The premise of the upcoming film By Any Means got me curious about the history behind one part of its story. How realistic would that position have been during the 1950s and 1960s? Were Black FBI agents assigned to investigations involving the KKK or racial violence in Mississippi during this period? If so how did their federal authority work when dealing with segregated local police departments and government officials? I’m especially interested in documented cases where race affected an agent’s ability to do his job. Did local authorities treat Black federal agents differently from their white colleagues or refuse to cooperate with them?

I’m less interested in whether the film itself is historically accurate since it takes dramatic liberties. I’m more curious about the real history behind the situation it depicts and any documented examples of Black FBI agents working in Mississippi or elsewhere in the Deep South during the Civil Rights era.

Were they already roman or still remember and revolt for pre-roman traditions and norms ? Or it was just supporting the popular and charismatic one ?

It’s a surprising lack of compassion especially with his overall character and upbringing. He really does not have an excuse. But maybe going to a military school and interacting with boys from slaveholding families made him make excuses to himself. Like if these guys are “good” then slavery can’t be bad. Befriending the Dent boy from school and visiting his slaveholding home and then marrying his sister. Again no excuses for him to just ignore all of that.

I really don’t know but his attitude reminds me of my cousin who is a good guy to family until we talk politics and he just shrugs off the pain and struggles of certain oppressed groups. Even worse when he’s a minority himself! And I think he must’ve got it from his awful friends growing up and online because his parents aren’t like that at all. Anyway just a guess would like to know the opinions of actual historians!

I usually see the anecdote about African-Americans serving in congress during reconstruction come up but I haven't heard much about what they did while in office. I would assume they would have mostly similar views given the circumstances and support the Radicals for obvious reasons, but I don't see that come up when reading about radical republican actions which mostly focus on Stevens, Phillips, and Butler.

What acts did they support? were they considered an important block in the congress or were they ignored? How did they get treated as more and more southern Democrats got elected to congress as well nearing Reconstructions end?

I have always wondered about something that is rarely shown or explained in movies or books: what actually happened to a battlefield after a battle was over? Who cleaned up?
Let's take the Napoleonic wars as an example. A large battle could involve 100,000 or more soldiers and result in around 10,000–12,000 casualties. So what happened after the fighting stopped?
What happened to the bodies of their own soldiers? Did armies try to identify and recover them? And the the bodies of enemy soldiers?
How long did it take to clean up a battlefield with thousands of dead bodies and dead horses?

How did this process really work?

Thanks in advice for the answers!

I was reading Sappho's poetry and I was surprised to see just how many poems were about an old mentor and a young woman. This interested me because I had always heard Sappho's poetry talked about as a kind of (obviously this idea is anachronistic) early example of modern day lesbian relationships. Her love poems, however, read to me almost as if they were about (a female equivalent to) pedarastic relationships, something without a modern day parallel.

Fragment 49:"Atthis, I loved you / long ago while you / still seemed to me a / small ungracious child" (this is Mary Barnard which I know is outdated). In other fragments she uses the term "youth" for her beloved and describes her old age.

My basic might-be-wrong understanding after searching more is that Sappho was an older woman who mentored unmarried woman in preparation for marriage. Her relationships with these women were that of mentor and mentee and the mentees were fairly young.

Specifically, I am curious what the relationships described in Sappho's poetry actually looked like. How old Sappho and the subjects of her poems likely were. Whether or not they are a parallel to the more famous pedarastic relationships in Ancient Greece.

With his destructive obsession with wonder weapons, all the talent in Germany (Hahn/Strassman/Meitner/Einstein) and nuclear fission actually being discovered in Germany in 1938, it feels like lady destiny lined up all the luck Germany needed to have a miraculous win over the world. Why did he fumble in recognizing the one shot he had?

I know the title may look a bit confusing, but I'm not sure English has a word for exactly what I mean.

What I've been wondering about is the process of spreading news through "official" channels using written materials, and when this became a normalized practice.

I know that, for long periods of history, news traveled through word of mouth, and that made me wonder whether news being written down in something like a newspaper and then sold or distributed only started with the invention of the printing press. However, that seems too simplistic. Trade and complex societies had already existed for a long time before the 16th century, so there is no way news was spread only through word of mouth for so long.

