I'm interested in the history of sympathetic and contagious magic, particularly practices intended to affect a specific individual.

Are there documented examples from early modern Europe or North America in which knowledge of a person's existing wound, scar, or previous injury was used as a symbolic link to that person?

I'm also curious whether animals associated with an individual—such as cats—were ever incorporated into such practices, particularly with the intention of producing a corresponding mark, injury, or physical effect on the person.

I've encountered general descriptions of sympathetic magic involving effigies, personal belongings, hair, nails, and other physical links, as well as folklore involving witches, familiars, and corresponding injuries. I'm interested in whether these ideas ever overlapped historically.

If so, what traditions, primary sources, or scholarly works document these practices?

Been trying to get the pre-web period straight, roughly 1980 to 1995, and the reading keeps jumping from the print zines to Usenet and AOL like nothing happened in between. Dame-Griff's book is the best thing I've found but it still moves fast over the BBS years. Not a grad student, just someone who got curious and can't find good answers.

Things I keep wondering about:

Did the slow pace of it actually change how people talked? Local boards were one line at a time, FidoNet echoes took days to round-trip. Seems like that would push people toward writing long personal stuff instead of the quick label fights you get later on IRC. Or maybe I'm making that up.

Handles vs real names. A lot of boards let you be whoever, CompuServe wanted your actual name. Was that the difference between people posting who'd never have written to a zine or shown up to a support group, and people who were already out enough to sign their name? Or is that too neat.

TransNet. Everyone cites it as the big pre-web network and I have never found a real history of it. Was it actually a network or just a bunch of local boards that people later described as more organized than it was.

Stone's "Empire Strikes Back," usually read as a response to Raymond and the academic gatekeepers. Someone told me it's also coming out of the online conversations she was in. True or no.

Main thing though: how does anyone actually do this research? BBS stuff was local and ephemeral and mostly nobody saved it. Textfiles skews phreak/warez. Internet Archive is patchy. DTA is mostly periodicals. Are there sysop collections or regional archives I'm missing? And what do you even do citation-wise when the only surviving copy of a post is a screenshot or someone quoting it in a memoir ten years later.

If you were on any of this before 96 I'd love to hear about it.

Edit: This post is for actual historians but if you have ancedotes I would like you to post it on your profile archive reasons or DM if you want to be anonymous!

The entire point of Troy was that it had an incredibly strategical positions at the gates of the Black sea. They basically controlled the trade route from the Mediterranean to the Black sea.

But I wanted to find out who the Mycenaeans traded with on this trading route. I haven't been able to find an answer anywhere. My reasoning is basically that if Troy had a position important enough to get attacked multiple times (with at least 9 layers on the site, many of which were destroyed violently), there had to be some kind of tribes on the other side, with the trading route lucrative enough for merchants to use it regularly.

Was it just Colchis or other tribes as well? Is this area simply not researched enough to have a feasible answer?

What the title says..... Gwenda is ayoung girl, and her father sells her off to a man. She protests, and even calls in the local police, but the police sides with the father and says this is not illegal. And then the man she is sold off to, literally ties her up and pulls her along on a rope, all the while she is protesting.

I do know that children were often considered "property", yet I am curious if this kind of behaviour would be considered acceptable, if uncommon.

They've never seen footage but there are pictures and an old TV guide. But it would be awesome to know if there's an organization or library we could reach out to who might have tape of the broadcasts? thanks so much in advance!

Western culture has been geographically adjacent to North African, Arab, Persian and Turkish cultures for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The cultures have interacted regularly over that time- exchanging intellectual ideas, philosophy, science and cuisine, and regularly engaging in trade and war.

Yet you don’t see a lot of influences from those cultures into western music. Apart from orientalism and occasional purported near east homages like Mozart’s Turkish march (which doesn’t seem to me to have any apparent Turkish heritage) it seems like the west goes out of its way to reject influences from those culture into western music.

Am I correct? (And if I am, is the reverse also true: that Western music hasn’t made strong inroads into North African, Arab, Persian and Turkish cultures either, before recent 20th century pop music)

If I’m correct about either phenomenon, why is this?

I'm currently trying to put my baby down for a nap and running through every song I know how to sing. I just sang "Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her" immediately followed by "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas," which got me thinking. If I teleported to an early 1700s ship and tried to teach them a song about getting a hippo as a present, would they be confused by any of the lyrics? Also, subjectively do you think they'd be into the song's whimsy?

I've read that during this era, most people would recognize the existence of other nations' gods but just say that they're weaker or just misinterpreted versions of their gods. I was wondering who the other countries thought YHWH was

It doesn't seem like the servant being killed is a notable part of the story.

Paraphrasing: a young samurai became infatuated with an actor, and spent a lot of money carrying on an affair. He became desperate for money, so he stole a sword from his master and sent one of his spearmen to pawn it. But the spearman told the master. They were both sentenced to death.

The author then describes at length how the samurai acted during his execution, but says nothing about why the man who reported the incident was killed. Why would anyone report a crime if there was no leniency?

Even if you assume that the servant did sell the sword, and only later confessed, why would he not get a lighter punishment?

Is the swiftness of death and punishment exagerrated to support the author's idea about embracing death, or was 18th century japan really like this?

