Surveyors have been burying metal markers to establish boundary lines for a long time. The Public Land Survey System started in 1785 in the US. I'm a real estate attorney and I regularly come across legal descriptions that refer to a buried rod, or an old axle, or some other metal object. A couple weeks ago I saw one from the 1800s that used an old gun barrel. It's still common practice for surveyors to set metal pins or rods into the ground to help people find boundary lines. Sometimes you'll see the head of these pins in the centerline of public roads.

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caesars number are IMHO most likely pure propaganda fantasy.

There was no way the gauls could have supplied 250.000 men in one army neither could rome.

For what it's worth, I owned a 1912 house in Chicago for about 20 years and found out that the property parcels were once delineated by burying slabs of lead. I found mine out buried by the alley - it was maybe 6" x 12" x 1/2 " and weighed a ton - but none of the my other neighbors were able to find/still had theirs. Just FYI.

That is my understanding, the use of lede for this meaning was for instructions to the printer in such a way that inclusion is a typographic mistake.

My dad found one in our yard (Picton, Ontario) years ago with "dieu et Mon droit" on it.

The French did this in the Great Lakes region around maybe 1740? They may have done the same along the Mississippi. Not that I really know but I’d suspect it was done to make up for the fact that they didn’t really have enough colonists to populate a lot of the areas they established trade networks in. I’m not sure where the practice came from though.

In terms of enforcement I think they mainly did it to “call dibs” before the English got there. Not that it really mattered when the Seven Years war broke out. That doesn’t answer your question but it’s all I got.

To expand, "lede" is used instead of "lead", as in the "leading paragraph" of a story. Merriam Webster explains

> Spelling the word as lede helped copyeditors, typesetters, and others in the business distinguish it from its homograph lead (pronounced \led\ ), which also happened to refer to the thin strip of metal separating lines of type (as in a Linotype machine). Since both uses were likely to come up frequently in a newspaper office, there was a benefit to spelling the two words distinctly.

To "bury the lede" in the expression which has relatively recently gone mainstream, is to ignore the main fact and focus on an unimportant detail. Posters on r/amitheasshole, for instance, often bury the lede by omitting crucial details that show the situation in a very different light once revealed.

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I believe early excplorers like LaSal did this in the 1600s in early America.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the whole reason it's spelled "lede" is to distinguish it from "lead" (as in, the metal), because of the latter's role in (historical) typesetting.

Ya. J instructor would fail me for burying the lead.

"buried the lede" is a term in journalism. Never heard this term in the context of property and real estate.

Never heard of this but following because it seems interesting

Thank you.

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Here's one excerpt, from Stalin:Tragedy & Triumph, by Dmitri Volkogonov

 

> It would be hard to find a precedent in history when one of the sides on the eve of a mortal conflict had so damaged itself. Zhukov recalled that during a large-scale war game in December 1940, he was given command of the ‘Blues’, that is the German side, while Army General Pavlov, commander-in-chief of the Western special military district, commanded the ‘Reds’. It so happened, Zhukov recalled, that he developed his operations precisely along the lines that the real battles would take in six months’ time. He claimed that his tactics were dictated by the configuration of the borders, the terrain and circumstances. He deduced that the Nazis would make the same calculations. Even though the umpires artificially slowed the progress of the ‘Blues’, in eight days they advanced to the district of Baranovichi. When in January 1941 Zhukov reported on the exercise to the Chief War Council he drew attention to the unfavourable system of fortified districts along the new border, suggesting they be moved back 100 kilometres. This was criticism of a decision that had been taken by Stalin. Stalin, meanwhile, listened attentively but was puzzled why the ‘Blues’ were so strong, why had such strong German forces been deployed by the rules of our own game? Zhukov replied that this corresponded to the Germans’ real capabilities and was based on a real assessment of the forces they could deploy against us in the opening phase of the war, thereby gaining great superiority by their first strike.
Stalin found Zhukov’s report comprehensive, and he admired the bold way Zhukov argued his case, and soon, in February 1941, he appointed him chief of the General Staff, one of his best decisions in this area, as future events would show.

 

I guess by my re-reading this, it does appear to be not a boardroom exercise, but rather a boots on the ground experience.

 

Here's another, by Ian Grey in Stalin, Man of Steel, in which he says the games were with Zhukov and Meretskov.

 

> Meretskov remained Chief of the General Staff for only a few months. Large-scale maneuvers played an important part in this period of intensive training. The first of the war games under Meretskov's direction took place in Belorussia in the late summer of i940, and Stalin accepted the evaluation of these maneuvers. Shortly after the second war game, held at the end of the year, however, Meretskov and the senior commanders were unexpectedly summoned to the Kremlin to report personally. Stalin and other members of the Politburo and the Chief Military Council were present. Meretskov proved incapable of evaluating the main features of the maneuvers. Vatutin, his deputy, tried to come to his aid, but Stalin silenced him. When Meretskov referred to the Soviet field regulations to support an argument, Stalin dismissed them as propaganda, adding that "here among ourselves we have to talk in terms of our real capabilitics." Stalin had seen through Meretskov's bluff facade of confidence and mastery. On February 1, 1941, Zhukov became Chief of General Staff. >  

I guess the question now becomes, Was it Pavlov or Meretskov? :P

Saying the Levant only had Orthodox Christians is a huge simplification. Miaphysite Christians predominated in Egypt. There were also Nestorian Christians, which predominated in the east, since the Persians tolerated that version of Christianity because it was not the official Roman Chalcedonian Christianity. There were also Jews, who still lived in the area despite all the Roman-Jewish wars.

The city of Rome was still administered by the few families that consistently produced emperors like the Julii until the Renaissance. Many Provencal nobles would try to trace their lineage to notable Romans in an effort to create legitimacy.

Trying to design a tattoo but when I try to find depictions of the flags used by guys like captain Kidd and Blackbeard, there are multiple options. Which flags are the “real ones” or at least close to it?

What are some great history books about Black historical events other than slavery?

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I don't think the Chinese cultural tradition that had gone for centuries was really connected to how they were thought of in the 20th century. Japan generally had the view that while some of their traditions might have originated from China, it had since then degenerated and now Japan was the rightful heir of the "real" tradition they had built on top of the original. I mean, they had been using those characters for hundreds of years already by the 20th century, it is much more likely they saw them as their own rather than as "Chinese". Therefore I don't believe there is any contradiction between seeing the Chinese as inferior in the 20th century while using the characters.

In a general sense, why did the others eradicate the characters while Japan did not? I'm not sure, but it seems to be dependent on each country. I think the central process here was that to promote literacy, every Asian country got rid of the very difficult Classical Chinese as the main literary language in the early 20th century and replaced it with something closer to their local spoken language. In Vietnam, Latin script was introduced by the colonial French administration while in Korea the Hangul script was promoted by nationalists and suppressed by the Japanese so it gained nationalist symbolism. Still, South Korea only really gave up the Chinese characters fully in the 1990s while the more anti-Japanese North Korea abolished them in late 1940s. So, the reason for keeping or not keeping Chinese characters was mostly a political issue unique to each country.

I've never heard of any major attempts in Japan to eradicate the kanji entirely, though I wouldn't be surprised if there were some arguments in the margins for switch to a Latin script or some other form of simplification - these were debated in pretty much every country during their modernisation, as even some Chinese argued for abolishing the characters in favour of some kind of alphabet.

TL;DR: Anti-Chinese sentiment during WW2 and usage of Chinese characters in Japan are not contradictory, there is no connection between the topics.

What's a good book on Tamerlane/Timur the Lame that details his life and his empire?