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canyoneer posted:Tycho Brahe, famous Danish astronomer, died in the aftermath of rupturing his bladder after drinking too much at a meal (as it would have been impolite for him to get up). He either died from infection or from the huge dose of mercury that he took to treat it. Bonus fun fact: he was an astronomer in the pre-telescope era, and his observations were accurate enough for Johannes Kepler to use when he did the math to discover the three laws of planetary motion. He also had a pet elk, who sadly died when he drank too much beer and fell down the stairs. He also lost his nose in a duel over a math formula, making him one of the most badass nerds to ever live. He had it replaced with a golden replica. When the pyramids were built, small populations of mammoths still lived in northern Siberia.
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Nov 5, 2015 05:12
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Peebla posted:What is life-loathing and why was it punished by cuts to the neck? Seems to be what the life loather would be into. What? No, it was a suicide, because she hated (loathed) life.
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Nov 9, 2015 17:00
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Red Bones posted:Considering history in terms of the human experience is something I find really enjoyable, so let's knock it back a little bit further to a couple of bits of archaeology that suggest some very human experiences: In the same vein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim Have some drawings by Onfim, age 7 (or 807, depending on how you want to count it). Featuring Onfim on a firebreathing horse being a badass knight/centaur.
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Nov 13, 2015 14:18
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SeanBeansShako posted:Frederick The Great won in the end, he got to play the flute all day surrounded by burly tall as hell Grenadiers. gently caress you dad indeed. More than that, he took the Army his father had painstakingly built over an entire lifetime and threw it into battle, over and over and over again, taking horrendous casualties most of the time. Granted, he won most of the time, but I wonder if there wasn't a degree of "gently caress YOU DAD I'M GONNA KILL ALL YOUR SOLDIERS and also become a European Great Power or something, whatever" involved.
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Nov 14, 2015 13:34
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Greatbacon posted:For example, In the leadup to WWI, the German high command had developed a massive war plan that involved taking all their forces and attacking France in an attempt to knock them out of the war as quick as possible so that Germany could then pivot all of their forces to defend against the mobilization of Russia. It was a plan so embedded in the military that is was simply known as "Der Tag" or "The Day." This is not actually entirely correct. The Germans only had one plan, the Schlieffen-Plan (named after its creator, who literally spent most of his professional career creating and updating it). It did indeed try to win the war quickly against the French, before the Russians could fully mobilize. Some say that this is the reason why the war broke out in 1914, the Russians were upgrading their railway system (with French money) to be able to mobilize more quickly, and by 1916 the Schlieffen-Plan would have been impossible. It was impossible anyway, as it turned out (the actual progress of the war went better than the plan expected, and still fell short). But the move through Belgium was absolutely vital. The Germans expected the French to hold fast at the border. To move around them and avoid any messy frontal attacks against an entrenched enemy (a very wise choice in the First World War, as it turned out), you had to move through Belgium, fall upon the weak French flanks and rear, cut them off from the rest of the country and annihilate them in one giant encirclement. The force holding the line in the south along the French-German border was the weaker part, as weak as Schlieffen dared to make it. Schlieffen wanted to concentrate everything in the right wing that would circle around and fall on the French rear. Reportedly, his last words, on his death bed, were "Keep the right wing strong!" (Dude was seriously obsessed with his idea of a giant encirclement, to the point where he wrote a giant book about Hannibal encircling the Roman Army at Cannae) His successors were altogether a lot less daring and pulled forces from the right wing, but that ended up not mattering a whole lot. The additional troops would in all likelihood have been forced to sit idle because the roads were clogged by other units. hilariously, the French decided not to sit still at the border. the moment war was declared, they attacked aggressively into Alsace-Lorraine, a province that had been taken from France during the war of 1870 (and by France from Germany during the 17th century), a move so counter to German military thinking that Schlieffen had dismissed the possibility during his planning because there was no way the French were that stupid (since it meant moving deeper into the encirclement he had planned for them).
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Dec 16, 2015 09:33
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I see the milhist thread has been victorious in its war of conquest. We will be benevolent overlords and only occasionally shoot our pistols out the window.
