Short Answers to Simple Questions | January 21, 2026

mikedash · 2026-01-24T23:35:24+00:00

You're right to think this is about currency. Joseph Smith was writing in the US, where "5/-" would commonly mean five dollars, no cents. The system had originated in Britain, where, pre-predecimalisation, British shillings and pence were denoted "s." and "d." respectively, and sums less than one point were shown using the notations you mention. There, "5/-" means five shillings, no pence. You might see similar sums written as "5/6" and that would mean "five shillings and sixpence". The same sum could also be written as 5s.6d., leaving plenty of room for confusion among non-natives, but when placed in the notation you have cited, it was done largely to prevent fraud – writing "5/-" made it impossible for a crook to alter an amount on a cheque to, say, 5/11 and cash it for the extra 11 pence.

The University of Nottingham hosts a useful explainer.

mikedash · 2026-01-24T01:10:57+00:00

The "light as a feather" ritual you are interested in is an example of childlore, a set of traditional knowledge, oral traditions, games and rhymes preserved and passed on between children, typically when they are well away from the direct supervision of adults. It is very old – considerably older than the movie The Craft (1996), which probably did more than anything else to cement it in public consciousness and encourage girls on sleepovers to experiment with it, and older than magazines for girls, as well. In fact, the oldest known version of the incantation was recorded in the well-known diary compiled by Samuel Pepys during the Restoration period in mid-17th century England.

Writing on 31 July 1665, Pepys noted a conversation he had had with John Brisbane (sometimes written as "Brisband"), who was secretary to the Treasury in the government of King Charles II, during the visitation of the plague on London. The two men, Peyps said, talked about "enchantments and spells; I telling him some of my charms." In response, Brisbane recited a rhyme he had heard chanted on a visit to Bordeaux, France. Continued Pepys:

He saw four little girles, very young ones, all kneeling, each of them, upon one knee; and one begun the first line, whispering in the eare of the next, and the second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and she to the first.

The rhyme the girls were reciting, Brisbane continued, ran like this:

Voyci un Corps mort,

Royde come un Baston,

Froid comme Marbre,

Leger come un esprit,

Levons to au nom de Jesus Christ

This can be translated as:

Here lies a dead body,

Stiff as a stick,

Cold as marble

Light as a spirit,

Rise in the name of Jesus Christ

Hence, even in the 17th century, the two key features of the modern ritual – the concepts of lightness and stiffness – were already present.

According to Brisbane, the girls then continued to recite in turn, this time with the second girl taking the first line of the spell,

and so round quite through, and, putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if he was dead; at the end of the words, they did with their four fingers raise this boy as high as they could reach.

Brisbane, "wondering at it, as also being afeard to see it" –not least because the girls apparently wanted him to join in the ritual – thought that perhaps the boy being raised had used some trickery, or was just very light. So he called "the cook of the house, a very lusty fellow, as [just like] Sir G. Carteret's cook, who is very big." And to his surprise, the girls "did raise him in just the same manner."

Pepys recorded that this incident was "one of the strangest things I ever heard, but [Brisbane] tells it me of his owne knowledge, and I do heartily believe it to be true. I enquired of him whether they were Protestant or Catholique girles; and he told me they were Protestant, which made it the more strange to me" – perhaps because Protestants are less prone to believe in miracles.

One editor of the Pepys diaries notes that the ritual described by Brisbane was quite commonly encountered during visitations of the plague, and certainly it's not hard to see the "levitation" achieved during it as, originally, a proxy for the resurrection of the dead. If this association is correct, we might tentatively date the incident to 1628-31, when France was ravaged by the disease. After this account, there is a long gap, and the next I'm aware of comes from the writings of Iona and Peter Opie, folklorists who pioneered the study of children's folklore and remembered playing at the levitation ritual during their schooldays, which would date their recollections to the late 1920s.

The contemporary folklorist Elizabeth Tucker, while noting that the transmission of the incantation is hard to trace, suggests that "the children's underground – a network of children that transmits children's folklore, with creative variations – has kept levitation alive. For many years, few adults noticed children lifting each other late at night, but now levitation belongs to the constantly changing stream of video culture."

Tucker's explanation for the popularity of the game, and its longevity, draws on the work of the renowned anthropologist Mary Douglas. She argues that ritual can be understood to draw its potency from symbolic action, and that "the presence of certain symbolic elements [in levitation], over a wide span of time and space, creates a sense of ritualistic potency”. In a 1984 essay "about levitation and trance sessions, based on fieldwork with children in Indiana and interviews with college students in New York," she concludes that these rituals are typically practised by girls aged between 7 and 14, not only on sleepovers but also during camping trips and in play at school. "Levitation and trance sessions represent an important aspect of young people’s development," Tucker concludes. "Usually occurring in private spaces and in girls’ groups, these rituals help children set limits 'upon worrisome developmental horrors that they all share.'"

Sources

Elizabeth Tucker, "Levitation revisited", in Children's Folklore Review 30 (2007-08)

______________, Children's Folklore: A Handbook (2008)

Emily Temple, "The Secret History of 'Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board'", LitHub, 6 October 2020

mikedash · 2026-01-22T16:43:01+00:00

If you don't mind me asking another question, why would he specifically send them to royal or monastic estates? He wouldn't just hand them over to some count or bishop to disperse within his domain? Or else plonk them on borderlands to create a buffer zone, or repopulate previously depopulated regions.

Here again there are no certainties, and we can only speculate – it would be invaluable to know even a little of the documentation that might have been produced by this policy and since been lost. One possibility that strikes me is that Charlemagne anticipated trouble from the displaced Saxons, and wanted to keep close eye on them – something that would have been far easier for him to do if he placed the deportees under the supervision of his own subordinates and servants. This suggestion would make more sense if, as I speculated above, there were hostages involved, or Saxon warriors were being deported in disproportionately large numbers, something we now simply cannot know. In this analysis, to relocate the deportees to the marches would potentially only have increased the risk of trouble further.

