Recent comments in /f/history

quantdave t1_jea5hix wrote

Reply to comment by Doctor_Impossible_ in Weekly History Questions Thread. by AutoModerator

>Perhaps if the monarchy hadn't been, or hadn't been seen as, the puppet of foreign interests, Iranians wouldn't have had such a dislike for it.

That was a big trigger in 1979, but over the longer term there had also been an erosion of perceived domestic legitimacy of successive dynasties from the 18th century onward: the last dynasty's origin in a fairly modern-looking military coup (allegedly with British involvement) didn't endear it to legitimist detractors, though as ever the clergy varied in its engagement with the throne.

Religious traditionalists were also alienated by the Pahlavi rulers' sporadic modernisation efforts: it's too readily forgotten that Khomeini's final breach with the throne came not over its pro-western leanings or autocratic rule but over the 1963 land reform which he saw as eroding the proper rural hierarchy. The revolution's mix of popular and traditionalist aspirations underlies much of its subsequent evolution and the idiosyncrasies we may find perplexing.

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quantdave t1_je9uc6x wrote

Reply to comment by JoJoCa3 in Weekly History Questions Thread. by AutoModerator

Do you mean a single-episode treatment covering the entire history of each of China, Japan or WW2? That's a big ask, because it would be impossible to do justice to the subject without the thing running to series length. I suppose you might just be able to squeeze an overview of Japan or WW2 into 3-4 hours, but it would have to leave out vast amounts: for China without even Japan's dynastic continuity or reasonably compact geography, it would be a hopeless exercise.

Video can be good at relating individual themes or events, but for the whole story there's really nothing else for it but reading - and even then a single treatment gives you only one version of events and their cause and significance (unless it brings in multiple scholarly viewpoints, which is a good format but adds to the length), so you need a few different takes to begin to form a rounded picture (not all necessarily book-length - journal articles can be valuable for specific events or topics).

Each is really too big to take on in a single bound, so it's far better to tackle individual periods or themes ("events" not so much at first, they're better understood once you've the context). But video has its limitations, and I suspect you're drawing a blank in your search because here you're encountering those limitations.

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