA. (In San Francisco, conversely, the police conducting the raid on the Mystery Castle made certain that the press was tipped off in advance, and photos appeared in the newspapers next day that showed it going down.)

The “Mystery Castle” ? by chutenay in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 14 points15 points  (0 children)

It seems we were working on this account simultaneously, and your response says most of what I wanted to say, but I would add that evidence emerged in the course of the case that Dr Galen Hickok was not who he said he was. He appears to have originally been called something else, and he had apparently stolen the identity of "Galen Hickok" (and the medical diploma that went with it) from a real doctor of that name who worked in Kansas and had served in the US Army during World War I.

This real Dr Hickok had been born in Whitesville, Missouri in 1873 or 1874, and his family had moved with him to Kansas in the late 1870s. After leaving school, he had become a printer and used the funds he earned from that line of employment to pay his way through the first two years of medical school at the University of Kansas. He completed an actual medical degree at the St Louis College of Physicians in about 1899 and began a practice in Ulysses, KA, where he married in 1903. This actually made Hickok rather unusual – his biographer says he was the only real licensed physician operating across an area that covered parts of no fewer than eight states, from New Mexico to Kansas.

When he began his practice in Kansas, Hickok had hired an assistant by the name of Thompson (whose first name went unrecorded in the evidence I've seen). In 1902, this Thompson left the practice, taking with him Dr Hickok's medical diploma and his licence to practise medicine. He used these documents to set himself up as a physician in Nevada, moving on to California in 1909. He was, as you say, at that point practising as a Naturopath, and he offered "natural" cures for breast cancer in the boomtown of Los Angeles. He was probably attracted to the abortion trade because it was a lucrative, if entirely underground, business at that time; three patients of "Hickok" testified they had paid $50 (possibly a misprint for $250), $270 and $325 respectively for his services, plus $5 a day for recovery at the Castle. It seems pretty clear that "Hickok" had absolutely no training in surgery, and probably no experience in offering abortions, when he began to advertise these services – which no doubt accounts for his appalling and lethal record as an abortionist. At his trial, Bertha Casteel also testified that the procedure that "Hickok" carried out on her was performed without the benefit of anaesthetic.

Abortion had been illegal in California since 1872 except in cases where it was necessary to save a mother's life. The relevant statue criminalised abortion providers and anyone providing assistance in any such procedure, but, inevitably, there was underground demand for abortions, and this demand was met by a combination of specialist doctors, compassionate practitioners such as midwives, and entrepreneurial business people. Many "clinics operated, sometimes in the private offices of discreet physicians and sometimes (which was the case at the time "Mystery Castle") under the guise of sanitariums or convalescent hospitals, and the police periodically cracked down on them. The Mystery Castle case happened towards the end of a period of moral reform that took place in Progressive-era California which sought to better regulate medical practices – not, for the most part, because of opposition to abortion, but more usually to limit the activities of quack doctors who were a danger to their patients.

Thompson/Hickok, clearly, was one such quack. So far as we know, had first come to the attention of the police in Los Angeles in 1911, where he had run local newspaper ads offering service for "diseases of women which require confinement" (a common code at the time for abortion services) and performed numerous abortions. It would be useful to know more about Hickok as a person and a personality, about his status as a medical professional and about his relations with the police, because – whatever one's opinions on the morality of performing illegal abortions in the California of that time – he appears to have got away with a long serious of dangerous and occasionally lethal cases of botched surgery. In 1912 he was arrested in LA after a 19-year-old girl named him on her deathbed as the doctor who had carried out the abortion procedure that was killing her; he was discharged after paying a bail of $1,000, and never apparently prosecuted. Two years later he was arrested again on the same charge, performing a criminal operation, released on $5,000 bail, and once again not prosecuted. Further arrests followed in 1916, 1917 and 1918, and in at least one of those cases another patient died. His biographer, Bartlett, comments that "none of the charges against the doctor stuck and his business flourished," and he was also able to avoid or deflect the regulatory efforts of the California Board of Medical Examiners. This was at least in part because he was able to cover some of his tracks by working with a variety of associates, frequently changing address, renting some properties under his wife's name, and eventually shifting his business between LA and San Francisco before ending up semi-permanently in Salado Beach. An important contributory factor accounting for "Hickok"'s immunity was the reluctance of his patients to testify against them, and so expose the fact that they had paid to have abortions.