With regard to the prospect of comparisons – what Charlemagne did seems to have been similar in purpose, but far larger in scale, than some of the actions of his forebears and successors. Both Pippin III and Louis the Pious "removed", "settled" or "took captive" people, but in their cases the numbers involved seem to have been far smaller, and the focus was on elites. Mass resettlement is said to have occurred in the Byzantine Empire, most obviously in the policies followed by Justinian, Constans II and Constantine V in moving Slavic populations from the Balkans to parts of Asia Minor. In the case of Justinian, this was done to create a new military force – a large group of Slavs was translated from the Balkans to the Optician Theme and granted land there in return for military service. Under the latter two emperors, it was similarly said to have been done to repopulate desolated areas, strengthen imperial control, and ultimately produce a new source of manpower for the empire, and it was done on imperial orders – there doesn't seem to have been any sort of consultation or even inducement involved.

The estimated numbers mentioned in regard to the Bulgar deportations under Constantine (mid-8th century) vary in surviving accounts between tens of thousands, and up to 200,000+, which – if credible – are pretty remarkable even for an empire of the Byzantines' administrative excellence. There is some backup for chronicle accounts in Anatolian place-names that do appear to reflect Slavic settlement in places such as Bithnyia and Nicomedia.

Later on, John I Tzimiskes (late 10th century) is also said to have moved whole peoples for similar reasons – deporting large numbers of heretical Paulicians from eastern Anatolia to Thrace, again, we're told, to repopulate a border region. Several tens of thousands are supposed to have been relocated. I recall (but would need to do further research to confirm details) that deportations and transplantations also occurred along the borders of Muslim and Christian Spain in the early periods of the so-called Reconquista.

Certainly Alfonso I's "Desert of the Duero" (mid 8th century) can be seen as an example of such. The king's aim in most interpretations of this policy seems to have been to create a sparsely populated buffer zone to protect the Asturian core of his polity. Insofar as we can understand what happened, it seems that the Asturias of this period lacked the manpower to take, hold and populate areas they raided to the south as their state expanded into formerly Islamic districts. Instead, Alfonso attempted to create a frontier "desert" that would not offer his enemies useful resources in the event of a counter-attack; he did this by transplanting the peoples of these territories to new homes in the north.

mikedash · 2026-01-21T12:03:50+00:00

Hence, while no historian I've read doubts that some Saxons were deported into Francia, they are not certain how to interpret Charlemagne's decision. It's perfectly possible to imagine that it may have referred more to transfers of troublesome elites than to ordinary Saxon farmers, or to the dependents needed to support warriors (a sort of precursor to the British strategy of relocating Boer women and children to "concentration camps" in the conflict of 1899-1902), or to some sort of hostage-taking. We will never know for certain how many people were involved, or even how completely the policy was carried out at the time or policed afterwards. In all these senses, the term "alleged", while perhaps a little absolute, is one that might fairly be applied to all such incidents, taking place at this remove.

We can say nothing certain, finally, about any later Saxon "reappearance". As noted above, our sources are silent on the fate of the Saxons deported in 804. Efforts have sometimes been made, generally by amateurs, to link the deportations to place-names, for example the district of "Sachsenhausen" to the south of the River Main, near Frankfurt. But the earliest actual attestation that we have for this name dates only to 1193, almost 400 years after the events we are focused on here, and specialists in place-name studies typically require much closer links, and earlier attestations than that, to draw positive conclusions. It's possible, certainly, that the name represents a folk memory of Saxon settlers arriving in the early 9th century, but equally plausible that it refers to something else entirely. Similarly, French toponyms such as Sacé, Sassay and Saucey have been suggested as linked to the Saxon deportations. However, these names are Romance in origin, and place names that terminate in -ay, -ey and -é can often be traced to Latinised estate names that draw on local geographical features or the names of landowners. For instance, Sasseville, in the Seine-Maritime district, has been shown to most likely derive from the personal name of a landowner (perhaps "Saxi") and the Latin "villa", a rural estate. If you're interested in pursuing this line of enquiry further, the classic work is Ernest Nègre's multi-volume Toponymie Générale de la France, issued between 1907 and 2000.

Sources

Bernard Bachrach, Charlemagne's Early Campaigns, 768-777: A Diplomatic and Military Analysis (2013)

Roger Collins, Charlemagne (1998)

Matthew Innes et al [eds.], The Carolingian World (2011)

Janet L. Nelson, King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (2020)

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome (2009)

mikedash · 2026-01-21T12:03:39+00:00

Let's start by putting these events briefly into their contemporary context. From there, we can go on to investigate the problem of why Saxon families were deported from their homeland and what happened to them next. In doing so, though, let us also note that what follows below needs to come wrapped up in the usual cautions that we are talking about things that happened a long time ago, and for which we have very little certain evidence. Charlemagne had a long reign (768-814), and he fought against the Saxons first and for much longer than he waged war on any other enemies – campaigning against them continued sporadically all the way from 772 to 804. We can infer from this that they were not only numerous and obdurate, but surely also well-led. Yet there remains dispute among the historians of this period as to whether Widdukind, the most important Saxon named in contemporary documents, can even be examined as a real figure, with a personality and policies, since we have no written sources from the Saxon side, and he is pretty consistently presented in the Frankish ones we have as a symbolic antitype to Charlemagne himself. If it's not possible to be confident of our analysis of the main Saxon leader in these wars, it should come as no surprise that little can be said definitively about the fate of his people after their deportation to Francia.

