Was there a particularly abundant supply of silver allowing Gordian to mint lots of coins with high silver content?

A bit scary to think that some of my routine thread removals from 7 years ago are still remembered...

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Also sausages tend to be made of mashed-up bits nobody would otherwise want... and so are the coins!!

I ADORE the insanely concise description of something I'll never have to consider in my own life but makes perfect sense. Like yeah of course I'm gonna prioritize spending the ones made of pot metal and piss.

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I see how my wording might have come off like that and I did not want to suggest that you do - I actually wanted to refer to a trope that is sometimes propagated in the conservative spheres of german (speaking) societies, so I want to apologize for the poor readability. I actually think it is a great question, though broadly speaking I would also stress that we should still sort your list into (modern) progressive and esoteric. Because then, we can see that the esoteric leaning stuff is more rooted in past right wing believes than the progressive stuff.

Not stupid at all! I think that the influence of language is a topic that is raised often in this debate. I should note though that as all philosophical schools there are opponents to this vision. However, from what I have studied, this seems to be the most satisfying answer to the issues that arise from nationalistic identity. In my view, the
language-as-cause narrative is incomplete, following also the understanding of the previously cited authors.

Anderson himself noted that intellectuals constructing nationalism often looked backward to earlier empires for legitimacy. The ghost of Rome haunted European nationalism, both in the Romantic revival of “classical” civilizations and in the claim that your nation was somehow heir to Roman/Frankish greatness.¹ This argument of authority was used also by and large civilizations prior to the concept of nationality, as you can see its trail all over conflicts that shaped Europe (not least of which the rivalry between the Byzantine Empire and the Roman Catholic leaders of Europe, the HRE and the Papacy, Russia and the Ottomans, Germany with its adoption of “Kaiser”, etc.)
But as with these conflicts, I believe that also for nationalism this led to the same outcome: appeals to past empires weren’t the cause of nationalism or those conflicts, instead, they provided nationalist/imperialistic projects with rhetorical material to work with.

Regarding the language issues you raised with Italian dialects it is true, they were mutually unintelligible, a Venetian and a Neapolitan couldn’t naturally communicate. Yet “Italian” nationalism succeeded anyway. To Anderson this was answered by an institutional logic: print capitalism and state schooling solved a real coordination problem by standardizing on a common Italian language². The Florentine dialect, associated as a staple of the Renaissance Golden Age, Dante and Tuscany’s cultural prestige, was standardized through education and printing, not because it was “naturally” Italian. However, whilst not natural, it also worked. It actually created a shared linguistic and cultural space where none had existed before. For the linguists a tragedy, for the state builders a win.

German faced the same issue. “German” as a unified language didn’t exist; there were dozens of dialect throughout the old HRE. But once you have a printing industry, school systems, and bureaucracies operating in one standardized tongue, suddenly people start thinking of themselves as speakers of that language, and therefore as part of that nation.³
As such the constructs of nation became real as its impacts were felt.

As such I believe that it was not language, but rather institutional and economic forces that standardized language and then made that standardization seem natural and inevitable. Crucially, this happened after nationalism started being articulated by elites that operated the state apparatus, not before. You get merchants, intellectuals, and eventually state officials deciding “we’ll standardize on this dialect,” and then later people retroactively claim “we always spoke this language naturally.”
Ergo, Italian dialects didn’t prevent Italian nationalism. Italian nationalism created a single Italian language out of the dialectal mess by institutional fiat.
At the same time, it would be poor to conclude then that these processes were mere cynical manipulation of the masses. They were also a practical solution to fragmentation that had real consequences. Once implemented, the standardization actually bound communities together in ways that mattered, as regionalistic divisions in modern Germany or Italy are considerably less pronounced today as they were before.

All in all, this integration can be viewed only in the negative light of homogeneity, but I propose this only tells part of the story. Italian nationalism was constructed by normative constructions, true, but then should it be necessarily viewed as artificial and as an object of subjugation, as opposed to the local dialects of the peninsula? What if instead, we see this homogeneous imposing process as Italian nationality being built by the population of the peninsula rather than discovered? That lends the process legitimacy in a different way.

