[removed]

Keep at it

Strong words from someone who clearly didn't click on the original link and watch a 5 minute video.

So... Lots to unpack here. A nation that lasted for 500 years does not have an unstable history. Have you seen China and Japan for those 500 years??? Constant backstabbing is human nature. One of the things that Korea got right was documentation. There is a reason you know every detail of political dynamics. It's more of a survivorship bias where a stable country with more documentation seems like there is more chaos.

Not saying it was a good country, but the stability was there. It wasn't a rich country by any means and the aristocrats were shitty. In the end the stuck up Royals fucked up the country by inviting the Japanese to deal with the Peasant uprising. Still boils my blood thinking about that from time to time. Even tho that was 130 years ago.

Good science, and indeed rational thought, involves a prior belief (what one might call a prejudice), which is updated to form a posterior in the face of new evidence. The stronger the prior, the stronger the evidence needs to be to overcome that prior. I have not seen any new evidence, but I am open to integrating it if it is presented.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_extraordinary_evidence

French and German are required languages for many disciplines in the humanities. I had to pass translation exams in both back when I was a PhD student in Egyptology.

I wrote more about this in Seeing as Egypt was under British patronage for most of the last two centuries, why is the majority of ancient Egyptian research primarily in French?

[removed]

I did graduate study in Medieval European history and was expected to be able to read German, French and Latin as a minimum.

The only recent popular history I know of (excepting the one that isn’t out yet!) is Mike Rapport’s Year of Revolutions.

For some much older books providing narratives of particular countries, you have Stanley Pech’s ‘Czech Revolution of 1848’, John Rath’s ‘Viennese Revolution of 1848’, and Istvan Deak’s ‘The Lawful Revolution’ about Hungary, all of which I believe can be found on archive.org.

Outside of books there’s a season of Mike Duncan’s podcast ‘Revolutions’ which is a good overview, and he’s got a bibliography on his podcast’s website.

I've just started watching this recently and yes, so far it's been thoroughly good.

> I guess most koreans don't talk about that part since it doesn't fit into the whole "hero" narrative.

I mean, it was both far from unusual for the period and achieved what it needed to, in helping to give Yi Sun-sin the army he needed to save his country.

Like if this upsets you don't check out the shit Richard the Lionheart got up to.

Science requires one to cast aside ones prejudices and have an open mind to come to new understanding. Identical twins have more than just DNA in common. Look up some studies on identical twins if you are interested.

Thanks for this. You have developed an excellent set of resources for studying this period

What periods and places are good to know French as a history student? Clearly, if you were gonna go to graduate school for the classics or the ancient world you would be expected to know Latin. So what periods and places would you be expected to know French?

Honestly though, from a purely military point of view- it was either that or your culture and society goes extinct.

>Despite this, he was largely unsupported by many politicians, scholars, and aristocrats because he was not the first-born son and he was born from a concubine.

>Gwanghae had a young half-brother born from a legitimate queen.

I thought the courtly intrigue of the Kingdom series was completely fictionalized. That’s shocking to me that the series’ plot had actual precedent in Korean history. Had never even heard of the Jurchen either before watching. Makes me appreciate it that much more! Thank you for your work. I really enjoyed it!

This has been a good read .

I recently saw the movie _ The Swordsman ( 2020 ) supposedly based on true historical events and had many questions about Korea Joseon . I had no idea Korea had this sort of background / culture . In truth , I guess I never gave it much thought .

Thanks for posting .

Only tangentially related, but if you like Korean history and zombie stuff, you should check out Kingdom on Netflix. It’s set in 1500s Korea. The Korean king has only one son who he had with a concubine, so that son is the heir but as a bastard it is a tenuous position. The king’s wife is pregnant though, so while his adult son is currently the heir, the new child may replace him as the heir, and the queen’s family is power hungry and wants this very much. But then the king dies before the birth, so the queen’s family comes up with a plan. They know a physician who can turn the king into a zombie. Then they will tell a few witnesses that he is alive but sick until the baby is born so that the baby can become the new heir. But of course it goes wrong and leads to a zombie outbreak across Korea. So it’s a zombie apocalypse before contemporary weaponry with lots of palace intrigue thrown in. Here is a trailer

If you go into the settings on Netflix you can watch it either with subtitles or dubbed.

The Manchus have a pretty complicated history. Many of the Mughal/Jurchen tribes were originally Goguryeo vassals, but they were displaced after Silla united Korea and then the newly formed state of Balhae fell to Liao and most of the various Jurchen tribes ended up becaming tributaries to both Liao and Goryeo.

Back then, it wasn't only Koreans that discriminated the Jurchen either, but Mongols/Chinese as well. The Jurchen civilization was originally at the time completely dominated and enslaved by the Khitans which formed the aforementioned Mongol/Chinese Liao empire. Before the Jurchens overthrew the Khitan, they even had a custom where married Jurchen women and Jurchen virgin girls were regularly raped by Liao Khitan envoys as they pleased.

Koreans never treated the Jurchens like this, but the Jurchens were seen just as barbaric as the Liao by Koreans because many of them were living as bandits and pirates harassing Korean communities that lived near their borders or on coasts. The Jurchens didn't raid only Goryeo either. For example in 1019, there was even a recorded case of Jurchen pirates raiding coastal Japanese villages, killing all the men, and enslaving many Japanese women as well.

At the time Khitan-Goryeo tensions were also flared up drastically and Liao ended up invading Goryeo, but they eventually ended up signing a peace treaty with Goryeo after their invading force was killed.

Then due to the shift the Jurchens managed to overthrow their rulers and turn the Mongols into their vassals after about a century, forming the Jurchen Jin dynasty which ruled most of northern China until eventually being defeated by the new Mongol overlord Temujin(Genghis Khan) who united a large number of nomadic tribes and invaded China.

Kingdom on Netflix is about zombies during the Joeson era and it's amazing.

Oh wow, Yi Soon Shin beheading fleeing soldiers and putting their heads up for display is not a part I ever heard about till now. I guess most koreans don't talk about that part since it doesn't fit into the whole "hero" narrative.

Yeah, it can preserve things surprisingly well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_body

without the rules of the reincarnation specifically outfitting you with that feature, I don't see how. Its not like we're usually able to identify any part of our body by any means other than our known senses.

Heck, I've had a limb fall asleep, then wondered who's f*ing arm this is often enough to know I can fail to recognise my own body part while its still attached to me.

When i see skeletons it makes me wonder; if reincarnation was real, would i know it if i ever saw my old skeleton on display?

Yes, and shame it burned to the ground. It must have been a spectacular and cosmopolitan place, relative to the time.

I wonder where Doggerland people would have clustered had they stayed in one place. Right in the middle of that map one might suppose - between purple and blue.