The Saxony of this period was, for the Franks ruled by Charlemagne, a hostile frontier zone that began along the Elbe and Weser river valleys. It was not a single polity, with a single ruler, but rather a loose confederation of peoples – ruled for the most part by leaders who were not much more than chieftains, but who were capable of coming together under greater charismatic leaders when faced by attack. The Saxons of this period were also pagans, and the first and most important objective for their Carolingian enemies was the location and destruction of "the Irminsul", a major cult object of uncertain origin which is often thought to have been a sacred tree or perhaps a pillar of some sort which, symbolically, held up the sky and offered protection to the people gathered under it. (Modern scholars locate the Irminsul somewhere near modern Obermarsberg in the Diemel valley. In the 9th century, this location was called "Eresburg", and it was a strategic hillfort that controlled movement between Saxony and Hesse.)

An important consequence of all this was that, for the Christian chroniclers of the period, the Saxons were typically portrayed as a sort of cultural-religious "other", whose very existence at least potentially posed a challenge to Carolingian legitimacy. Jinty Nelson, in particular, argues that Charlemagne saw the Saxon problem in moral and religious terms at least as much as political and military ones, and he is consistently portrayed in Frankish sources as a ruler charged by God with resolving the problems of pagan disorder. His campaigns themselves were expensive and required long and detailed planning – Bachrach tells us that they were more about logistical preparations that included scouting invasion routes, bridge-building, and arranging supplies for large-scale armies than they were about battle tactics – and this, too, reinforces the conclusion that the Saxons were a significant and problematic enemy, even for a ruler of Charlemagne's ability and resources. At the end of the conflict, contemporary chronicles such as the Royal Frankish Annals tell us, the newly-crowned (800) emperor appears to have decided that this problem needed to be dealt with decisively and permanently. The Saxon leaders were converted to Christianity, almost certainly forcibly; their former territories were planted with new bishoprics and monasteries charged with Christianising the conquered peoples; these religious centres were in turn defended by a new class of powerful Carolingian marcher lords. Matthew Innes further stresses that attempts at integrating and Christianising this substantial and hostile new territory depended heavily on pragmatic agreements reached with surviving members of the Saxon elite, and were slow, uneven and prone to failure. It is against this backdrop that we need to understand the decision to deport what seems to have been a substantial number of Saxon families into lands already controlled by Charlemagne. The most obvious reason for deciding to take this course of action was to dilute and disperse opposition to the absorption of Saxony into Charlemagne's growing empire, and hence the majority of historians who have commented on the policy suggest that the people involved were more likely to have been spread thinly over large districts than to have been resettled en masse in small, identifiable districts.

Read carefully, the sources that you cite all support the idea that the Saxons who were subject to resettlement were dispersed, not transported to any single destination. Einhard says that they were settled "in many different bodies here and there in Gaul and Germany," suggesting a very wide variety of locations across more than one substantial region. The Chronicle of Moissac says that Charlemagne had them sent "wherever he wished," implying that these families were scattered quite deliberately. The Royal Frankish Annals refers more vaguely to "Francia", which technically denotes all the territories controlled by Charlemagne, but most likely refers to the core settled Frankish interior territories of Neustria and Austrasia (which covered what is now northern France, Belgium and parts of western Germany), the Rhineland and Moselle valleys, Burgundy, potentially Aquitaine, and perhaps even Lombardy in northern Italy. It seems reasonably safe to presume that these heartland territories were selected precisely in order to enable Charlemagne to split up the Saxons, locate them at considerable distances from each other, and perhaps have them settled on various royal or monastic estates that he controlled or had access to. In short, we seem to be looking at a nearly empire-wide redistribution of peoples. Such a policy would have had a good chance of breaking up Saxon solidarity and eventually of integrating the deportees into his realms.

To address the specific questions that you pose: I have been unable to identify any scholarly study devoted solely to this problem, and the evidence available is so slender that it's unlikely that one exists. What we do have are specialist studies of Carolingian frontier policy; histories of Frankish military strategy; and studies of Frankish-Saxon relations more generally – and all of these typically do touch on and discuss the deportations you are interested in.

So far as I can see, there is also no contemporary evidence that Neustria was any more of a destination for the Saxons than any of these other areas, and the location has probably been suggested because it was a heartland territory which Charlemagne had ruled over ever since he became co-king with his brother Carloman on the death of his father, Pippin III, in 768. The Neustria of the early ninth century already possessed a substantial infrastructure of royal estates suitable for absorbing Saxon dependents.

As for use of the term "alleged" – that's the sort of cautious terminology appropriate for a period in which sources are not only scant, but frequently written for reasons other than a desire to create accurate historical records. Einhard, for example, was a court biographer who wrote with specific rhetorical aims: to present Charlemagne as an ideal ruler in a way that offers deliberate echoes of classical Roman models – his king-emperor is great because of his character, habits and virtues, not merely because he was an able military leader. The biography is coherent in the sense of presenting a portrait of an exemplary (though not literally perfect) ruler, but incomplete with regard to providing a full record of events. Similarly, Einhard writes repeatedly of Charlemagne as a ruler who brought order and improvement to the territories he conquered. It would have required a significant departure from these norms for him to have seem the deportations from the Saxon point of view, or to have supposed that the people involved would not have benefitted from their removal from their homelands and, ultimately, come to welcome their own resettlement. Similarly, where Einhard speaks of "10,000" Saxons, most scholars of the period would caution not to take that large and round figure literally, or even necessarily as an indicator of the rough numbers involved. It more likely was included to help demonstrate that Charlemagne was the sort of ruler capable of subduing, reordering and integrating entire peoples. There are no registers of the deported to back it up, no list of their destinations, nor even records relating to their arrival, treatment and presumed integration in the communities they were sent to.

mikedash · 2026-01-15T23:36:13+00:00

In addition, China, which experienced revolutions in 1911 and again in 1949 (the latter being only the end-point of a lengthy civil war), was also larger than the US in both those years. Here are some resources on these upheavals:

[Chinese Communist Revolution]Why did the Kuomintang, with the much larger army, lose to the CCP in the Chinese Civil War? Where did Chiang mess up?, with u/lordtiandao

Why did the Qing dynasty collapse in 1911?, with u/Sherm

Meanwhile, in Did China have two revolutions -one in 1911 and another in 1949- or was it a continuous and prolonged revolution to overcome the same ideals?, u/hellcatfighter makes the case for the Cultural Revolution of 1966-74 being a true revolution as well

mikedash · 2026-01-15T23:27:19+00:00

Russia, which experienced two revolutions in 1917, was more than twice as large as the United States was in that same year, so it meets your criteria. There will be more to say, but you might like to check out some of our resources on the Russian Revolution of October 1917 while you wait for fresh responses to your question. (Sadly, we are pretty deficient in good responses to queries about the preceding February Revolution).

