Is that why all the books on the Vietnam War are written in Vietnamese?

You could spend five minutes searching the internet and find out this isn't true. So. Why not give that a try?

Does anyone know any books on english history between the battle of Hastings and the rise of the Plantagenets? Can't seem to find much on this period but I'm very interested

Thanks for your comment. I'd love to be able to answer you in more detail. I, and most Australians, know very little about the first nations of the land. I could probably give you more detailed answers on the politics of Weimar Germany than a general overview of Aboriginal culture.

This reference may give you some enlightenment in the difference between nations, cultures, and language groups.

The first two mins of this might help re language groups.

This is an interesting overview on potential Aboriginal agriculture. The section on the Bogong moth harvest might give some insight into how groups collaborated.

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Ive heard of this before. This is fascinating as astonishing on a whole different level.

>The greater cultural/language group has been on that part of Australia for something like 50,000 years.

These are all descended from the group of homo sapiens that came to Australia? I guess after roaming the continent (and unfortunately exterminating the greater fauna) theyd be able to establish some kind of status quo that worked out very well with no intrusions or invasions from outside

So these indigenous nations are more like ethnicities or more like tribes? Would they live cut off from each other like different nations in Southern America for millenia or how was their (guessed) history? And how common or separate is or are the culture(s) for those nations?

Excerpt:

A Japanese foreign minister met Pope Pius XII and his secretary of state during World War II to seek mediation in a desperate bid to avert war with the United States, eight months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Vatican documents recently seen by Kyodo News show.

Yosuke Matsuoka wanted the Holy See to speak to President Franklin Roosevelt to try to prevent "a war of mutual destruction," telling Cardinal Luigi Maglione that Tokyo also wanted a cease-fire with China after more than three years of war, according to a summary by the cardinal's office of a meeting on April 2, 1941, between the two.

[Matsuoka] said that the U.S. leader would be able to bring peace to the Far East by mediating on Japan's behalf with Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, according to the documents.

Matsuoka held talks with the pope before he met with the cardinal but what the pope said during the discussions remains unknown to the public.

 

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, leading the United States to declare war against the country the next day and formally enter the conflict.

After his country's surrender in 1945, Matsuoka was arrested and indicted as a Class-A war criminal by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East but died of illness in 1946 before the trial's completion.

According to historian and author Satoshi Hattori, Matsuoka began exploring ways to save Tokyo's relationship with the United States around December 1940 after realizing that the Japanese southward military advance would fail.

The document is a demonstration of Matsuoka's last-minute attempts to prevent war with the United States by using every possible channel, he said.

Kyodo News, 27 November 2022.

Why are hessians during the revolutionary war depicted in both green and blue coats? Whats the background?

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

When the (Western) Roman empire fell apart, it led to a precipitous economic, cultural and scientific decline in Europe. Hence the "Dark Ages". This is also why the end of the medieval period is called the "Renaissance" (rebirth), a "rebirth" of the values etc of Rome.

Later historians have tried to nuance the story of the post-Roman period, but the fact remains that there was a great decline.

Ahhhhh I have a question. Why was the early medieval period referred to as Dark Ages?

I asked here before but now added more details:

Is there a precedent for a state which was taken over from within by criminals in a democratic way? There are all sorts of dictatorships, but usually those took over by a coup. The question refers to a nation where a gang, gangs, or an assortment of criminals, took over by exploiting democracy and employing populism slowing over years to convince everyone they should vote for them, e.g. by cutting deals with the media, finding ways to use institutions for their criminal activity like laundering money, etc.

By gang I mean:

1. everyone in the party is hand picked by the boss who has centralized power so no one could challenge him from within
2. everyone in the party supports one another by belonging to the party so the party would prevail with no regard for any ends other than the success of the party
3. the party has a large base of support in the public who vote for it regardless for any ideology other than the shared identity
4. the people who support the party within the media read out the news from their mobiles that's dictated to them from the party
5. when someone in the rival party doesn't do as they bid the supporters harass him/her or their families
6. they have support from within the police and partisan organizations
   Of course in such a state there's little meaning to democracy, and this could go on only as long as the party doing that doesn't have to actually create policy which requires wide support and only keeps its power by handing out money to its supporters in all sorts of made up jobs and projects.
   The example I have is a minority party which forms a coalition with other smaller parties by buying them out so they could win support.

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Hi!

It seems like you are talking about the popular but ultimately flawed and false "winners write history" trope!

While the expression is sometimes true in one sense (we'll get to that in a bit), it is rarely if ever an absolute truth, and particularly not in the way that the concept has found itself commonly expressed in popular history discourse. When discussing history, and why some events have found their way into the history books when others have not, simply dismissing those events as the imposed narrative of 'victors' actually harms our ability to understand history.

