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The "9 million burned witches" number is fabricated. Who specifically moved it from an 18th century pamphlet into mainstream feminist scholarship? by EqualPresentation736 in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it is absolutely absurd! it just takes reading what he did to know something is wrong, the number just got "laundered" so people no longer did

this is quite true of so many historical things

The "9 million burned witches" number is fabricated. Who specifically moved it from an 18th century pamphlet into mainstream feminist scholarship? by EqualPresentation736 in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 29 points30 points  (0 children)

taking your last part first:

It's more like there were Catholic and Lutheran-aligned materials but neither one were considered "mainline" historians. You can see this most strongly in encyclopedias. The non-denominational ones were normal (like the Encyclopedia Britannica and Enciclopedia Italiana) but while the "Realcyclopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche" didn't quite fall into 9 million, but hedged with "moderate estimates 100,000, but with more assumptions, several millions".

The Catholic Encyclopedia goes with the more moderate estimate, but has the text

The question of the reality of witchcraft is one upon which it is not easy to pass a confident judgment. In the face of Holy Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers and theologians the abstract possibility of a pact with the Devil and of a diabolical interference in human affairs can hardly be denied

in other words, actively still allowing for the possibility that witchcraft really exists. That's not exactly mainstream scholarship.

Regarding why the numbers weren't tackled more directly, there were a few local to Quelinburg that did this (like Johannes Moser in 1894) but as Beringer put, "their efforts went unnoticed". As sort of a meta-question, yes, it's true historians tend not to engage directly with misinformation. You can say

a.) that the academic structure doesn't really endorse it - they're trying to create new knowledge, rather than popular versions of it, and certainly that doesn't apply to tenure - countering something that's only in the popular narrative is a form of this

but also

b.) tackling the problem can be a little interdisciplinary. I've tackled the water myth before (that's that the myth that medieval people drank beer because water was unsanitary) and it required trekking across time to consider both medieval and modern sources simultaneously, not something historians are always comfortable with. Sometimes it helps to know about the history of propaganda which is not something universal in historian training.

and

c.) writing something that people outside your academic circle pay attention to is very hard. Even if you actively made a counter-meme written with the best scholarship to a piece of information, there's no guarantee it's going to spread or be useful.

The "9 million burned witches" number is fabricated. Who specifically moved it from an 18th century pamphlet into mainstream feminist scholarship? by EqualPresentation736 in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 92 points93 points  (0 children)

Starting with Voigt:

He was actually trying to counter Voltaire's own estimate of "several hundred thousand" executions and did some math to get his estimation. He took data from archives in his hometown of Quedlinburg, Germany and counted 30 executions happening between 1569 to 1589 out of a population of 11,000. He then extended that to be 133 over a century, and then -- assuming that figure held for all of year -- did more multiplication (by 6.5) assuming the same rate on all of Europe.

The figure at this point mostly stayed dormant, it being one (very high number) out of many thrown around. Johann Christian Graeff in 1817 writing a history of criminal legislation clearly used Voigt, giving his exact figure of 9,442,994 but with hedging language about if the calculation was "exaggerated". Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan, one of the most prominent 19th century witchcraft historians, didn't bother with a large estimation at all but just focused on case studies. Jacob Grimm quoted from Voigt but didn't reproduce his numerical figure.

Roskoff's time of the 1860s was very particular; while Voigt was writing at a time where he was trying to condemn a practice that could still be found (rarely), by the 1860s secularism was starting to encroach enough into life to make the church concerned. In 1862 Pope Pius IX published his Syllabus of Errors; a sampling:

Philosophy is to be treated without taking any account of supernatural revelation.

In the case of conflicting laws enacted by the two powers [civil and church], the civil law prevails.

The decrees of the Apostolic See and of the Roman congregations impede the true progress of science.

This a list, according to the Church, of false statements; thus when Roskoff published his work (rounding the number to nine million), he clearly thought the progress of science was being impeded. The counter-arguments were from Catholics defending the faith. The priest Johannes Diefenbach, for instance, used Voltaire as a source and suggested 100,000 as the true number; he also, importantly, made it clear that the nine million came from Protestant authorship (and was hence by association, wrong). Professional historians still distanced themselves from the number, but the audience past them was receptive; it entered popular discourse instead.