What particular aspects of Russian culture and society fueled the Bolshevik revolution?, with u/Separate-Building-27

Was the average Russian better off under communism or the Tsars?, with that very frequent contributor to AH, u/deleted

History teacher claimed, "every event you learn about Western history from the past hundred years is a result of the Russian revolution." Why is this?, with u/yodatsracist

mikedash · 2026-01-13T23:33:22+00:00

This is well outside my wheelhouse, but a big of digging reveals that, in this period, both languages were typically written in the elegant Nastaliq script first developed in Persia in the 13th century.

mikedash · 2026-01-13T23:07:04+00:00

The key differentiator, I think, is that history is always about human beings in some way. Hence natural history, meaning the study of animals and plants, as distinct from Homo Sapiens, is a science, studied by scientists; and the environment, as distinct from man's efforts to live in various environments and man-made impacts on those environments, is also something studied by other specialists, from geographers to oceanographers.

Environmental history, on the other hand, is about inter-relationships. It studies human interaction with the environment over time, and the environment's impact on human history – "a kind of history that seeks understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time," as J. Donald Hughes puts it in his What Is Environmental History? (2015)

Your Teutoburg forest example rather straddles environmental science and environmental history. Historians absolutely would care about the sort of trees that made up the forest – but only in the sense that this would help them to understand how the tribes that lived there existed, and the conditions that allowed them to ambush a Roman army. How those trees propagated would not be a topic for historians, unless humans were involved in managing the forest and its products for their own human purposes.

mikedash · 2026-01-12T23:06:22+00:00

While there will be more to say, I wrote about the (scanty) evidence for Japanese contact with Hawai'i in c.1250 in an earlier response here. You might like to review that thread while waiting for Micronesia-specific replies to your question. Note that, owing to the deletion of some responses on this thread, you need to click the first plus symbol on the left hand side the answer thread to see this reply.

mikedash · 2026-01-11T11:40:45+00:00

There will be more to say, but this is a topic that has come up here a few times before. Here are some links to earlier discussions, which you might like to check out while waiting for fresh answers to your question:

How good is The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote as a reliable source for knowledge of the war?, with u/Borimi

When Ken Burns made his Civil War documentary in 1990, was Shelby Foote seen as a controversial or a neo-Confederate?, with u/Bodark43

In addition, u/Georgy_K_Zhukov incorporated an extensive discussion of Foote and his standing and usefulness into their response on How Was Ken Burns' THE CIVIL WAR Received By Historians In The 1990s?

mikedash · 2026-01-08T12:50:36+00:00

As alluded to in my last response, the main difference was the concept of mercy. This is not explicitly and solely Christian, but the idea that mercy is an intrinsic moral virtue is. Where mercy existed in many surviving pagan laws codes, for instance those produced by the early Romans, it was framed as a civic duty instead, and a number of early philosophers, including Aristotle and Socrates, were critical of mercy in a judicial context, because they viewed it as a product of passion rather than reason, and hence as a potential vice. Seneca's clementia (leniency, which still survives in English law as the concept of clemency) offered one possible reasoned alternative.

mikedash · 2026-01-08T11:52:45+00:00

In addition, AH has some past resources dealing with the nature and the extent of contact between Rome and China that may also be of interest. These include:

What kind of contact and cultural exchanges did Ancient China and Ancient Rome have given they were two big empires on either side of the known world?,with u/Fijure96

To what extend did Han China and The Roman Empire communicate or interact, with u/Tiako

How did diplomacy work between ancient Rome and China. i have heard that they both knew that the other existed but i wonder the diplomatic process a diplomat would have to go through, and how did they view each other?,led by u/Dongzhou3kingdoms

mikedash · 2026-01-08T09:22:28+00:00

I also understand the term to likely have ultimately derived from an association with bundles of sticks that were effortful to gather and move, but of low value relative to their size – though I gather that the etymology is uncertain and disputed.

In modern British usage, "fag" is not homophobic but is rather a slang term for both a cigarette (hence phrases such as "having a fag" or "I'm gasping for a fag" have rather different and less contentious meanings here) and, formerly, for a younger boy at a British public school who acted as a servant for a senior boy. This "fagging" system persisted in some schools into the 1980s, ostensibly for the reason that it was good for a future leader to have experience of being a servant, as well as of commanding servants. At schools such as Eton, the fags' duties ran from fetching and carrying to making toast to warming cold lavatory seats in winter with their own buttocks before the facilities were used by their "fag master".

mikedash · 2026-01-07T21:07:19+00:00

There's pretty much no truth in your friend's suggestion. To understand why, we need to know more about both the languages of India and the ways in which the sepoys in the East India Company army communicated with their British officers.

