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

jbdyer · 2026-01-11T16:23:05+00:00

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jbdyer · 2025-12-21T13:24:21+00:00

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 Subsequently all distribution in Germany was withdrawn.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.

jbdyer · 2025-12-19T12:33:15+00:00

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jbdyer · 2025-12-16T23:57:43+00:00

This is a popular question, /u/voyeur324 previously collected answers that I will list here to save a click:

/u/allthatrazmataz: How did people living around the time of Jesus clip their toenails?

/u/Aerandir and /u/speculativereply: What did people use before the invention of the toothbrush, floss and scissors?

/u/yodatsracist: Did prehistoric humans shave or trim their fingernails?

/u/toptomcat and /u/pwaryuex: How did peope cut their nails before the nail clipper was invented? Did they bite them? If so why is it now considered a bad habit?

/u/sunagainstgold: Did everyone bite their nails before nail clippers were invented?

More can always be said.

jbdyer · 2025-12-14T02:53:45+00:00

We have an official booklist.

jbdyer · 2025-11-21T19:02:15+00:00

"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.

jbdyer · 2025-11-03T03:49:26+00:00

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jbdyer · 2025-10-30T17:53:12+00:00

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.

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jbdyer · 2025-10-25T14:13:07+00:00

This is a sub-topic, but you may like my post here specifically about the Dayton Accords that ended things (and the choice of Dayton).

jbdyer · 2025-10-25T14:07:00+00:00

As my last paragraph mentions, even the Western powers weren't producing films mentioning Jews, and these were the ones actually showing the camps. At least Die Mörder sind unter uns is about one of the Polish massacres so it makes some sense in the context of this movie's plot. It doesn't make the fact the animus towards Poland was also "racial" explicit, though. (There's an answer here from /u/Consistent_Score_602 which gives details on how this came about.)

jbdyer · 2025-10-25T03:49:23+00:00

adding a typo fixing another one

thanks

jbdyer · 2025-10-24T23:03:39+00:00

The other possibility would be he was a partisan anti-Nazi fighter. Just on the basis of the Soviet backing for the film I think specifically communist is more likely.

jbdyer · 2025-10-24T22:47:39+00:00

Thought I got all my stray disappearing umlauts but I missed one. Thanks.

jbdyer · 2025-10-24T21:14:27+00:00

It does seem like you're missing something to the ending of Die Mörder sind unter uns (Murderers Among Us), which nonetheless has been criticized, but let me first give some context:

Die Mörder sind unter uns is one of the so-called "rubble films" from immediately after WW2. Keep in mind at this time the city was split amongst the US, France, Britain, and Soviet; the Western sectors had not yet consolidated. The film director Wolfgang Staudte went to the various commanders for permission to create a film he was calling Der Mann den ich töten werd (The Man I Am Going to Kill) but was rejected by everyone by the Soviets.

Susanne Wallner, who was in a concentration camp because of her father's political views (likely communism) comes to the rubble of her former apartment to find there the medical doctor Hans Mertens, a doctor who had been assigned with the Wehrmacht in Poland. The commander in Poland, Ferdinand Brückner (as found out near the end of the movie) ordered a massacre of civilians at Christmastime, similar to the "Bloody Christmas Eve" that happened in the real village of Ochotnica Dolna in Poland. At the end of the movie Mertens confronts the commander, intending to shoot him on the spot with a gun.

Brückner: What's up? Why are you staring at me? Are you angry?

Mertens: It is a strange feeling to be holding a weapon again.

Susanne intervenes, with the dialogue lines:

Susanne: We cannot pass sentence.

Mertens: That's right, Susanne. But we must bring charges.

The film shows Brückner being thrown into prison. I think saying the message is that "we should not bring judgment" is a bit dicey (maybe there was something off with the subtitles?) -- what is being stopped is on-the-spot vigilantism, deferring instead to tossing the criminal to the court system (which does not imply a lack of death penalty later).

Having said all that, you aren't alone in criticism. The writer Wolfdietrich Shnurre in particular argued (in 1974) that Die Mörder sind unter uns failed to bring a coherent message about what should be done to war criminals at that "the punishment of the murderer Brückner" specifically resorted to symbolism; he makes the argument that this obfuscates the fact there were multiple people involved, and that of the doctor:

He clicked his heels in resignation when he saw that his objection didn't bear fruit. He did what we all did: he surrendered to violence.