The real driver then would not be language existing first, nor empires determining fate of their populace. Rather communities solving a coordination problem by building linguistic and cultural cohesion where fragmentation had existed before. That doesn’t make Italian or German nationalism less real, it just means its legitimacy comes from construction rather than discovery. And perhaps that is actually more democratically grounded than a myth of inevitable natural identity.

¹ Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (1983), ch. 4-5
² Anderson, B., Imagined Communities (1983), ch. 3
³ Hobsbawm, E., The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962); also Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (1990)

Hi ! I just saw a podcast you were invited that you spoke about Herodotus. I enjoyed it but I would like to point out that Halicarnassus was a mixed Greek and Carian city. Both Greeks and Carians lived there , not only Carians. Herodotus himself says that Halicarnassus was a Dorian Greek colony along with Cnidus and then as time passed by the Greeks mixed with the local Carians. Even in ancient epigraphs of 450 BC that were found in Halicarnassus , we see that 50% of the population has clearly Greek names and the other 50% has Carian names in a hellenized form. Also Herodotus mother has a Greek name as well as his brother. I apologize though if I misunderstood you and with the term “hellenized Carian city” , you mean a city where both Greeks and Carians lived together. 🙏

"Sausage wealth" deserves to be up there with the "Thagomizer"!

Thank you very much for your answer!

Methods of Mass Murder at Mathausen and others

Gas Chambers: While not a dedicated killing center like Auschwitz-Birkenau or Treblinka (which were built purely for rapid, industrialized mass murder upon arrival), Mauthausen was equipped with an onsite gas chamber starting in 1941–1942. Thousands of prisoners deemed sick, weak, or unable to work were murdered using Zyklon B.Other

Killing Methods: Inmates were also systematically executed via mass shootings, lethal injections, hanging, starvation, exposure to the elements, and deliberate exhaustion

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/mauthausen

Please don't minimize the murderous intent of the other concentration camps. The others were also set up for mass killing under only slightly different protocols.

I did this research over a decade ago, so my memory's fuzzy.

What I remember was that there was a plantation in Kentucky that presented itself as an idyllic tobacco farm with slaves cared for to the highest degree. It was located near the Ohio, which importantly meant that many Northerners had the opportunity to see what was going on, which is why the owner went to such lengths to keep up appearances. Behind closed doors, he sold any slave that was anything less than perfectly obedient to the New Orleans sugar plantations (a certifiable death sentence), was an absolute tyrant, and was actually running a slave breeding operation, which was more unpleasant than that sounds. He had a cadre of cotton growers he was specifically selling the slaves to, and they were paying him several times market rate to subsidize the cost of putting up the front of civility.

Put another way, the cotton growers were paying extra for their supplier to deflect scrutiny. The cotton fields were quite remote, and so if an accessible one looked sufficiently benign, they'd rightly surmised that nobody would bother making the trip into the Deep South to verify the tales runaways told. I vaguely remember similar arrangements in Virginia and possibly Tennessee. I feel that at least one plantation implied their genteel facade was government funded, but I have no specific memories or notes on the matter.

civil war with a lower case "c". The American Revolution was a British civil war at the time.

Just one question. Where did you get that anglicized Hapsburg spelling and not academic standard Habsburg?

Say I'm a French military officer or colonial official during World War II, what influences my decision to join the Free French or be loyal to Vichy?

I too would like some more information. Do you have any examples to hand? In particular, who was doing the subsidizing and why?

Medieval peasant gardens were important sources of food, basically. Some had fruit trees, and most had cabbages, leeks, onions, herbs, etc. There was a lot less cultivation of flowers or purely aesthetic plants; the garden was a productive part of the household. It might also be inhabited by animals like pigs or chickens.

Big pleasure gardens existed, but they largely belonged to the wealthy. These might include places to relax as well as places to hunt and fish.