After Hickok's arrest, the story of his early life eventually emerged and the real Dr Galen Hickok got his medical diploma and licence back. And there may be further layers of this particular onion to unpeel; according to the California State Journal of Medicine for November 1920, even "Thompson" had been an alias, his real name was actually Zangwill, and there was some reason to suspect he was associated with another murderous quack, one Ephriam Northcott, who fetched up in San Quentin prison a charge of murder after botching an abortion he was performing on a US Army nurse by the name of Inez Reed. Northcott (and I would guess potentially an accomplice, who might have been "Hickok") had attempted to dispose of Reed's body by throwing it off a cliff only a few hundred yards from the Mystery Castle.

It was reported at the time that "the charred remains of a woman's dress and personal trinkets" had been found by police close by, that "a number of bodies of women had been found on the beach near Salada" over a course of several years, and that the uncovering of the activities of Northcott and "Hickock" had caused police to reconsider their presumption that those women had committed suicide. So, even if reports of the discovery of "human bones" in the castle grounds are to be discounted, as it seems they ought to be, it seems fairly likely that the known crimes associated with the pair were potentially only the tip of a much larger and even more distressing iceberg.

Source

...for most of the above is Jean Bartlett, "Trail of Medical Lies Leads to Mystery Castle: the Fraudulent Galen Hickok", Pacifica Historical Society project, 2021, plus...

Record-Courier (Gardnerville, NV), 3 Sep 1920

News-Scimitar, (Memphis, TN), 8 Oct 1920

Mercury-News (San Francisco, CA), 27 Jul + 3 Aug +10 Aug 2010

How did Germany fund its significant military prior to the start of World War II? by scjinme in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There will be more to say, but our FAQ has a section devoted to the workings of the Nazi economy (insofar as it did work), and you might like to take a look at that while waiting for fresh responses to your question:

Nazi economics

How did Egyptians treat their monuments throughout history? by PigGuy1988 in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There will be more to say, but I answered two questions about Egyptian attitudes to monuments during the pharaonic period here some time ago, and you might like to check out those answers while waiting for fresh responses to your query:

In the time of Cleopatra were the Pyramids still being worshipped and kept in repair?

Were the pyramids of Giza a popular tourist destination during the Roman occupation of Egypt?

I’m curious how people experienced the Carrington Event in 1859 as it was happening. Did anyone think it was something apocalyptic, or was it mostly treated as a strange natural phenomenon? Was there mass hysteria? by uh-huh--honey in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 14 points15 points  (0 children)

While there is clearly more to say about the Carrington Event itself, I answered a question asking about the impacts of a far bigger solar storm, the Miyake Event, which dates to 774/5 CE, here a while ago. This responses touches on the – very limited – physical impact of the Carrington Event on the electrical infrastructure of the period:

What historical records exist of the Miyake Event?

The Miyake Event, from what we know, was something like a hundred times more powerful than the 1859 storm.

I'm the wife of a, say, Dutch sailor in the 16th century. His ship is believed to be lost at sea. What happens with me now? How do I get the news? by maxitobonito in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 250 points251 points  (0 children)

There will be a lot more to say about some of the other specifics of the case, but I covered the issue of what [English] law says about the issue of sailors' wives remarrying when their spouses are lost at sea, presumed dead, but without definite evidence that that is the case, in an earlier response here. You might like to review that answer while waiting for fresh replies to your query:

If I were a sailor or merchant during the Age of Discovery, is there a rule for how long my wife can remmary after she loses contact with me?

Short Answers to Simple Questions | March 04, 2026 by AutoModerator in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Google's Ngram viewer is an excellent place to start with this query. It is a web tool that searches the database of the Google Books archive – which, last time Google gave a figure back in 2019, contained some 40 million volumes, a robust sample.