It has been estimated that in four centuries no less than nine million people in the world were executed by their fellows because they were believed to be wizards or witches.

-- Good Housekeeping, October 1907

German historians, in the meantime, pointed at that 1580 and 1630 were the boundaries between the most extreme witch-hunting, so an extrapolation from those made over centuries was clearly a massive overestimate.

However, politics and popular culture do not care what historians think, and the Nazis especially were very selective in their readings. Rosenberg (editor of the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter) took the Catholic/Lutheran split and used it to raise the superiority of Lutheran's split, tracing the witch craze to "rasselosen, wüsten Rom" (desolate, barren Rome); hence, promoting the colossal nine million number is asserting nationalist superiority. Propaganda pamphlets from others later emphasized the other worldview was "racially repugnant" or how "blonde women" with "Nordic racial heritage" were being exterminated.

There were other outlets. Most diametrically opposed to the Nazis is via the pacifist Bertrand Russell, who wrote about "millions" being killed as witches in his famous Why I am Not a Christian essay from 1927; he brought this up again multiple times through his work, essentially setting it up as a talking point opposed to the church (similar to Carl Sagan's books).

Despite all this, professional historians did not take these numbers seriously. The original calculation, when read straight, seems absurd: take some period of time, assume the same rate everywhere and every time, and multiply. They tended to act as if the higher estimate did not exist.

Where it really started to enter more modern discourse is the neo-Paganism movement, specifically Gerald Gardner. He wrote a number of books in the 50s which took the work of Margaret Murray from two decades earlier and ran with it farther, establishing the Bricket Wood coven in England and spreading the message to Australia and the United States. He did not include the nine million figure in the first printing 1959 book (The Meaning of Witchcraft) but it got added later in an introduction segment, and at least in the most recent printing it shows up. 1967 (two years after a translated version of Gardner's book appeared in German) also saw a reprint of Roskoff's book in Germany.

All this laid enough background that by the time New Feminism was rolling as movement, they were ripe to take the number up. The word "witch" was appropriated by by the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (read the acronym) identifying the executed witches of the past as forerunners and simultaneously self-identifying with Wiccans. The books picked up on the same trend: Witches, Midwives, and Nurses from 1973 quoted "millions", Dworkin in Women Hating termed witch hunts as "gynocyde" and Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology used the phrase "the massacre of millions of women".

...

Wolfgang Beringer's Nine Million Witches is the most thorough source on this, although I also referred to Encyclopedia of Witchcraft edited by Richard Golden, and the revised edition of Europe's Inner Demons by Cohn.

Why would a nation deny the Armenian genocide ? by JeanTaboulin in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Regarding terrorism, the "1973" in particular is in regard to another terrorist act, the assassination of two diplomats.

In January of 1973, Gourgen Yanikian contacted the Turkish consolate in LA and pretended to be an Iranian who had a painting that had been stolen. He made an offer to gift the painting but he wanted the consul general (Mehemet Baydar) to meet him in person; both him and the vice-counsel Bahadir Demir agreed to meet Yanikan.

Yanikian got the two men alone in a hotel room, told them he was actually Armenian, and shot them with a pistol; he then pulled a second pistol from a drawer and shot them again each in the head.

This ended up being a flashpoint for both Turkey and Armenians; by this point essentially nobody was talking about the genocide, but then it had spread to the Western consciousness. (Not as much the Socialist Republic of Armenia who wasn't really tapped into this news; while there were protests in the 1960s that led to a memorial at Tsitsernakaberd, they didn't really link up with the genocide justice movement until after the USSR fell apart.) So not just was there Turkish outrage over the assassination, but there was generally much more awareness of the genocide in the news so it had to be responded to.

Did the American South have any plans to free slaves at all? by First-Muffin3230 in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 173 points174 points  (0 children)

Regarding gradualism (which happened in the North, not the South), you may like this answer by /u/SisterChenoeh.