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Dec 22, 2015 19:26
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:The Roman Empire fell about 563 years ago. Edward Gibbon began writing about the fall of the Romans a little over three hundred years after the fact. The Roman Empire is alive and well in the form of the Vatican. Granted, it's territory has shrunken somewhat from its glory days. Nessus posted:Wasn't there some last ditch hope of Goebbels and co. involving Roosevelt dying which was actually rooted in some German history, where an enemy monarch died or got iced and was replaced by his heir who was much, much friendlier to Germany? During the 7 years war (aka the French and Indian war), Prussia was getting turbofucked by a coalition of Russia, Austria and France. Then the Russian monarch died and the Russian heir Peter the something or other made peace with the Prussians, giving them the much needed respite to go on and win the war. When Roosevelt died, the Nazis expected the Allies to fall apart because there was seriously no way the arch-imperialist powers would keep an alliance with a loving communist country going, right? Turns out they didn't, but the alliance held long enough to finish the war.
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Jan 1, 2016 14:55
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Samovar posted:Who... who sent the letter? The Swedish Forestry Department. I can only imagine there were several generations of civil servants who asked why the gently caress the Navy wanted so much oak delivered by 1980, only to be told it was top secret and a national security issue. ArchangeI has a new favorite as of 15:43 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 15:14
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Man, that awkward feeling when a Ghost claims to be a dead aunt you didn't know you had. Looks like one of your grandparents has a bit of dirty laundry...
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Jan 30, 2016 22:59
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System Metternich posted:
Now here is German name if I ever saw one
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Mar 1, 2016 23:15
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Delivery McGee posted:You should read HEY GAL's posts in the A/T Military History thread, about the exploits of one Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze (and that's not even the most German name she's come across, just the one with the wackiest stories.) Oh, I am very much a regular in that thread. And Schutze would inevitably lose in the fight against Julius Caesar von Breitenbach.
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Mar 1, 2016 23:35
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Geniasis posted:I think this was, at least in part, so that the European powers would be less likely to go to war if they knew that they were going to be fighting their family members and having to awkwardly explain themselves to grandma Victoria at the royal family reunion. Well, that's a bit too easy. One of the major players of the start of the war (France) was a republic, and they certainly didn't have to be dragged into the war kicking and screaming. Austria's Kaiser had no relations to the rest of the extended Victoria family. Every single monarch had a government who advised him, and most of them counseled war. The royals of the day certainly aren't blameless (Wilhelm II most of all), but they are by no means solely or even mostly responsible for the war breaking out. ArchangeI has a new favorite as of 20:26 on Mar 21, 2016 |
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Mar 21, 2016 17:54
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Canemacar posted:I heard another factor was that a lot of the political landscape of Europe had been established by Otto Von Bismark, who was pretty much a political wizard. The only problem was that when he retired/died, no one could manage the diplomatic finesse that Europe needed and the whole system began to break down. It wasn't that complicated. Bismarck correctly predicted that France would seek revenge for the humiliation of 1871, so his political goal was simply to keep France diplomatically isolated and to always have at least one, better yet two, strong allies to back him up. The concert of Europe was one of five powers (Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary). Having two allies means you are pretty much set. if you only have one, you better work to ensure one of the other three stays out of it (which Britain often did). After he went out of office, the arrangement with Russia lapsed, and the French were able to create an alliance. That need not happen. France was a republic at the time, and Russia had just barely abolished serfdom. To keep that alliance from happening requires only the very smallest of efforts. The prediction about the Balkans isn't that special. It's the equivalent of someone today claiming that things will get ugly in the Middle East.
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Mar 21, 2016 22:07
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RenegadeStyle1 posted:I always found it was weird that nobility never saw the connection that their family had all these weird problems from inbreeding that the common people didn't have. "Hm, yes, obviously, I mean we gently caress our extended families and have fame, fortune and power. They don't always gently caress their extended families and have neither. Clearly, we must be doing something wrong."
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Mar 22, 2016 16:15
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16th century  : quote:The foulest place of my arse is fairer than thy face https://thesocialhistorian.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/the-foulest-place-of-mine-arse-is-fairer-than-thy-face/
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Jul 23, 2016 12:41
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System Metternich posted:Thanks for the translation, but why would anybody write this on random stones in runish? It's the viking equivalent of a sign saying "Nothing to see here, move along", duh.
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Aug 8, 2016 18:04
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