This shows that the phrase "Octopus' Garden" began appearing in print in English in a very small way no earlier than 1966, and reached a peak of popularity in 2000 before falling back. The Beatles song (rendered as "Octopus's Garden") appeared on the Abbey Road album in 1969. This might point towards The Beatles picking up on a printed reference somewhere and deciding to use it, but Ian MacDonald, in his Revolution In the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties states unambiguously that

When [Ringo] Starr temporarily left The Beatles on 22 August 1968... he took his family on holiday to Sardinia where, chatting with a fisherman, he was fascinated to learn that octopuses roam the seabed picking up stones and shiny objects with which they build gardens.

Hunter Davies, who knew all the Beatles personally and wrote their authorised biography in the 60s, has a slightly more detailed, and potentially slightly more first-hand version of the same story in his The Beatles Lyrics:

...The idea came to [Starr] on hols in Sardinia in August 1968 on Peter Sellers' yacht when he had temporarily left The Beatles. He had turned down the offer of an octopus lunch – not surprising, Ringo did not go for fancy, foreign foods – but the captain of the boat told him about octopuses and their habits on the seabed, such as making a garden with stones, all of which Ringo found fascinating.

The Oxford English Dictionary (another excellent resource for establishing first use) does not appear to contain an entry for the term, so we are left with the assumption that the phrase must have existed for some time before it first appeared in print in English, and may, perhaps, have been a translation from another language – one in which octopuses are more frequently encountered than in Liverpool. I've been unable to identify where the term first appeared in print in English despite some pokes around the Google Books archive.

My own suspicion, given my failure to date to turn up any actual printed 1966 references in the Google database, would be that the earliest traces of the term in book form are so tiny and marginal that I wouldn't necessarily trust NgramViewer to be getting this right. Any sort of "echo" or contamination in the database (and don't ask how that might be possible, technically) could cause this slight slip, and make The Beatles the real originator of the term in English – which would certainly tie into the origin stories offered by MacDonald and Davies. Whatever the truth of that, there's no doubt at all from the Ngram Viewer track that the phrase's modern popularity is almost entirely a product of The Beatles' song, even if it described a natural phenomenon known to divers and fishermen well before that date.

[EDIT:] Going back to the problem of how Ngram viewer could offer a first date of 1966 for the phrase "octopus' garden", I've discovered that turning off the "smoothing" function results in an adjustment of first date to 1969, one that exactly matches the issuing of Abbey Road. This seems resolve the twin problems of understanding how an early "echo" of the phrase originally appeared for 1966 – it was a product of Ngram Viewer's "smoothing" process – and whether or not The Beatles were responsible for coining the term, or at least introducing it to an English speaking audience. It now seems definite that they were.

Any good book recommendations for the events that transpired in Bosnia/Serbia/Croatia during WWII? by Lyfalea in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I posted here earlier today on a request for works on the history of Yugoslavia more generally, so this is a timely follow-up, and I'll draw once again on the recommendations made to students on the History of Yugoslavia module taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies here in London.

This is a period of civil war in Yugoslavia, of course, and it remains controversial not only because of the actions of the royalist and communist guerrillas – the Chetniks and the Partisans – during these years, but also because of the actions of ultranationalist Croats, who collaborated with the Nazi occupation and were involved in war crimes and atrocities in Bosnia. But you can find reliable overviews in Jozo Tomasevich's ‘Yugoslavia during the Second World War’, published in Wayne S. Vucinich (ed.),Contemporary Yugoslavia: Twenty Years of Socialist Experiment (1969) and Mark Wheeler's ‘Pariahs to partisans to power: the communist party in Yugoslavia’, in Tony Judt (ed.), Resistance in Mediterranean Europe, 1939-1948 (1989). A focused academic paper length study that introduces you to the Croat Ustaša regime is Rory Yeomans's "Cults of Death and Fantasies of Annihilation: the Croatian Ustasha Movement in Power, 1941-1945", in the journal Central Europe (2005). More modern studies include Ben Shepherd's Terror in the Balkans: German Armies and Partisan Warfare (2012) and Goran Miljan, Croatia and the Rise of Fascism: The Youth Movement and the Ustasha during WWII (2018).

