IIRC, the earliest usage of the word "Eurasian" was used to describe the children of British colonists and their Indian wives.

Anyway, I saw in another comment that you seem to be pretty annoyed by this, but man, language is messy; words change meaning over time, and the same word has different meanings in different contexts.

Like if I told you I'm amped up, I'm not describing the amount of elecrical current in my body.

Most pagans didn't quite believe their religion to be "true" the way Christianity purports itself to be true.

To be a member of a pagan religion, you just had to be the ethnicity of that religion and participate in it's ceremonies and rituals. Christianity, on the other hand, is partly a philosophy that was debated, attacked, and defended. You'd be hard pressed to find a Norse shaman who wanted to discuss Christianity, while on the other hand Christians were the ones who had very compelling arguments for their religion, or I guess the point is that they at least had arguments.

>change your socks/clothes

I have never served but my grandpa was in the army from 1944-1946 and I still don’t wear socks to bed because of how often I heard about trench foot from him and the training of changing socks. For years. Because I lived with him. So even when my feet are freezing I won’t wear socks to bed. So that conditioning can even extend to family members.

east germany was not part of the soviet union btw

One powerful factor for rulers is that Christianity and the church's seal of approval solidified their basis for kingship and eased dealings with local Christian subjects and with other kingdoms. Formal conversion of the crown was generally preceded by conversion among part of the population as Christian missionaries journeyed through pagan lands, and contact with (and bringing of captives from) Christian territories was fairly commonplace, so the break wasn't wholly abrupt, while as a Christian monarch you now enjoyed the support of church and clergy so long as you didn't seriously misbehave.

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Women often played a large role in pagan kings' decision to convert.

• Clovis, King of the Franks was convinced to abandon paganism by his wife, Saint Clotilde of Burgundy
• Æthelberht of Kent was converted by his wife, the Frankish princess, Saint Bertha.
• István I of Hungary and his father both agreed to convert so that he could marry Gisela of Bavaria, though István appears to have been a more faithful Christian than his father was.
• Mieszko I of Poland agreed to convert so that he could marry Doubravka of Bohemia.
• Vladimir the Great had a Christian grandmother, Saint Olga of Kiev, and finally agreed to convert so he could marry the Byzantine princess, Anna Porphyrogennētē
• Hermenegild I of the Visigoths was convinced to abandon Arianism by his wife, Ingund of Austrasia. (Though Arianism was a form of Christianity, it still fits the pattern).
• Władysław II Jagiełło agreed to convert to Catholicism so that he could marry Jadwiga of Poland and become king of Poland jure uxoris.

Two books I read recently, The Realm of Saint Steven and East Central Europe in the Middle Ages pointed out that converting often opened the door to Christian marriage alliances and that the idea of one god and one church often fit better with kings' missions to somewhat centralize their authority that the multitude of gods of pagan faiths.

It's difficult to judge what any of them were thinking psychologically, as ancient and medieval chroniclers generally did not seek to uncover their subjects' inner lives and motivations, as modern writers so often do.

England is an obstinately un-revolutionary land for all its impacts on the international status quo (or perhaps because it found such outlets for its restlessness?), and modest relaxation from the 1820s of the harsh 1815 law allowed it to import grain during periods of shortage around 1830 and 1840, though prices remained high: the real crisis in 1846 was in Ireland, where the devastation of the potato crop left people unable to buy grain even at post-repeal prices, and worse followed in 1847 even as England more than doubled its grain purchases.

An upheaval was possible in the England of the 1840s, but not even the denial of the vote to the great majority of the population could rouse the masses to rise up when the issue came to a head in the spring of that year. "No revolution please, we're British."

There's a gigantic organization. It has connections to natural resources, contacts with traders and political leaders, and has an armed force. There's an opportunity to get your family/clan/town/region access to those resources, people, and arms. That same opportunity is probably being offered to rivals.

Enthusiastic embrace is the most logical option in a lot of situations.

Are we talking about converting from pagan to catholic? The conversions were mostly top down with the king and court converting and putting a catholic layer over lingering paganism that lasted underground for generations afterwards. The biggest reason is the King went from being in charge because blood and force to anointed agent of God, making fighting the King the same as fighting god. Then you had the ease of dealing with few bishops rather than dozens of local priests in religious matters. The priests brought in bureaucracy as they were literate and many became clerks for the King allowing greater control and communications. laws were written down and taxes became more formalised and legal agreements such as treaties and land holdings stopped being based memory.

> so those posted to the frontier may have been significantly affected (the CWGC's criteria for commemoration rightly include those falling to "disease contracted or commencing while on active service" alongside combat-related deaths.

Also on this point, worth remembering that throughout history, disease has caused more war time casualties than combat all the way up to at least WWI, possibly WWII?