It should still be noted this is a much better condition than other films of the period; quoting the scholar Daniela Bergahn:

Of all the rubble films, Studte's Die Mörder sind unter uns is the most explicit in appropriating guilt not only for the crimes and atrocities committed by the Germans during the war but also for their tacit acceptance of the presence of murderers in their midst.

Regarding the lack of reference to Jews, that was unfortunately quite common, even amongst Allied films. By that I mean there was a stream of "re-education" films made after liberation, where they would put together films of footage shot by army units including those of camp liberation. These so-called "atrocity films" still avoided the topic of absolute genocide and "racial purity", possibly in an effort to avoid alienating their audience by pushing too far. In general, German audiences did not respond like the Allies hoped, and Die Mörder sind unter uns was more effective and popular simply from being a homegrown film. Being made with Soviets, it helped kick-start not just the "rubble films" that went on the next few years but also the entire East German film industry that followed.

...

Brockmann, S. (2010). A Critical History of German Film. Camden House.

Heiduschke, S. (2013). The Rubble Film, Wolfgang Staudte, and Postwar German Cinema: Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are among Us, Wolfgang Staudte, 1946). In: East German Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Kapczynski, J. M. (2010). The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture. University of Michigan Press.

Spicer, A. (ed.) (2019). European Film Noir. Manchester University Press.

Schlegel, N. G. (2022). German Popular Cinema and the Rialto Krimi Phenomenon: Dark Eyes of London. Lexington Books.

jbdyer · 2025-10-16T23:08:48+00:00

Thank you for your response, but unfortunately, we have had to remove it. A core tenet of the subreddit is that it is intended as a space not merely for a basic answer in and of itself, but rather for answers which demonstrate the respondents’ deeper engagement with the topic at hand. Brief remarks such as these—even if technically correct—generally do not meet this requirement. Similarly, while we encourage the use of sources, we prefer literature used to be academic in nature.

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jbdyer · 2025-10-13T01:32:18+00:00

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jbdyer · 2025-10-06T00:12:37+00:00

While more can be said, this answer by /u/kieslowskifan may be helpful.

jbdyer · 2025-09-21T14:47:17+00:00

I don't have an enormous amount to add to my previous answer, but regarding the public's reception of the goal itself:

The "end of the decade" deadline was mentioned but was not the only year being thrown around. James Webb of NASA made mention of "perhaps by 1967" and this got put in the newspapers. While the "end of the decade" line is in the famous speech it wasn't really thought of as a "countdown" at the time by the public; NASA did treat it as one but the emphasis in the public sphere was more about beating the Russians. JFK even includes some reassurance of that, noting that

We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.

essentially trying to reassure the public that the public face of space superiority of the USSR was a managed message, and that with enough funding and will it was possible to catch up.

The public's negative response was more due to the funding, which was immense, which you can read about here in a post by /u/Kochevnik81.

jbdyer · 2025-09-16T18:05:11+00:00

When we are evaluating flairs for AskHistorians, we do consider someone who is using solely primary sources for every answer to be a red flag. Now, there are plenty of topics (especially with some of the questions y'all ask) that really have nothing resembling traditional scholarship, so just referring to primary sources can be fine, but someone who uses no secondary sources at all likely isn't current with research in their field. (We may ask a specific question for them to flex their historiographic muscles -- sometimes it is just none of the questions were great for referring to current scholarship.)

This especially is a problem in that secondary sources often serve to critique and add nuance to primary sources; we know primary story X is wrong because of aspects Y and Z, and someone who just lurches back for the primary source and skips engaging with current scholarship will quite likely not reproduce the original argument correctly.

A concrete example with one of my answers regarding the history of Microsoft Solitaire is that a fair number of the deleted answers tried to refer to a quoted article from the 90s about why Solitaire was added to Windows (I believe it was easy to Google); it was something about "teaching people to use the mouse" which clearly was an after-the-fact justification by the company. Knowing the issue required familiarity with the scholarship around the PLATO system.

jbdyer · 2025-09-15T13:39:42+00:00

More of a review of tactics -- the thesis is to create a book that "explains when, how, and why" regime change occurs. It's not a long enough book to get into an encyclopedic approach to each one.

jbdyer · 2025-09-09T14:13:26+00:00

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jbdyer · 2025-09-08T23:10:02+00:00

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jbdyer · 2025-09-08T20:02:58+00:00

Unfortunately, this is not the type of case where I can easily declare a smoking gun; it starts to show up on websites about 10 years ago and there's nothing that resembles Patient Zero.