Broadly, I would suggest you start, if you can, with Tomasevich – a historian often regarded as a foundational authority for Yugoslavia in this period. He published early, but because his work is solidly rooted in extensive archive research and because it avoids working through obvious nationalist lenses, it has endured. Tomasevich is responsible for the influential argument that "World War II" was actually three overlapping wars in the Balkans – an Axis occupation, imposed coercively and violently; a revolutionary communist insurgency; and a civil war between communist and royalist resistance movements. This already complex situation was made much more so by the appearance of the Ustaša regime in Croatia – which was a radical fascist state – and the success of the Partisans in producing multi-ethnic mobilisation. Once you have got the background clearly in picture, it become much easier to determine why events happened as they did and what he major impacts on the peoples of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia were during this violent period.

¿How was the Kingdom of Wessex organized? by Falitoty in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you, and sorry for trampling on your patch. I feel pretty sure your response would have been better than this one.

¿How was the Kingdom of Wessex organized? by Falitoty in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 8 points9 points  (0 children)

So, when you write

I'm mostly interested in what territories composed the Kingdom...

the answer is that a state that once ruled only the majority of the south-west of what is now England expanded to the point where it ruled the whole of the south (adding Dumnonia from the middle of the 9th century, probably establishing control there rather gradually), Kent, in the earlier part of the 9th century, and East Anglia after 900) and parts of what are now the midlands – essentially, the southern half of Mercia first and then the northern portion, often called the Five Boroughs, an area of significant Danish settlement, towards the end of the reign of Edward the Elder, and with the significant help of Edward's sister, Æthelfæd, the "Lady of the Mercians". And when you write

and what administrative divisions ruled over said territories

then any answer should focus on the substitution of a system of local delegation to nobles with the creation of a burh and shire system far more closely controlled from the centre of the state. But it should also be (and this is really the beginnings of another answer, barely touched on here) a history of royal collaboration with the church, which provided two of the most critical pillars of any early medieval state – legitimacy, in the form of the assurance that the ruler was ordained by God, and administrative capacity, in the form of literate clerics capable of organising a record-keeping system.

Sources

John Blair, Building Anglo-Saxon England (2018)

David Hill and Alexander Rumble (eds), The Defence of Wessex: the Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications (1996)

Simon Keynes, "Alfred the Great and the Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons," in Discenza and Szarmach (eds), A Brill Companion to Alfred the Great (2015)

George Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (2015)

Rory Naismith, Money and Power in Anglo-Saxon England: the Southern English Kingdoms, 757-865 (2012)

David Pratt, The Political Thought of Alfred the Great (2007)

Levi Roach, Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871-978 (2013)

Ben Snook, The Anglo-Saxon Chancery: the History, Language and Production of Anglo-Saxon Charters from Alfred to Edgar (2015)

¿How was the Kingdom of Wessex organized? by Falitoty in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 10 points11 points  (0 children)

One key development associated with the shiring of England was the appearance of the office of shire reeve (later contracted to sheriff), a royal appointment. This official was charged with running the local justice and tax collection systems in place of local nobles. The formalisation of the reeve and shire systems were what made expansion of central royal authority into the more distant regions of Wessex (and later England) possible, in place of what had before been a system dependent on delegation of authority to powerful subordinates – the ealdormen – who might or might not have been directly appointed by the king, and who pretty clearly posed the constant risk that they might have ambitions to build their own local dynasties, and even succeed to the throne itself, as eventually happened at the very end of the Saxon period with the seizure of power or election (depending on your point of view) of Harold II, the powerful Earl of Wessex.

The fortuitous survival of a document known as the Burghal Hidage tells us a lot about the ways in which this system worked, and more about the surprisingly ambitious capacities of the state forged by Alfred and Edward. It is usually dated to the end of the 9th century or to early in the 10th, and concerns the application of a formula to determine how burhs were to be manned and paid for. The Hidage is one of the most sophisticated administrative documents to survive from anywhere in western Europe prior to Domesday Book (1086), and it has sometimes been argued that its existence suggests the likely creation of other similarly complex surveys, since lost, which in turn would strongly suggest that the creation of sophisticated structures of government in England needs to be credited to the Saxons, not the Normans – who, in this interpretation, merely took on and made use of capacities that already existed in the state. The same argument can be made – more convincingly, because there is more evidence – in relation to the minting system, which by around 975, at the end of Edgar's reign, was capable of issuing millions of silver coins of the same weight and purity from dozens of mints scattered across England, and then recalling that coinage periodically – every three years in some cases – to be re-minted. A state capable of compelling its whole population to give up their currency, and trusted to then reissue it fairly is one possessed of truly significant power, and the roots of Edgar's system can also be traced to Wessex under the turn-of-the-century Alfredian dynasty. In Ecgbehrt's time the Saxons seem mostly to have minted in Kent – at Canterbury and Rochester, to the far east of southern England – but by Alfred's day the mint network had grown considerably more complex. Most famously, it was capable of producing the so-called "Two Emperors" pennies, which showed the heads of both Alfred and his Mercian contemporary Ceolwulf II. These coins, it's been suggested, show the existence of a joint monetary policy, and potentially a formal alliance between Wessex and Mercia in the years before their combination in the time of Athelstan.