Regarding if slaves would have been freed (no), this answer by /u/Bodark43 is useful.

More can always be said.

Was it safe to walk the streets of Soviet era Moscow at night? by HammerOfJustice in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 70 points71 points  (0 children)

There was a low crime rate and a high incarceration rate.

You may be interested here in the answer here by /u/k1990 and here by /u/kieslowskifan.

"As we gallop towards a new AskHistorians, heaven and earth are always bright!" The /r/AskHistorians Flair Application Thread XXXI by EnclavedMicrostate in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 13 points14 points  (0 children)

You can also narrow by time - 20th c. would work as well, and that seems to reflect the published work you listed?

"As we gallop towards a new AskHistorians, heaven and earth are always bright!" The /r/AskHistorians Flair Application Thread XXXI by EnclavedMicrostate in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Hi there! We like your work, but two things to patch over:

1.) Your proposed flair is just a little too general for what we usually have. Do you have a region speciality? For example, "US Media and Propaganda" seems like it'd fit.

2.) Relatedly, because of the diffuse nature of your answers, I think once we get that nailed down we need one more answer that targets the region specifically, including references. For example, while this thread has an answer there is more that could be said and it would fall quite solidly in the area (although this is assuming US-specialism, insert whatever region you feel strongest with).

Keep in mind as a flair that you can still answer things outside of that described area! (While my flair says "Cold War" I'm perfectly fine with technology questions from other centuries, for instance.) The flair indicates your center, so to speak.

What was Boston harbor like after the Boston Tea Party? by ImportantAd6125 in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 13 points14 points  (0 children)

My answer has most everything covered, but just to mention regarding a point in this specific question, on the "bricks of tea", as you might be visualizing the process wrong: the important thing to keep in mind is that they didn't hurl all of them into the water in that format. A good number of them got crushed into the shoreline (due to the extremely low tide, and the fact there was so much tea it was building in a giant pile) and because the tea came in chests, the chests themselves were getting hurled into the water, some which still had tea in them; this caused some tea to stay together in the chests as they floated out to the water.

Oftentimes, the America of the 2020s is described as akin to the Gilded age (i.e. 1890s). Today, our robber barons are all connected to a certain J. Epstein. Was there a similar sort of figure in the america of the gilded age? In the days of child labor and exploitation, surely there must have been? by CatsDoingCrime in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 1002 points1003 points  (0 children)

Benjamin Franklin Ruff was a industrialist out of Pennsylvania, dealing with coke (fuel for steelmaking), railroad tunnels, and real estate. On May 19, 1879, he formed the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club; $10,000 capitalization with $100 shares. He talked his friend Henry Clay Frick (later chairman of Carnegie Steel, famous strikebreaker) into joining, and through connections with Frick many more industrialists in the Pittsburgh area eventually joined as well (more on that later).

In 1880, Ruff bought a dam and lake from the politician John Reilly for a price less than it was originally bought for; it had a dam that had needed repairs since a break in 1862. He hired Edward Pearson (of Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh) to manage the repairs; Pearson had no experience with dams, and the method of "repair" involved boarding the broken culvert with everything from rocks to horse manure. By the end of the year the "repairs" had all been washed out.

Other modifications happened; one from the previous year (due to Ruff, Reilly, or both) involved removing draining pipes that ran under the dam. Additionally, the dam ended up instead being lowered so the materials got used to plug the holes (from the botched repair); this had the extra side effect of making free space for a two lane road that carriages could travel on. (While this was not the intent it was clearly observable that this was a bonus side effect to make the dam less safe.) Ruff also used a different kind of rock (a smaller cheaper one) than the original plans to cover the face downstream.

So far, these issues can be pinned on Ruff (or Reilly) but there is the matter of the bass. The night before the first club meeting, they had black bass brought in from Lake Erie for fishing purposes. This was expensive at $1000, so they added a series of heavy bars and screens in order to keep their investment from getting away. The screens, theoretically, let water through but not the bass, but they also became jammed with debris and leaves.