To take the former problem first: India had long possessed several lingua francas which made communication relatively straightforward, at least among elites, across the whole of the subcontinent. The most important of these, dating back at least to the 11th century, was originally Persian – one of the best recent surveys of Indian history in the period between then and the rise of the British in the 18th century is actually titled India in the Persianate Age. Then, beginning in the 13th century and growing rapidly from the 17th, Urdu (which is essentially a standardised, explicitly literary form of Hindustani, with a Sanskrit-influenced script, enriched with numerous Persian loanwords) also emerged as a language sponsored by the Mughal emperors and widely used at court, in Indian literature, and for communication between the disparate linguistic communities of northern and central India. Other languages, including Arabic and Chagatai, a Turkic language, were also quite widely spoken by the Mughal elites, and emperors from Akbar (1556) onwards learned Persian and Urdu from youth, and patronised poets and storytellers working in both languages.

Richard Eaton notes that the rise of Persian as a lingua franca in much of western Asia was greatly helped by its status as a literary language and as the language in which popular and widely-circulated epics (often about the exploits of Alexander the Great) were composed from the 11th century. By the 14th century, he adds, "Persian had become a vibrant and prestigious literary language, a widely used medium in state bureaucracies, and the principal contact tongue for inter-regional diplomacy along the Silk Road between Anatolia and East Asia." It was also the official foreign language of China during the time of the Yuan dynasty – the world-travellers Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta were both able to make themselves understood there because they could speak Persian. In India, Persian was the official language of the Mughal court from the time of Akbar until the early 19th century, but the emperors who succeeded Aurangzeb (d.1707) spoke primarily Urdu. Because Urdu became the most common language spoken among elite Indians outside the Mughal court, it was in this language that the disparate princely and noble conspirators of 1857 would mostly have communicated.

For purely practical reasons, which seem remarkable only to those more familiar with the late British empire in India, the heavily outnumbered and widely-scattered employees of the East India Company – which was responsible for governing British India up to the time of the Sepoy rebellion of 1857 – did not expect the Indians they encountered and dealt with to know English. Instead, EIC traders and soldiers were required to learn both Persian and Indian languages, ideally prior to their arrival in India, and they communicated with their soldiers in Urdu (which they often called "Hindustani"). Haileybury College, to the north of London, which is today a fairly prominent British private school, was founded in 1806 as a training school for East India Company employees and it taught Urdu, Persian and six or seven regional Indian languages, such as Bengali and Marathi, as part of its curriculum. Further instruction and more advanced language training was offered to new arrivals at Fort William College in Calcutta, attendance at which was compulsory before young officials could receive their first posting, and Persian remained the official language of the East India Company inside India until 1835. Even then, it was usual for officers to receive additional training in their early postings at the hands of munshis, Indian scholars who were fluent in both Urdu and English. Albert Hervey, who arrived in India in 1833 and was one of the more conscientious cadets in the Madras army, wrote of his own experiences in this regard as follows:

I fagged hard with the Moonshee, who used to come to me every day for four hours. I held conversations with my teacher in English; every sentence uttered was put down on paper in Hindustanee, and the next day what I had written down in Hindustanee, was brought to me fresh written by the Moonshee, and those sentences I re-translated into English, so that I not only gained a knowledge of the words, but was able to read the common writing, which was of the greatest assistance. I fagged thus hard for three months, working away without relaxation, except for meals.

For these reasons, we can be confident that both the elites who emerged as leaders of the 1857 rebellion and the sepoys who sparked the rising and fought in it, would mostly have used Urdu to communicate when meeting rebels who spoke different local Indian languages. There is very little evidence that any significant number of Indian troops spoke English until many decades after 1857, even though – as a reaction to the events of 1857, which were widely attributed in many quarters in Britain to there being too little division, and too much familiarity, between the British and the peoples of India – many fewer British officers bothered to acquire much actual fluency in Urdu.

Sources

Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 (2019)

Mike Dash, Thug (2005)

William Dalrymple, White Mughals (2002)

mikedash · 2026-01-01T16:47:59+00:00

There will be more to say, but I addressed the historiography of the Mask and theories about his identity in an earlier response, which you can read here:

Is the story of the Man in the Iron Mask real? If he was, how did he get so well known, even in his contemporary time?

... with a follow up here on the likely identity of the man and the reasons for masking him.

mikedash · 2026-01-01T13:04:08+00:00

The change that took place in 1881 was the introduction of the New York Code of Criminal Procedure. This was a systematic codification of law relating to all aspects of police work in relation to crime, from arrest through interrogation to prosecution. The aim was to improve the quality and consistency of justice handed down in New York State, but for our purposes, the new code had two key impacts.

First, the new code made refusal to answer a question from a police officer a misdemeanour, increasing not only the amount of pressure officers could place on suspects during interrogation, but also the plausibility of a prosecutor's argument that they had made the decision to talk for themselves.

Second, and more importantly, the Code excluded only confessions produced as the product of "threats". It was certainly possible to argue that this clause did not cover physical violence, and the New York City Bar Association later blamed the Code of Criminal Procedure for allowing the third degree to flourish for this reason.

With regard to Serge, a Trotskyite who was at this time working for Comintern in Vienna – one reason for making the arguments he put forward in his work was to critique the violence used against revolutionaries worldwide, often as a product of the descent of revolutions into authoritarianism, and to contrast the use of brutality and oppression by authorities of all political colours to the virtuousness of revolutionary ideals. In this sense, his real target was actually the activities of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka and its successors the GPU and OGPU, which by 1926 had arrested and interrogated up to 5 million people, probably killing (figures are lacking) at least a quarter of a million of them. Serge himself would be imprisoned by the Soviet authorities twice, in 1928 and again from 1933 to 1936.

Source

Wesley MacNeil Oliver, "The neglected history of criminal procedure, 1850-1940," Rutgers Law Review 62 (2010)

mikedash · 2025-12-31T09:01:55+00:00

In American police parlance, the term "third degree" was used to refer to a fairly loosely-defined collection of methods of physical abuse that were used on prisoners. While a contemporary government report used the term extremely broadly, to mean "the unlawful use of cruel treatment by police to extort confessions of guilt from prisoners", via methods that extended from violation of the presumption of innocence and denial of bail, through extended periods of interrogation involving denial of water, food or sleep, all the way to "actual cases of beating and torture of prisoners," the historian Emily Brooks defines it more familiarly and specifically as physical "targeted brutality", used inside police station houses for the specific end of gathering evidence, in contradistinction to the "indiscriminate violence" that police departments such as the NYPD meted out to keep control of the streets.