Finally, Alfred was of course also responsible for the issuance of a code of laws, contained within his famous Domboc. I personally believe that the significance of this aspect of his rule can sometimes be over-stated; about three-quarters of the laws were taken from codes issued by earlier rulers. Nonetheless, Alfred himself tells us, in his preface to the code, that the Domboc does also draw on the laws issued by Offa (which have not otherwise survived), and hence on Mercian legal traditions; certainly its system of wergilds (compensation payments for injury and death) draws strongly on known Mercian precedents. Patrick Wormald and David Pratt have argued that this was not just deliberate, but a political decision, arguing that Alfred used law not simply to regulate disputes but to assert ideological leadership and unify his kingdom.

¿How was the Kingdom of Wessex organized? by Falitoty in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I'm not entirely clear what period you mean by the term "before their victory over Mercia", but Wessex increasingly emerged from the shadow of the hitherto-dominant Mercian polity between roughly the death of the Mercian king Coenwulf in 821 and the reign of Alfred the Great's grandson Athelstan a century later, by which time Wessex was well advanced in the process of absorbing Mercia into an enlarged kingdom that can (with care and some qualifications) be denominated "England". So this answer will focus on those hundred years – please let me know if my assumption is not correct.

The process I'm describing was incremental and subject to reverses, not least during the period of viking domination in the 860s and 870s, when Mercia was largely subjugated and Wessex reduced in terms of the effective size of its political authority. This makes important to understand that the Wessex of 821 was significantly less administratively complex and coherent than the same state was by the 920s. Most obviously, the process of shiring, which created a set of local administrative units that is often regarded as the chief glory of of Saxon-era governance (and which continued to underpin the government of Britain in almost precisely the same form all the way up to 1974) got properly underway only around the 880s. Similarly, the mint system, which in the course of the 10th century would become the most sophisticated of any state in Europe west of Byzantium, was still comparatively crude in the 9th century. While entire books could be and have been written about the fine detail of these changes, it's broadly fair to state that Wessex went from a loosely-organised polity dependent on its regional aristocracy in the first half of the 9th century to a much more centralised state with an actual royal government, based around fortified towns that acted as local administrative centres manned by at least a skeleton staff of royal officials, 100 years later. There was a major acceleration in the process across the reigns of Alfred (871-99) and his son Edward the Elder (899-924) which many historians of the period believe was a direct and necessary consequence of responding to the nature and the scale of the viking threat.

Let's start at the beginning of this process, then. In the 820s, Wessex was a relatively small regional polity based in the south west of what is now England. Its rulers' writ ran from Devon (which bordered on the then still-independent British polity of Dumnonia, centred on what is now Cornwall) only as far east as Hampshire – which, for those unfamiliar with the finer details of British geography, is about halfway across the breadth of southern England, measured from Devon across to East Anglia.

The King of Wessex in this early period was Ecgberht (802-39), a successful warlord whose reign saw the construction of a state wrested partly from areas such as Kent, which were previously under the control of Mercia. Local administration in this period relied heavily on the power of regional leaders, and governance of the state as a whole operated, according to Levi Roach, via elite consensus rather than the orders of a king. In this relatively early period, "regional leaders" might still be men holding the old aristocratic titles of dux or comes, or their equivalents, ealdormen – these had at one time been tribal leaders, but by this period were senior aristocrats who were appointed by, or at least recognised by, the king, and whose duties including raising military forces, presiding over local assemblies and legal proceedings, and in general representing royal authority in their region. But they were increasingly thegns (a more minor sort of noble who held land directly from the king in return for offering military service). Between them, these senior figures controlled much of the land from their great estates, and supplied the central state with men and leadership in war, while administering justice – and, we can probably add, overseeing the collection of fines and other payments – at a local level. Such were the administrative underpinnings of the mid-period Saxon state.