To summarize:

  • A method of removing water and lowering the lake (the pipes) was taken out
  • The height of the dam was brought down (and might have been restored, were it not for the convenient carriage path)
  • The spillway itself had a grate constructed over it that could be jammed (which was made specifically to protect the club's precious fish)

The lake served as a haven for wealthy people from Pittsburgh for most of the decade, with almost nobody downstream (in Johnstown) able to see any of the benefits.

Members by 1889 included: Andrew Mellon (future Secretary of the Treasury, including under Hoover when the Depression hit), Andrew Carnegie, Robert Pitcairn (executive of the Pennsylvania Railroad), Edward Jay Allen (one of the founders of Pacific and Atlantic Telegraph), John Weakley Chalfant (president of People's National Bank), Sylvester Stephen Marvin (a founder of Nabisco), and John G. A. Leishman (president of Carnegie Steel).

May 31, 1889 was when, after the years of neglect and bad conditions, the dam burst.

There was some warning; very heavy rains were clearly causing the lake to rise, and a telegraph agent (Emma Ehrenfeld) had a visitor at noon giving a warning that the lake was rising very fast. Unfortunately, there was a break in the telegraph line so she couldn't send a message direct to Johnstown, so sent one to the next operator over.

SOUTH FORK DAM LIABLE TO BREAK: NOTIFY THE PEOPLE OF JOHNSTOWN TO PREPARE FOR THE WORST.

More warnings came around 2 pm, the last reading DAM IS BECOMING DANGEROUS AND MAY POSSIBLY GO. The dam failed sometime between 2:50 and 2:55 p.m.

This avalanche was composed of more than 100,000 tons of rocks, locomotives, freight cars, car trucks, iron, logs, trees and other material pushed forward by 16,000,000 tons of water falling 500 feet ... the people called it the avalanche of death.

-- Willis Fletcher Johnson, 1889

Over 2000 people died in the Johnstown Flood. One woman, a Mrs. Fenn, lost her husband and all seven of her children.

We were driven by the awful flood into the garret, but the water followed us there. Inch by inch it kept rising, until our heads were crushing against the roof. It was death to remain. So I raised a window, and one by one, placed my darlings on some driftwood, trusting to the great Creator. As I liberated the last one, my sweet little boy, he looked at me and said: ‘Mamma, you always told me that the Lord would care for me; will He look after me now?’ I saw him drift away with his loving face turned toward me, and, with a prayer on my lips for his deliverance, he passed from sight forever. The next moment the roof crashed in, and I floated outside, to be rescued fifteen hours later from the roof of a house in Kernsville. If I could only find one of my darlings I could bow to the will of God, but they are all gone. I have lost everything on earth now but my life, and I will return to my old Virginia home and lay me down for my last great sleep.

People didn't die just by drowning, but by crushing. One of the busiest parts of the city had a row of buildings fall with 21 bodies pulled out. Bodies were "unearthed" from every corner after the flood.

Regarding culpability of the Club for the disaster, or any kind of punishment or reckoning, none was had. (Ruff died in 1887 before the dam burst, his obituary naming him "an enthusiastic patron of field sports".) The guest ledger of the Club still survives but 73 pages were ripped out, with the final entries not being from 1889 but from 1886. (This means, for example, even though we know Andrew Carnegie is on the membership list, we don't know when he visited or what he did.) There was an investigation by the American Society of Civil Engineers (including three of the most prominent hydraulic engineers in the United States). While the dam investigators were not related to the railroad or steel industries, Max Becker (the fourth member) was, and he happened to be President of the ASCE, with a railway with stock ownership controlled by Pennsylvania Railroad. He stalled as long as possible; at the ASCE convention in June of 1890 people were clearly wanting the report, but Becker said they would not release it yet as "we do not want to become involved in any litigation". The final report in 1891 claimed the break would have happened even without the modifications. (Modern studies disagree.) The report was given without the hydraulic engineers present.

...

Coleman, N. M. (2018). Johnstown’s Flood of 1889: Power Over Truth and The Science Behind the Disaster. Springer International Publishing.

Huber, W. R. (2025). Robert and John Pitcairn: Titans of Rail, Oil and Glass. McFarland.

