The History Thread

niMic said:
It's pretty funny that the only thread in the CE where Daily Mail links are tolerated is in the history thread, where they should have the least influence of all.
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To be fair, it's still 1950 in MailWorld.
 
niMic said:
He was talking about WWI, the Maginot line was built after the war. Really, it was more or less built because of the war.
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Yes, feck, it was. I'll go and have a lie down.
OK, it wasn't the Maginot line, but France still had most of it's army defending the German border, and by going through Belgium the Germans planned to outflank them, and it was the shortest route to Paris anyway. Britain's army was always small by continental standards, the plan was to knock out France quickly and then negotiate with Britain from a position of strength.
 
jakec said:
So I've been learning the basics of WWI and one thing I don't really understand is why Germany didn't just not go through Belgium to invade France to avoid a war with Great Britain.
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They could have met the French head on when the French troops invaded Germany at the beginning of the war. But based on the tangled web of alliances they knew that they would end up having to fight the Russians, who they assumed would have a long and delayed mobilization time frame. They were looking for a way to quickly knock France out of the war and then be able to move troops east to deal with Russia.


The original plan called for allowing the French to attack into Germany whole the bulk of the German Army wheeled through Belgium, Lux, and the Netherlands. Driving deep into France wheeling around BEHIND and through Paris, cutting off the bulk of the French Army as it drove into Germany (but not too far mind you), bringing about Frances defeat. The far right was originally intended to cut off most of the Channel Ports delaying the British Armies entry.

As you know a wide variety of factors led to the plan not working out as intended. Whether not invading Belgium would have kept Britain out of the war is uncertain, there was more driving the British then just their alliance with Belgium, before the war they were already working with France and Russia on plans for the war (as almost everyone across Europe was).

I
 
Mystery as century-old Swiss watch discovered in ancient tomb sealed for 400 years



Archaeologists are stumped after finding a 100-year-old Swiss watch in an ancient tomb that was sealed more than 400 years ago.
They believed they were the first to visit the Ming dynasty grave in Shangsi, southern China, since its occupant's funeral.
But inside they uncovered a miniature watch in the shape of a ring marked 'Swiss' that is thought to be just a century old.


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The mysterious timepiece was encrusted in mud and rock and had stopped at 10:06 am.
Watches were not around at the time of the Ming Dynasty and Switzerland did not even exist as a country, an expert pointed out.
The archaeologists were filming a documentary with two journalists when they made the puzzling discovery.

'When we tried to remove the soil wrapped around the coffin, suddenly a piece of rock dropped off and hit the ground with metallic sound,' said Jiang Yanyu, former curator of the Guangxi Museum.
'We picked up the object, and found it was a ring.
'After removing the covering soil and examining it further, we were shocked to see it was a watch,' he added.
The Ming Dynasty - or the Empire of the Great Ming - was the was ruling dynasty in China from 1368 to 1644.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...discovered-ancient-tomb-sealed-400-years.html
 
Penna said:
This Iron Age tunic made of wool has just been uncovered in Norway, due to snow melting in the mountains. Fascinating to see an every-day item and imagine the person or people who wore it. Mind you, not so good about the melting snow ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23849332

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You know make some recreations of this, get one of the Kardashians to wear it and you could make a fortune.
 
Full Cheapside Hoard goes on display for first time

The Cheapside Hoard is an unprecedented collection of jewelry from the late 16th and early 17th century discovered in 1912 by workers demolishing the Wakefield House in Cheapside, London, near St. Paul’s Cathedral. They drove a pickaxe into the cellar floor and hit a decayed wooden box that had been hidden there centuries earlier before the Great London Fire of 1666. Inside the box were trays of jewelry, nearly 500 pieces made of gold, enamel and gemstones from all over the world.
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http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/25513
 
http://phys.org/news/2013-09-oil-emerges-venezuela-jurassic.html

Under the rich Venezuelan soil, paleontologists have found treasures rivaling the bountiful oil: a giant armadillo the size of a Volkswagen, a crocodile bigger than a bus and a saber-toothed tiger.

The fossils found during the surveys include a featherless chicken that looked like an iguana, a three-meter (10-foot) pelican and giant sloths that lived on land 12 million year ago, unlike their modern relatives living in the trees.
 
I've heard of the giant sloth. Liverpool paid £35m for one.

I believe some species of giant sloth survived until the arrival of humans in the Americas. After that, like most other large animals, they evolved into lunch.
 
I guess this counts as history. Can anyone guess who this is without reverse searching it?

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Some Tudor documentaries:










 
It makes you wonder how much of our knowledge of the past is just guesswork. Fossils which, if found separately, would be classified as different species, are now recognized as the same species because they're found together? Making sense of bits and pieces of petrified bone is clearly more art than science.

The story of human origins is always changing. Every newly discovered bone fragment gives birth to a new theory.
 
Persian then and it is stunning - shame most of the historically successful civilizations are broken countries now
 
Apparently they didn't really value the ability to actually see anything when going to battle back then.
 
Kolyma Diaries: A Journey into Russia's Haunted Hinterland

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The 2,025 km-long Kolyma Highway in the far east of Russia is known as the Road of Bones because the thousands of gulag prisoners who died building it lie just beneath its surface.
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Captured escapees from camps were typically given 10 additional years for "economic counter-revolution", which during Stalin's era was also the fate of some innocent civilians convicted for being late to work, stealing a bottle of milk or neglecting a collective-farm cow...
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Arrested children

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/kolyma-diaries-jacek-hugo-bader-review
 
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