Can anyone help me understand the history of "newspapers" a bit?

It is my understanding that Italian East Africa never had complete control over Ethiopia, but I was hoping I could get a more in depth explanation. Additionally, I was also wondering why Ethiopia’s resistance to Italian occupation is not covered or often taught in most WW2 curriculum.

Thank you.

I heard someone say that Japanese language did not even have a word for “the western concept of love” until the 19th century. I am struggling to understand what they meant, surely love is a universal human emotion? Is it some difference in the expression or cultural understanding of romance, sexuality, affection, attachment? Was it simply an inaccurate statement? If it is true, what did love look like in Japan before western influence?

Who came up with there being 7 days in a week and what was it like before that?

I spent some time recently touring the towns and seeing the sites in Minute Man National Historical Park, and I'm trying to imagine what the landscape was like back then. And in that process, I came up with some questions about all the trees that were cut down and consumed back then.

1) Along the "battle road" where there are the stone walls that the colonials hid behind, some is still pasture / farmland but other areas have heavy tree cover. What was the landscape like back then in this area? I've always been told that the stone walls were made as land was cleared and farmers pulled rocks out of their fields, but if they were just open fields, would that really be enough cover for the colonials to hide from the regulars?

2) I read how the Concord minutemen watched the regulars from Punkatasset Hill. I know the hill is wooded conservation land now, but there are references to how the land used to be cultivated. How back then was standing on top of a 300 foot hill providing a good enough view to see what was going on? Was the whole area was pretty much cleared and was only really farmland / pasture?

3) How did they deal with stumps back then? Knowing how difficult it is to remove a stump in modern times, what techniques were used? Was it shovels and farm animals pulling? Burning? Letting it rot for a few years after you harvested the wood so that it was easier?

4) Knowing that Concord and Lexington had been settled in the 1600s and were full communities with taverns and craftsmen and shops, etc. how much of the land would have been cleared for things like firewood or lumber? In the center of town, would there have only been a few trees for shade / decoration?

5) How would people who lived in the center of town or the businesses like taverns or craftsmen have gotten firewood? Were there farmers who sold/traded excess from when they cleared fields? Were there people who went onto public / unclaimed land who gathered it and sold it?

I hear things such as fighting Mass migration on the news everyday and throughout almost every political party in the west.

I actually wonder if that has ever worked. If a large sum of people from a different region move to another region, I think it would be almost impossible to move them back to where they came from or send them to another place without committing crimes. Has this actually ever worked?

When my mother was telling me about her side of the family (from Laos), I was told that we didn’t have much in the way of family history due to no one writing anything down. Did no one truly write anything down or were the records simply lost?

Why was it that despite the people wanting to be united and the fact that there were several times where it could have (and should have) been united... it just didn't unite until the Prussian stronghold united it in 1871.

Wondering, because now the monarchs are protected by professional security guards when did the role of the guard regiments transition from a genuine role to mostly just a ceremonious role?

Vague question admittedly! I'll try my best to explain what I'm getting at. Basically I'm asking about the effort represented by the popularizations of people like Robert Chambers with Vestiges or Carl Sagan with Cosmos (especially with the Cosmic Calendar visualization): this effort to weave together insights from astronomy, geology, biology, and other fields into a grand narrative of the history of everything. Obviously, attempts to craft universal histories had existed before, but in the case of people like Bishop Ussher, Kepler, Newton, etc., their attempts at chronology were based on Biblical sources; when did the insights from scientific investigations, like deep time or evolution or whatnot, become sufficient for people to look back and try and sum up everything they've learned into one continuous narrative? (I recognize that framing perhaps flirts with the problematic conflict thesis, so please correct as necessary!) And how did those narratives, and the popularization of them, evolve as more was learned (e.g., the formation of elements, the Big Bang, plate tectonics, etc.)?

So far, I haven’t seen many people trying to refute the claims made in this movie, and many people talk about it as if it were some secret truth that was finally being revealed.

Have any of you watched it, and what do you think about it?

We all know of English language sea shanties. Did any Portuguese or Spanish sailor's work song or similar survived in written records or singing traditions?

What were the conditions that allowed the English language sea shanties to survive past the windsail era?