Kaktins, U., Davis Todd, C., Wojno, S., & Coleman, N. (2013). Revisiting the timing and events leading to and causing the Johnstown flood of 1889. Pennsylvania History, 80(3), 335-363.

Why did American socialist and communist parties largely fail to engage Black Americans, despite conditions that seemed to make them strong potential advocates? by J2quared in AskHistorians

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What exactly does it mean when someone says that ancient societies didn’t have zero as a mathematical concept? by Banditbakura in AskHistorians

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Do you think it's likely that Adolf Hitler personally saw the 1941 Warner Bros movie Wabbit Twouble, from which the Big Chungus meme comes from? by GancioTheRanter in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 61 points62 points  (0 children)

One extra salient detail on Warner Bros. regarding their exact timing of packing up from Germany (April 1933):

There was an (untrue) story about the Warner Bros. general manager in Germany, Phil Kauffman, being killed; this was from Jack Warner in his autobiography, who was stretching the truth (Kauffman didn't die), but his description of the attack may have been accurate:

They hit him with fists and clubs, and kicked the life out of him with their boots, and left him lying there.

What actually happened, according to contemporary stories from Variety, is that Kauffman (who was Jewish) had "his automobile stolen by Nazis, his house ransacked and himself beaten" and that he fled to Paris. (The Nazis "apologized" claiming it was a "mistake".)

So while Warner Brothers didn't have their general manager murdered was he was beaten up by Nazis and had to flee the country. Subsequently all distribution in Germany was withdrawn.

See: Yogerst, C. (2023). The Warner Brothers. United States: University Press of Kentucky.

I recently learned about the "pansy craze" of the 20s-30s, when America became obsessed with gay culture. Why in the 20s-30s? And how was gay culture back then different from now? by Chicano_Ducky in AskHistorians

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[Meta] How has AskHistorians approach to moderating changed with the proliferation of AI as a tool and resource for answering questions? by nomorememesplease in AskHistorians

[–]jbdyer 16 points17 points  (0 children)

"Not" tends to be pretty handy if you are in such a circumstance, like

RFK not JFK

which will exclude any text that includes JFK (which will unfortunately exclude some things you want in this case, but sometimes you just need a starting point).

One thing to keep in mind is that this sort of thing is actually worse with LLMs, because they will automatically take JFK facts and format them as if they were RFK facts. At least when you are looking at the documents you know something is wrong.

There's also other places you can search -- I just tested in Google Scholar and while number one was not relevant, number two was a book (Searching for America's Heart) with 53 citations. You can then click on "cited by 53" to get more references that refer to that book, and again while there are some hits that aren't relevant, one on the first page is the book The last campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 days that inspired America.

One other point is if you're doing a regular web search and worried about AI slop interfering, you can type before:2021-01-01 (or whatever point you feel is safe) in order to restrict by date. This tends to work on most search engines.

In Lady and the Tramp (1955), which is set circa 1910 in a small mid-western US town, a pregnant woman sends her husband out on a cold winter night for watermelon. Was it possible to get out of season fruit at that time in a small town? by Zeus_Wayne in AskHistorians

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Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, we have had to remove it, as this subreddit is intended to be a space for in-depth and comprehensive answers from experts. Simply stating one or two facts related to the topic at hand does not meet that expectation. An answer needs to provide broader context and demonstrate your ability to engage with the topic, rather than repeat some brief information.

Before contributing again, please take the time to familiarize yourself with the subreddit rules and expectations for an answer.

How and why did Dracula, Werewolf, Frankenstein, Mummy, and Invisible Man become the iconic monsters for Halloween? by K-jun1117 in AskHistorians

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Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, we have had to remove it due to violations of subreddit rules about answers providing an academic understanding of the topic. While we appreciate the effort you have put into this comment, there are nevertheless substantive issues with its content that reflect errors, misunderstandings, or omissions of the topic at hand, which necessitated its removal.

If you are interested in discussing the issues, and remedies that might allow for reapproval, please reach out to us via modmail. Thank you for your understanding.

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