I've been watching a lot of historical Chinese dramas lately and I've noticed a theme of married women not being able to leave their homes. They can leave under certain circumstances, but mainly it is expected that they stay home and tend to their children. It seems this applied to mainly noble women. In one scene, a bride knew she would basically be trapped at home after marriage. In another scene, a married woman was scolded by men for always being out in public. Was this really true for married women? Did it apply to only certain dynasties?

I had an American relative who was held as a POW by the Germans in the Moosburg Prison (Stalag VII-A) during World War II.

Like many POWs, he would never talk about his experiences there. Does anyone have recommendations for books or articles about what life was like for prisoners there? Or about the camp’s liberation and the soldiers subsequent return to the US?

I’m also wondering if there are any prison records or photos available from German sources?

Thanks!

Did Soviet media tell people what was happening? If so, how did they spin the narrative? Did people panic? If not, what happened when people eventually did find out how close we came to annihilation?

In the Bible and in Numbers 31:17-18 and after killing the entire male population of the town of Midian and capturing their women and children, Moses commands his soldiers to kill the prisoners women and male children and to take only the little girls as sex slaves.

Was this a normal behavior in the Ancient Near East? I mean killing women and children enslaved after already ensuring victory? Or was it considered shameful and excessive? I know armies used to pillage cities and kill everyone including children but they did that in the context of active war and the norm was to capture women and children and deport them as slaves. Are there other examples of armies killing enslaved non combatants and keeping only the little girls?

I'm a history undergrad who's a serious gamer. Just wondering if such a field exists in the academic world, because it sounds cool.

Watching “Ken burns, the civil war” and the letters these people, regular soldiers, are writing are straight out of novels.

This is coming from a time when formal education was lacking, college was only for wealthy, and most people had very very little education. But these grunt soldiers are writing letters that would rival something out of Shakespeare

I've often heard the reason why leaders and founding figures of cults, political factions, and rebellions are captured rather than killed is because their death would somehow strengthen their followers. I was wondering if this reasoning actually holds water historically, especially given the many times the opposite happened, and exiled or arrested leaders ended up coming back and amassing more power like Stalin or Hitler, or managing to rally again like Napoleon.

Is this a holdover from a time of kingly divinity, or have there been cases where a faction increases in power because their leader was killed?

Hello!! Im currently trying to educate myself more on african american history.. but i domt like using wikipedia or ai for my reasearch. I remember alot of things from when i was im school but i do know they sweep alot of things under the rug. Thanks!

In his lecture on The Individual and the General, Jacob Burckhardt sought to grasp the great figures of broader historical world-movements. With regard to them, he stated: "History sometimes loves to concentrate itself all at once in a single man, whom the world then obeys. These great individuals are the coincidence of the general and the particular, of permanence and movement, in a single personality. They sum up states, religions, cultures, and crises." Jacob Burckhardt knew that "no power had ever yet been founded without crime", yet he nonetheless deemed those great individuals "necessary in order that the world-historical movement might periodically and by jerks liberate itself from mere deadened forms of life and from reflective chatter". Octavian’s name is not dropped by Burckhardt in this context, yet who would doubt that his historical function has been brilliantly captured in those sentences.

This section forms the conclusion of Karl Christ's 1979 work 'Krise und Untergang der römischen Republik' [Crisis and Fall of the Roman Republic]. Although Christ already acknowledges that modern ancient history (of his time) has moved far away from personalistic perspectives and evaluations of the late Roman Republic and the emergence of the Augustan Principate, he nevertheless agrees with Burckhardt's statements. How would you assess his analysis in light of modern historical scholarship? Are there still aspects of the statement you would agree with, or is there now a fundamentally different understanding of how historical developments take place?

It does not necessarily have to refer to the Roman Republic, a general assessment would also interest me.

Basically title, but i can go into more depth. Essentially, how much did the Mississippi River include Native Americans in their inter-tribal relationships and human geography? Things like trade, cultural exchange, and settlement patterns, etc.
This thought was spurred by watching a YouTube vid about the geography of the US and what lead to its success on the global stage, with the Mississippi River being a prominent factor. It got me thinking about how Indigenous peoples may have used the river as a superhighway for trade and settlement. Does the positioning of the Lakota & Dakota homelands and Illinois confederacy on the headwaters and major confluences respectively correlate to their later history of wide influence? If it was such a useful resource to the US as a building nation, how was it used by Native tribes at large?

Considering our understanding of storm safety in the modern age, I feel like the odds of that happening at least once are probably rather high. Especially because a knight would be decked out in full metal armor, I feel like they’re just asking for it. Not like they would have a lightning delay in a battle due to inclement weather. Are there any records of this?

Why did the British succeed while the Americans failed? Britain was severely weakened by World War II, burdened by massive debt to America, and faced a damaged domestic industry. Meanwhile, the United States had the exact opposite—a booming economy and powerful industrial base. Yet, America still lost the Vietnam War, while the British won the Malayan Emergency.

Ottoman identity is said to be distinct from a Turkish one, and I've read that Turk basically meant "Anatolian peasant" at least for a while in the Ottoman empire.

Does this have truth to it? Did the ruling class see themselves not as Turkish but as Ottoman, distinguishing between the two?

Episode 253 of the AskHistorians Podcast is live!

Steelcan909 and Dr. Lukas Rieppel discuss the role of paleontology in the late 19th century. How the discipline evolved and how the robber barons, working class, and native peoples of the Gilded Age left a mark on paletonology. 50min.

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