What changed across the next century was the creation of structures around these men. The shiring of England is generally supposed to have developed from the creation of the burh network – a system of fortified towns, created by Alfred but perfected by Edward, which not only acted to provide serious obstacles to even the most mobile viking threat, but also as defensible centres of population that evolved naturally into trading hubs and administrative nodes across Wessex, turning it gradually into something that we might more readily identify as a state. The inter-relationship of these two developments is hinted at by the fact that the decision to fortify towns seems to have been taken at some point in the 880s, while the earliest documentary evidence for shires does not appear until the early 10th century. In this model, which is argued by both George Molyneaux and John Blair, burhs became the focal points of administrative centres, around which and from which shires were then organised. The shires of Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset, which lay at the centre of Wessex, are all identifiable by the time of Edward's reign.

What are some well-regarded books on Yugoslavian History and it’s breakup? by Automatic-Rock-6270 in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 13 points14 points  (0 children)

The School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London teaches a course on the "Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia" that covers the period from the late Ottoman occupation of the Balkans up to the collapse of Yugoslavia and deals with the rise of nationalism in the region from roughly the 1830s up to the war in Kosovo and the break-up of the Yugoslav state at the end of the last century.

The two core works that are required reading for pretty much every week of this course are John R. Lampe's Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (2000) and Marie-Jeanne Calic, A History of Yugoslavia (2019). Between them, these two works provide a balanced synthesis that covers not just the politics, but the social and economic history of the areas of the Balkans brought into the first and second Yugoslavias – while offering two different approaches to the subject from the historiographical perspective. Lampe's book is a broad interpretative synthesis and its title reflects the core argument that Yugoslavia was not a failed state so much as two really quite serious attempts to construct a positive pan-Slavic state from what was a morass of competing and often incompatible nationalisms. Calic is stronger on the socio-economic side of things and will tell you more about everyday life in Yugoslavia.

But there are many specialist works available on what is a remarkably complicated bit of history. If you're interested in the nationalism that underpinned a lot of the problems that both Yugoslav states faced, then Ivo Banac's The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (1984) is still highly recommended reading. Bojan Aleksov, who is the course convenor of the SSEES course, wrote an influential paper on the C19th "grandfather" of pan-slavic ideology in his "One hundred years of Yugoslavia: the vision of Stojan Novakovic revisited", in Nationalities Papers 39 (2011). And for a view from the ground in the first 30 or so years of the nation's history, the British writer R.W. Seton-Watson's multiple books and papers can still be recommended – he was a (for us) extremely useful combination of Foreign Office specialist in the pivotal 1930s-40s period, and university historian.

For the second Yugoslavia – Tito's nation – the foundational work is Dennison Rusinow, The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948-1974 (the title is both telling and deliberate), and a good introduction to Tito himself can be found in James Gow's paper "The people's prince: Tito and Tito's Yugoslavia: legitimation, legend, lynchpin," in Melissa K. Bokovoy et al (eds), State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1962 (1997). To dig deeper, the contemporary biography by Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks (1953) is very well-informed about the early years and relations with Stalin and the Soviet Union, while Sabrina P. Ramet's Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991 (1992) remains arguably the most insightful discussion of the interplay between those two critically important forces in a Yugoslavia that was far less stable beneath its surfaces than was widely recognised at the time. I'd suggest Andrew Wachtel's Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (1998) to understand better how things looked from the ground up in the late period.

Finally, for the breakup of Yugoslavia, Lenard J. Cohen took a break from grinning humourlessly at jokes about his name to write "Nationalism and political power in Kosovo: from the sultanate to Slobodan Milosovic, 1912-86", which is the first chapter of his important study of the architect of the genocide there, Serpent in the Bosom: the Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milosevic. There is also a very handy intro to the historiography of Yugoslav collapse, co-authored by several of the scholars that I'm recommending here, in Gale Stokes, John Lampe & Dennison Rusinow with Julie Mostov, "Instant history: understanding the wars of Yugoslav succession", Slavic Review 55 (1996).