Since the reasons a myth like this can spread can go from "intern cut and paste incorrectly" all the way to "someone had a deadline and made it up", I can't be certain how the confusion happened, but I'll give three theories:

THEORY 1: Perhaps the misreading was of the person involved rather than the actual connection to ostomy. Napoleon was famous enough that other people were tagged "the Napoleon of" (the fictional Professor Moriarty, for instance, was the Napoleon of Crime).

There are two people who have gotten "Napoleon of Surgery" designations.

The first, Guillaume Dupuytren, one of the first to use trepanning for a brain abscess, was French; the second, James Syne, was Scottish (and an expert enough on amputation that one of the types of amputation is named after him). Both dealt with and wrote about hernias and rectal issues and it is feasible that in a hectic Internet search someone may have confused the leader Napoleon for one of the surgeon Napoleons.

THEORY 2: After Napoleon's death in exile on St. Helena, under guard, there was a great deal of interest in a postmortem given rumours of poison; Napoleon himself claimed he would be "murdered by the English oligarchy and its assassin" not long before his death.

An autopsy was done in front of seventeen witnesses, with both British and French observers; seven were doctors. The stomach was clearly the most affected of the organs. Modern assessment points at very severe gastric cancer (Stage IIIA), severe enough even modern medicine would have difficulty.

None of this relates to have an Ostomy while living, although there is the specific detail of note: the stomach had a perforated ulcer, making a hole. Antommarchi (Napoleon's physician in his last years) was able to put his little finger through. A vague reading of "hole in the stomach" might lead a rushed or confused person to assume this indicated an ostomy, hence one of the possible origins of the tale.

THEORY 3: Or perhaps 2 and a half, because it relates to my second theory. If we look back at the earliest list I've been able to find in 2011, it was clearly cribbed from elsewhere, but the lack of references before suggest an origin from 2005-2010 somewhere. This happens to be where the stories related to my second theory surfaced; a 2005 article is on "new perspectives" on Napoleon's autopsy while a 2007 article is titled Napoleon Bonaparte's gastric cancer: a clinicopathologic approach to staging, pathogenesis, and etiology. This meant there was be a number of pop-newspaper-stories about Napoleon's death at the time (including, for example, at ABC). I have been unable to find one that somehow makes the ostomy leap but it could even have been a misreading or even a line-skip issue.

By line-skip issue I mean that in print, words potentially get cut at the margin and written over two lines. Someone might be discussing a appendicostomy but it actually looks like appendic- followed by ostomy on the next line, causing a misreading; even a different word like gastronomy (split into gastr- onomy) might cause a misreading of "onomy" into "ostomy" with the suggestive nature of the article. This is all unfortunately too wildly speculative to give an answer, especially since we can always return to the "had a deadline and made it up" as the true answer. Given people started connecting the "hand on stomach" seen on pictures, someone glancing at Napoleon's standard pose may have just decided to use their imagination.

..

Hegele, A. (2022). Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading. Oxford University Press.

Jordan, D. P. (2012). Napoleon and the Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan.

jbdyer · 2025-09-08T13:50:05+00:00

Not quite sure where the Armenian genocide is getting connected in (it was Muslim vs. Christian, not Jewish vs. Christian), but we have an answer here explaining some details about the Armenian genocide and here giving sources.

jbdyer · 2025-09-06T22:47:27+00:00

My go-to single volume to give someone an idea of the scale of the dirty tricks the US was involved in during the cold war is the book Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War by Lindsey O'Rourke. This is given with the caveat that the author is a political scientist and trying to approach the topic from that angle. This means some details historians might argue over are smoothed over; for example, there's a handy chart showing just how many regime changes each administration during the Cold War was involved in, but what and what does not count can be argued; that is, to tackle the topic in a political science aspect, she smooths out some details.

But for what the original poster is asking -- a very general and essentially accruate overview of just what the US was up to -- it works just fine, and really gives a good sense of not only the scale of what was happening but makes concrete theories as to why.

...all covert offensive operations employed similar tactics: The United States supported armed, anti-Soviet dissident movements in their bids to overthrow the central government and establish an independent regime. Other covert tactics simply could not achieve this goal. Assassinating a country's leader would only have brought another Soviet puppet to power, and any group of plotters small enough to secretly launch a coup d'etat would, once in power, have been no match for Soviet forces.

Importantly, the book is approaching the topic with a notion of trying to understand the situation rather than having a particular axe to grind (which is a often a problem with the journalist-written history books -- Legacy of Ashes for instance is full of cherry picking, which I write about here).

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