You could say that is in fact a somewhat "lazy" way to introduce the concept of bias which this is ultimately about. Because whoever writes history is the one introducing their biases to history.

A somewhat better, but absolutely not perfect, approach that works better than 'winners writing history' is to say 'writers write history'.

This is more useful than it initially seems. Until fairly recently the literate were a minority, and those with enough literary training to actually write historical narratives formed an even smaller and more distinct class within that.

To give a few examples, Genghis Khan must surely go down as one of the great victors in all history, but he is generally viewed quite unfavorably in practically all sources, because his conquests tended to harm the literary classes.
Similarly the Norsemen historically have been portrayed as uncivilized barbarians as the people that wrote about them were the "losers" whose monasteries got burned down.

Of course, writers are a diverse set, and so this is far from a magical solution to solving the problems of bias. The painful truth is, each source simply needs to be evaluated on its own merits.
This evaluation is something that is done by historians and part of what makes history and why insights about historical events can shift over time.

This is possibly best exemplified by those examples where victors did unambiguously write the historical sources.

The Spanish absolutely wrote the history of the conquest of Central America from 1532, and the reports and diaries of various conquistadores and priests are still important primary documents for researchers of the period.

But 'victors write the history' presupposes that we still use those histories as they intended, which is simply not the case. It both overlooks the fundamental nature of modern historical methodology, and ignores the fact that, while victors have often proven to be predominant voices, they have rarely proven to be the only voices.

Archaeology, numismatics, works in translation, and other records all allow us at least some insight into the 'losers' viewpoint, as does careful analysis of the 'winner's' records.
We know far more about Rome than we do about Phoenician Carthage. There is still vital research into Carthage, as its being a daily topic of conversation on this subreddit testifies to.

So while it's true that the balance between the voices can be disparate that doesn't mean that the winners are the only voice or even the most interesting.
Which is why stating that history is 'written by the victors' and leaving it at that is harmful to the understanding of history and the process of studying history.

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Because history isn't written by only the winners (see also the bot reply, it is quite informative). Have you never heard of for example Lost Causers or Wehraboos?

And who says we never see war 'from the other side'? Plenty of ego-documents left by people from all sides in historical events like for example, WW II. If you haven't seen it, it is not because it does not exist, it is because you haven't read it.

And as others have said, the study of history requires one to be very circumspect, and this is the focus of aby historian in training.

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"Is it possible?" Sure, why not. But possible doesn't mean likely.

There's absolutely no way for a historian to answer what if questions. I've seen it best explained through an example of going to the grocery store.

Say you need groceries, you realise this at 7 o clock at night after getting home from a long day at work. You've got enough to last you til tomorrow, but not ideally. You could go to the store tonight, or you could wait until tomorrow. It's a scenario every adult has experienced.

So what happens if you go tonight, versus going tomorrow? In 99.9999% of the scenarios there's absolutely no difference maybe other than a bit of annoyance. But, for those small chances there are people that go out and get in a life changing car accident, or get food poisoning from stock that would have been replaced overnight, or run into an ex, or meet the person of their dreams in the queue, or a million different highly unlikely but entirely possible scenarios.

If you play that game for just ONE person it's highly unlikely that anything will change. But if you play that game with an entire population for hundreds of years, you're going to hit a lot of crazy odds.

So when we play the game of "what would happen if this entire group of people and this entire group of people combined with this entire group of people matched up differently..." we get into an absolutely unimaginable amount of scenarios and probabilities. Expand that over many generations and it's even more so. What if one of those people who would have been a great leader never existed because their parent died, etc. etc.

It may be fun to imagine, but there's no academic way of answering it. There is /r/HistoryWhatIf where they have a bit more fun with this, but again, take every answer with a dumptruck of salt.

Washington didn’t do any of that, the Continental Congress did.

Is it possible that without the aid of the other Native American tribes in the region, the colonists would not have been able to populate Connecticut and the northern American region due to the Pequot Nation? Doing research for my 3rd grader, and it's a simple project. I went deeper and started to understand that the Narraganset and Mohegan tribes allied up with the colonizers to rid themselves of the Pequots...resulting in the Pequot Massacre in 1637.

Simple question about this incredibly complicated historical event is this: is there evidence that if the Native American Tribes in that region had banded together that the English and Dutch colonies would not have taken hold, and the America we know today would not exist?

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It's possible you're thinking of Captain Fluellen from Shakespeare's Henry V who famously wears a leek in his hat during the battle.

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