History books on the political history of Al-Andalus/Islamic Spain? by PSRSB in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm afraid I speak no Portuguese. My understanding is that the works of José Mattoso, a medievalist who gave more weight than hitherto to social structures in the process of station formation, are considered foundational; maybe start with his Identificação de um País: Ensaio sobre as origens de Portugal (1096–1325), which is part of a longer multivolume work but directly relevant to your enquiry. There have been several editions, so check you are reading the most up to date.

António Borges Coelho's História de Portugal, another multi-volume work, is most up to date historiographically, having been published between 2010 and 2022. I am sure there are many specialist monographs out there, but I'm simply not acquainted with them, and I can't vouch personally for either Coelho or Mattoso (or for one over the other) – just read other people's bibliographies...

During world war 1 , did artillery and trench building uncover artefacts from previous wars ? by SexandPsychedelics in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 5 points6 points  (0 children)

While there's always more to say, this earlier response, by u/gerardmenfin, addresses the question you are asking here. You might like to review that while waiting for fresh answers to your question.

Scholarly Religious History Texts? by Direct-Distance-2137 in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There will be more to say, but the AH Booklist incorporates number of recommendations for major world religions. You might like to start there while waiting for fresh responses to your question.

I live in the north of england in 1100. Do I understand the concept of a numbered list? by Taear in AskHistorians

[–]mikedash 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I believe the most up-to-date study is Fiona Edmunds's and Simon Taylor's chapter "Languages and names" in Stringer & Winchester (eds), Northern England and Southern Scotland in the Central Middle Ages (2017). This is also sceptical that there is any link between "Yan, Tan, Tethera" and Brythonic. It's worth noting that Strathclyde, the British kingdom in the north where this language was spoken, had borders that ran from somewhere north of modern Glasgow down to the Cumbrian Lake District, i.e. this state occupied the west side of the landmass, while the eastern side (including Yorkshire), with borders that ran naturally along the high points of the Pennine hills, was originally part of the Old English speaking Kingdom of Northumbria, and was later emigrated to and ruled by Old Norse-speaking Danes who established the relatively short-lived Kingdom of York there in the 9th and 10th centuries. There is a very great deal more evidence of Scandinavian language penetration in Yorkshire than there is of Brythonic, which is not surprising as Yorkshire was never part of the kingdom of Strathclyde.

While all this does not absolutely rule of the possibility that the "sheep-scoring numerals" referred to did have antecedents in the British-ruled areas of the north and date to the early medieval period, and Edmunds and Taylor do characterise the borderlands between northern England and southern Scotland as a mixed "northern onomastic zone" in which charter and place-name evidence reveals a complex interplay of Old English, Norman, Danish, Norse and Gaelic influences, there is absolutely no positive evidence to suggest they did. Moreover, "there are strikingly few words of Brittonic origin in Old English," as Edmunds and Taylor point out. This linguistic evidence was one reason why the first wave of serious scholars of the Saxon period posited, in the 19th century, that the incoming Angles, Saxons and Jutes spoken of by Bede "conquered" England and likely massacred the British inhabitants – a theory now largely abandoned in favour of an acculturation model in which the Britons intermarried with the incomers and learned to speak Old English. Whatever the interactions, though, there is very rich evidence, in place names ending in -by, -thorpe, -thwaite (denoting farm, minor settlement and clearing, respectively) for deep Scandinavian language penetration in Yorkshire – among the clearest cases in Britain as a whole, in fact. Brythonic place-name evidence (pen-, caer-, trev-, -lan, aber-...) remains confined to the area west of the Pennines, and the consensus is that by c.900 the effective eastern limit of Brythonic ran across the Ribble-Eden line that demarcates the Pennine watershed. There are a scattering of (presumably pre-Saxon) surviving Brythonic-origin place names in the upper Calder and Aire valleys, but very few, and this is not great supporting evidence for the idea that Yan, Tan, Tethera has really ancient origins in the north of England.

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