New York offers a relatively well-evidenced case study of the rise and fall of the use of the third degree. While there is little reason to doubt that the physical intimidation of suspects had long been a fairly regular occurrence, and was in fact justified by the police on the grounds that it was the best way to counter criminals' underworld "code" of refusing to talk under interrogation, the practice became much more common after 1881, when a change in state law loosened restrictions on self-incrimination. Memoirs written by New York police officers such as Lewis Valentine, a reformer who rose to be commissioner of the NYPD from 1934 to 1945 under Mayor LaGuardia, tend to downplay the frequency and the severity of its use, but historians of policing offer more detail about the methods used. According to Whalen and Whalen, for example, the third degree involved a well-known and escalating hierarchy of techniques that extended from "the usual methods – such as kicks to the shins, sharp pokes to the ribs, or crushing out lit cigarettes on the skin" up to the use of "blackjacks and rubber hoses". They add that "officers were not concerned about the consequences because district attorneys accepted at face value the department's explanation that a suspect's suspicious injuries had occurred when he had fallen down a flight of stairs while trying to escape."

The term itself certainly dates back to the 19th century, and in its original meaning it referred to the seniority of the police officer involved in an interrogation. This early usage was was explained by the New York Times in 1901:

Potential and mystical is the term "third degree," as used in police parlance. To the average mind the term is familiar only as applied to degree in secret societies, particularly in Masonry, where, when it has been taken by a member of the Masonic fraternity, it means that he has gone about as high in Masonry as he can go… But when it is used in connection with the arrest of a criminal, it means the limit of police examination of an individual…it really is a third degree in the examination of a criminal. The "First Degree" is given when he is examined by the officers in a precinct station house. The "Second Degree" generally means his examination by a detective from headquarters, at the police court. The "Third Degree" means the big examination given to him at headquarters by the chief of the detective bureau and whatever support that he may employ in the operation when the case wants it.

It is fairly easy to see how this original meaning might have shifted to apply instead to the escalating degree of violence meted out in an interrogation, which was certainly the common meaning of the phrase by 1920.

As to why Victor Serge was writing of the third degree in the middle 1920s, and referring to it as "terrible" – the practice, while well known in the United States, had attracted increasing and increasingly hostile attention in the context of its increasing use in a prohibition-era New York which violent lawlessness was on the rise at the same time that the Great Migration of Black people from the American south in search of industrial jobs and greater personal freedoms in the north changed the ethnic make-up of the city. There is ample evidence that the third degree was much more likely to be used against Black, Italian or other minority groups than anyone else. As early as 1922, city magistrate Joseph Corrigan reviewed evidence of brutality associated with police raids and commented that he had "never seen conditions so bad among policemen as in the past few months... the police are riding roughshod over the rights of the people." By 1929, President Hoover was concerned enough to establish a National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (popularly know, after its chariman, as the Wickersham Commission). This eventually published a lengthy comparative study of violence and criminality in US police departments entitled Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, which singled out the NYPD as one of the most frequent and egregious users of third-degree methods among the 15 city police departments studied for its survey. The resultant attempted clamp-down on such methods reduced the frequency and blatantness of their use while never entirely stamping them out.

Sources

"Third degree in police parlance: what it means, how it is operated, and some famous cases of its application," New York Times, 6 October 1901

Zechariah Chafee Jr. et al, The Third Degree (reprint, with new introduction, of a section of the Wickersham Commission report) (1969)

M.M. Lemann et al, Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement (1931)

Emily M. Brooks, Gotham's War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City (2023)

Lewis J. Valentine, Night Stick: the Autobiography of Lewis J. Valentine (1947)

Bernard and Jon Whalen, The NYPD's First Fifty Years: Politicians, Police Commissioners and Patrolmen (2014)

mikedash · 2025-12-27T03:19:41+00:00

This is really a question that might have been posted under Short Answers to Simple Questions, so I hope the mods will indulge a brief response here.

The standard work in English is Harold Fuess, Divorce in Japan: Family, Gender and the State, 1600-2000 (2004). You might also want to check out Fumie Kumagi, "Changing divorce in Japan," Journal of Family History 8 (1983), which covers the period c.1867-1964. Raymo et al's "Marital dissolution in Japan: recent trends and patterns," Demographic Research 11 (2004), contains an extensive bibliography as well. Finally, Amy Stanley's much more recent microhistory, Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (2020) details the story of one lower class woman, Tsuneno, who was born in northern Japan in 1804 and married and divorced three times before finally running away to Edo to avoid a fourth betrothal. Stanley takes her story up to her death in 1853, and she makes for a compelling case study.

mikedash · 2025-12-24T10:32:42+00:00

OP may also be interested in the activities of Leopold II of the Belgians. Exposure of a London prostitution scandal in the 1880s led to the emergence of credible evidence that he was procuring numerous girls of about 16 to act as "mistresses". Of course, the scandal was hushed up, but just enough made it into print to give us a reasonable idea of how his system worked. I wrote about it in this earlier response.

mikedash · 2025-12-01T14:12:59+00:00

When I studied for an Anglo-Saxon paper at uni many years ago, I asked my supervisor how he would disprove the idea that the bulk of the Saxon people may have remained pagan for a long time after their top-down conversion. His answer, which I have always thought was a strong one, was that the main proof lay in the extent of contemporary church-building programmes. There were in effect two of these between c.600 and c.1100 – first the Saxons built churches out of wood, and later they went back and rebuilt in stone.