A big development to change that (besides the mere luck of avoiding major world pandemics I suppose) was modern medicine recognizing the impact of disease and taking a deliberate approach to controlling it.

Even down to a very simple example: when you see recruits in military boot camp, they get hygiene inspections nightly, they get in trouble (at very least yelled at, maybe worse) for things like touching/picking at their face. (You so much as rub your eyes and a DI sees it, you were getting aggressively corrected.)

Only later did I realize, oh. duh.

They are breaking you of disease spreading habits (don't touch your face), and also conditioning you to disease preventative habits (change your socks/clothes, wash up at night. You wouldn't think washing and changing clothes should have to be reinforced, but its not the doing it, that they're conditioning. Its the never not do it no matter how tired you are. 19 hour day and you just hiked 20 miles, all you want to do is climb in the bag and sleep? Heck no nasty, you still clean your weapon and take care of your personal hygiene first.)

It could be a after effect of a being gassed some time in the past.

The Soviet Union stretched from East Germany to the Pacific ocean with many aligned states or at least using Soviet military equipment in the middle east. The Soviet had close trade and political links leading the to some Western commentators to use the "Eurasia" for a shorthand for this area. This usage of the term lacks nuance but is not broadly inaccurate if talking about modern history.

Indeed, it's most frustrating for those of us who use it for the wider whole. The concept in this narrower sense was originally Russian, seeking to emphasise the cultural distinctiveness of the Tsarist and later Soviet space in relation to western & central Europe - some seeking in it a "greater Russian" identity, others a non-nationalist fusion of European and Asiatic elements.

Western usage seems to derive from post-Soviet scholars and political commentators for whom the Soviet-era concept offered a more convenient label than "former USSR". The less objectionable "northern Eurasia" enjoyed a brief vogue but was apparently too long for those who popularise these things.

And it gets even messier: the journal Soviet Studies became Europe-Asia Studies, while its peer Eurasian Studies covers a distinct though overlapping area "from the Balkans to Central Asia and Iran". I'm sticking with the original meaning.

I laid flowers on the grave of a soldier by me who died 'of disease' on 12/11/18. Always think his is the saddest commonwealth war grave of all those in the cemetery

How were rulers in the medieval era convinced to convert to catholicism? Imean why and how were they convinced that catholicism was "the true faith"? I get that most people were forced to convert but some also just converted by choice. Lots of old germanic tribes, slavic tribes and vikings (famously harald Bluetooth) converted to Christianity by choice.

It at least seems to me that once you're brought up in a theological society, it gets imprinted in you that this is just how the world works and there's no other way. Surely it would be blasphemous if a missionary just came around and tried to convince you and your people that their way is actually superior. How did it work?

When and how did "Eurasia" become a byword for the post-Soviet space?

My understanding of Eurasia had always been the combination of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. That's what I was taught in elementary school. Then I get to graduate school, and everybody's referring to Central Asia or former Soviet states as "Eurasia." WTF?

Indeed, that made it all the more traumatic for those who'd made it through, and I think it's part of the reason it later faded from collective memory in the west (in India it's very much remembered): it was just too much for people to cope with.

Yeah it’s pretty sobering, dying that way after making it through the war seems especially cruel as well.

That's the pandemic, then: November 1918 was one of the deadliest months internationally (October in the US, but later for most). It hadn't occurred to me that it had reached so far into inner Asia, but troop movements in the war's last year were the biggest source of global spread (and of transmission from the US to Europe in the spring as the US army built up its numbers in France), so here we see the virus's long and lethal reach.

Hi thanks I managed to find a death certificate and it’s hard to read but it is listed as something like Inflammation of the Lung so i think it was likely an illness of some sort rather than combat.

What are your favourite books about ancient Greece?

Looking for basically anything relating to the Hanwell, Horton, and Colney Hatch Asylums from around 1874 to 1924, but I’d ideally like videos from inside the asylums (these can stretch to the 1930s/1940s but 1950+ is a bit on the late side). Documentaries specifically about Victorian era asylums are good as well! Films, TV shows, or clips that are based on the asylums during that time period would be excellent as well.

There was a brief Anglo-Afghan conflict in 1919 and the frontier districts were long considered only partly pacified, but a more likely culprit in late 1918 may well have been the influenza pandemic whose second wave killed millions in India in the last four months of the year: troopships docking at Karachi are thought to have been one of its principal routes into the country, so those posted to the frontier may have been significantly affected (the CWGC's criteria for commemoration rightly include those falling to "disease contracted or commencing while on active service" alongside combat-related deaths. Frustratingly the MoD too seems not to give cause of death, so I'm not sure how to find that without a copy of the death certificate.

Will Durant's 'The Story of Civilization'. Multi-volume. Begins with 'Our Oriental Heritage' and ends (I believe) with 'The Age of Voltaire'. Four different volumes cover just the 17th and 18th centuries.