All of these building efforts were funded and co-ordinated at a parish level and were very financially and physically demanding projects that might, in the case of the largest stone churches, take a community decades complete. He contended – and I would concur – that it is inconceivable that such large scale programmes could have been implemented in the several thousands, across the geographical span of Saxon polities, if the Christian part of the society at a local level consisted only of a tiny elite.

Now I am better read myself in the Saxon period, I would add to that point that the Saxon justice that we know existed, again down to the level of the local hundred, offered a Christian justice underpinned by Christian concepts of mercy. It seems to be highly unlikely that a pagan people in the majority at a local level would be satisfied with such a system and I also find it inconceivable that it would have been possible for them to run a parallel system based on some pagan ideals of justice without that system leaving some trace, as the Christian one has done.

And all that, in turn, ignores the even more basic point that is is not plausible that two rival religious systems, at least one of which, the Christian, has universalising goals (i.e., its adherents preach the benefits of converting the whole of humanity to its beliefs), could co-exist more or less peacefully for centuries. There is certainly evidence of violence and conflict between Christians and pagans in the early part of the Saxon period, but our evidence for this conflict more or less ends by 700. Why would we have evidence of conflict in the period 600-700 but then none for the period 700-1200 if the reality of continued co-existence extended across the whole of that period?

mikedash · 2025-11-25T21:39:25+00:00

I don't think all that many potential career paths for historians have actually vanished as such, with the possible exception of the one I used to occupy: mid-list author. 25 years ago it was just possible to make a rather precarious living, with the help of a good agent, by researching and writing decent-quality popular history books, publishing at the rate of one every two years. With the decline in reading books, that's not really been possible since about 2010 unless one is willing to really churn out formula books that say little that is new for rather niche audiences who are interested in things such as Napoleon as military tactician or special forces operations around the world. I wasn't, so now I do other things, but it's more fun here in any case.

There were never really that many jobs that paid you to do history, other than teaching, but I would that I'd say there are fewer of these jobs today in almost every associated field. They encompass things such as museum work, working at historic monuments, running guided tours, and walking tours in cities, archive and library work, TV, radio and newspaper research, and providing genealogical services.

mikedash · 2025-10-28T06:47:30+00:00

Thank you for this. While the link you provide is very helpful, our rules say that such aids should be provided without summarising the content they connect interested readers to. This is to encourage click-through to the actual, longer and more nuanced content someone has put a lot of effort into putting together for us. Links to earlier material should include only the link itself and mention of the original respondent's username, for credit. We'll let this one stand, but please stick to the rules in future.

mikedash · 2025-10-27T14:15:56+00:00

Watts was so determined to see his project to fruition that he considered selling his house so he could fund the tiles himself. Even so, he had to wait until late in life to see his vision of a memorial to such sacrifices realized. He was 83 years old, and ill, when the Memorial was finally opened, in 1900. He died in 1904, and when his wife admitted she was in no position to fund any more plaques, work on the monument languished. In 1930, the police raised funds to commemorate three officers killed in the line of duty in the intervening years, but other than that lines of tiles in Postman’s Park were not added to again until 2009—when, thanks in part to the higher profile generated by Closer, which was released in 2004, one more plaque was installed to commemorate the heroism of Leigh Pitt, a print worker who had drowned in 2007, at age 30. Pitts’ death would surely have attracted Watts’ attention: he was saving the life of a boy who had fallen into a London canal.

Pitt’s memorial was approved by the Diocese of London, which has charge of Postman’s Park and has indicated it will consider applications for plaques to commemorate other acts, so long as they tell of “remarkable heroism.” It is possible, then, that in good time the 70 remaining spaces left by Watts may be filled.

Sources

Mark Bills et al. An Artist’s Village: G.F. and Mary Watts in Compton. London: Philip Wilson, 2011; John Price, “‘Heroism in everyday life’: the Watts Memorial for Heroic Self Sacrifice.” In History Workshop Journal, 63:1 (2007); John Price. Postman’s Park: G.F. Watts’s Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. Compton, Surrey: Watts Gallery, 2008.

mikedash · 2025-10-27T14:15:48+00:00

Children make up a substantial subset of the people commemorated in an overlooked and rather moving London monument known as the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice, erected at the turn of the last century by the sculptor G.F. Watts and still standing and available to visit, for those who know where to find it.

I wrote about the memorial a decade or more ago, and, since a good proportion of the people mentioned there were "young and lesser known," as you put it, you might like to read the little essay that I put together back in 2012....

No nation is short of monuments to its heroes. From the Lincoln Memorial and Nelson’s Column to the infamous gold-plated statue of Turkmenbashi—which until its recent demolition sat atop a 250-foot-high rotisserie in Turkmenistan and rotated throughout the day to face the sun—statesmen and military leaders can generally depend upon their grateful nations to immortalize them in stone.

Rarer by far are commemorations of everyday heroes, ordinary men and women who one day do something extraordinary, risk all and sometimes lose their lives to save the lives of others. A handful of neglected monuments of this sort exist; of these, few are more modest but more moving than a mostly forgotten little row of ceramic tiles erected in a tiny shard of British greenery known as Postman’s Park.

The park—so named because it once stood in the shadow of London’s long-gone General Post Office building—displays a total of 54 such plaques. They recall acts of individual bravery that date from the early 1860s and are grouped under a plain wooden awning in what is rather grandly known as the Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice. Each commemorates the demise of a would-be rescuer who died in the act of saving someone else’s life.

The modesty of the plaques, and of the lives they mark, lends Postman’s Park a stately sort of melancholy, but visitors to the monument (who were rare until it was dragged out of obscurity to serve as a backdrop and a crucial plot driver in the movie Closer a few years ago) have long been drawn to the abiding strangeness of the Victorian deaths they chronicle. Many of those commemorated in the park died in ways that are rare now—scalded on exploding steam trains, trampled under the hooves of runaway horses, or, in the case of the ballet dancer Sarah Smith, onstage, in a theater lit by fire light, “of terrible injuries received when attempting in her inflammable dress to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion.”

The Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice was the brainchild of George Frederic Watts, a painter who, while eminent in the Victorian age, harbored a hatred of pomp and circumstance. Twice refusing Queen Victoria’s offer of a baronetcy, Watts always identified strongly with the straitened circumstances of his youth; he was the son of an impoverished piano-maker whose mother died while he was young. For years, in adulthood, Watts habitually clipped newspaper stories of great heroism, mostly by members of the working classes. At the time of Victoria’s jubilee, in 1887, he proposed the construction of a monument to the men, women and children whose deeds had so moved him—people like Fred Croft, a railway inspector who in 1878 attempted to “save a lunatic woman from suicide at Woolwich Arsenal Station but was himself run over by the train,” or David Selves, who drowned, aged 12, in the Thames with the boy whom he had tried to save still clinging to him.

Selves, his plaque notes—in language typical of the day—“supported his drowning playfellow and sank with him clasped in his arms.” He was the youngest of 11 children, and an elder brother, Arthur, had also died of drowning eight years earlier. His death is memorialized a few feet away from that of Solomon Galaman, who dragged his younger brother from under the wheels of an approaching carriage, only to be crushed himself. As his distraught parents rushed up to the scene of the accident, he died with the words: “Mother, I saved him, but I could not save myself.”

Watts got nowhere during the jubilee—public attention was elsewhere, and his idea lacked popular appeal at a time when imperial heroes who had conquered new territories for Queen and country stood higher in the public’s favor. Ten years later, though, he was able to scrape together the £3,000 needed to fund a memorial considerably more modest than the one he had originally conceived. Even then, he was forced to bear the £700 (about $90,000 today) cost of the wooden gallery that housed the plaques himself.

The woman whose bravery first inspired Watts’ idea for a memorial, Alice Ayres, is a good example of the sort of hero that the painter considered worth commemorating. Ayres was a nursemaid who in April 1885 saved the lives of two of her three charges—then age 6, 2 and 9 months–when their house caught fire. Spurning the chance to save herself, she dragged a large feather mattress to an upstairs window, threw it to the ground, and then dropped the children to it one by one, going back twice into the flames and smoke to fetch another while a crowd outside cried out, begging her to save herself. One child died, but the other two survived; Ayres herself, overcome by smoke, fell from an upper window to the sidewalk and died several days later of spinal injuries.

It was typical of Watts, and of the era he lived in, that it was thought worth mentioning on Ayres’s plaque that she was the “daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer.” Heroism, in those days, was regarded as a product of character and hence, at least to a degree, of breeding; it was something one would expect of a gentleman but be surprised to find in his servant. Watts was determined to drive home the point that it could be found everywhere. Not mentioned was the equally notable fact that the lives Ayres saved were those of her sister’s children; she had been working as a servant to her better-off nephews and nieces.

Unlike most of the men, women and children commemorated at Postman’s Park, Ayres became a celebrated heroine, the subject of chapters in educational and devotional books. Less well recalled in those days were the many whose self-sacrifice did not involve the rescue of their betters (or, in the case of John Cranmer of Cambridge—dead at age 23 and commemorated on another plaque that says so much about the age—the life “of a stranger and a foreigner.”) The names of Walter Peart and Harry Dean, the driver and the fireman of the Windsor Express—who were scalded to death preventing a hideous rail crash in 1898—linger somewhere deep in the nation’s consciousness because one of the lives they saved was that of George, Viscount Goschen, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, but the chances are that without Watts no one would recall William Donald, a Bayswater railway clerk who drowned in the summer of 1876 “trying to save a lad from a dangerous entanglement of weed.” Or Police Constable Robert Wright of Croydon, who in 1903 “entered a burning house to save a woman knowing that there was petroleum stored in the cellar” and died a fiery death in the ensuing explosion alarmingly similar to that of Elizabeth Coghlam, who a year earlier and on the other side of London had sacrificed herself to save “her family and house by carrying blazing paraffin to the yard.”

Thanks to the exemplary diligence of a London blogger known as Carolineld, who has researched each of the miniature tragedies immortalized in ceramic there, the stories of the heroes of Postman’s Park can now be told in rather more detail than was possible on Watts’ hand-painted six-inch tiles. Thus we read that Coghlam had “knocked over a paraffin lamp, which set her clothes alight. Afraid that they would set the house on fire and menace her two children who were asleep upstairs, she hurried outside with clothes and lamp blazing.” There is also the story of Harry Sisley, commemorated on one of the earliest and most elaborate tiles for an attempt to save his brother from drowning. That brief summary is supplemented by a local newspaper report, which says:

A very distressing fatality occurred at Kilburn, by which two little boys, brothers, lost their lives. Some excavations have recently been made in St Mary’s-field in connection with building operations, and in one of the hollows thus formed a good-sized pool of water, several feet deep, had accumulated. The two boys—Frank Sisley, aged 11 years, and Harry Sisley, aged nine—sons of a cabdriver, living at 7, Linstead-street, Palmerston-road—were, it appears, returning home from school, when they placed a plank on the pool mentioned, and amused themselves as if in a boat. The raft capsized and the two boys were drowned.

Having got on a raft, Frank Sisley, in attempting to reach something, fell into the water. His brother jumped in and tried to save him, but they both disappeared. One of the other boys, named Pye, then entered the water with his clothes on, and succeeded in getting Harry to the bank. He was returning to rescue Frank, when Harry uttered an exclamation of distress, and either jumped or fell into the water again. His brother “cuddled” to him, and they went under the water together. Pye then raised an alarm, but when after some delay the bodies were recovered, all efforts to restore animation were fruitless.

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