Hot answers tagged contemporary-history
14
Please don't use CPI. CPI only measures consumption bundles for wage workers.
If you want to measure inflation you need to ask why you're equating the value of money over time. www.measuringworth.com goes into this, in great detail, with multiple theoretical papers and multiple measuring systems for US inflation.
what amount of modern currency would ...
13
No! The Cold War was the standoff between the Capitalistic USA and Communistic USSR. Communism lost. What remains is corruption within the former communist country (Russia). The War in Ossetia was over oil (a distinctly capitalistic move) not ideology (spreading Communism) as it would have been were the Cold War still ongoing.
10
Las Vegas was not founded in a particularly random desert. It was founded on a meadow (las vegas is Spanish for "the meadows") watered by the nearby Big Springs, or Las Vegas Springs. As such it was a watering spot on the Old Spanish Trail.
After the Civil War, O.D. Gass set up the first permanent white settlement there. Other settlers followed, and it was ...
10
Yes, all guillotines have been dismounted. Public executions are no longer popular, and even the memory of them is not something most people want to face. While executions were originally public, they gradually became less so: execution times changed over the 19th century to happen in the dead of the night, then at dawn; in 1939 (a lot later than in most ...
7
There are many techniques used by military recruiters. You can find a list on Wikipedia. To sum up:
There are a lot of very poor people in the USA too. As in your county the people recruited don't have better options. This is called "poverty draft" in many articles.
Recruiters give you hope that they will pay for your education
A recruiter interviewed in ...
7
The main reason that comes to mind at once are legal issues:
http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/97/03/chapt1.html
Nevada, legalizing casino gambling in 1931, was for almost 50 years the only state with legal casinos, New Jersey being the second one, in 1976.
6
From Green on blue, unboxing, and brass: on the radar in September 2012:
... Green on blue is modeled after an earlier phrase, blue on blue, referring to inadvertent clashes between members of the same side in an armed conflict... Blue on blue originated in the British military in the early 1980s, but has now spread around the world, and even moved ...
6
According to this paper from Penn's Population Studies Center, perhaps to go somewhere safer?
But it is not difficult to find conditions equivalent to combat in
American cities. In Philadelphia, the death rate for black males aged
20-34 in 2002 was 4.37/1000, 11% higher than for troops in Iraq. A
slight majority of the deaths were from homicide ...
5
There are only approximately 20,000 Zoroastrians in Iran, which is about 0.026% of the total population. I would not say Zoroastrianism is strong in Iran in terms of the total population. The only way Zoroastrianism can be said to be strong in Iran is because it has the second-largest Zoroastrian population after India (~69,000). See List of countries by ...
5
No the Cold War has stopped. If you think that the 'Cold War' is still going on because there is still slighly antagonoistic relationships between Russia and western europe, then you have to remember that there has always been antogonism between Russia and western europe. Just look at The Great Game (between Russia & UK), or French invasion of Russia in ...
5
Taking the link SevenSidedDie found, it looks like a penny in 2007 would have been worth roughly 0.037 cents at the founding of the Republic.
The interesting thing is that if you look at the graph, almost all of this inflation happened after the 1930's. For most of the history of the USA, the buying power of our currency was fairly stable.
What changed ...
4
No, there are none at all. A google search failed to turn up any good credible results. In the book. Physics for Future Presidents, the author writes that, "one ton of jet fuel or gasoline, when burned in the air, releases the energy of 15 tones of TNT...For the two planes, the total was 1800 tones TNT equivalent." The author also writes, When the airplane ...
4
I'm hardly a Mexican legal expert. However, the Constitutional article you state (the first can be ignored, as that Constitution isn't in effect any more) seems to say that your right to keep guns in your own home can only be restricted by Federal authorities (not state or local authorities). However, there's no limit placed on how restrictive the Federal ...
4
You need to make distinctions between:
US government openly supporting a group (likely, not happening though for reasons of plausible deniability/optics rather than some law). This may be confused with legit spending on assorted humanitarian etc... programs though. The latter is legal as long as Congress appropriates the money for the purpose.
US ...
4
The main factor is here undoubtedly Christianity. The Ancient Greeks may have distinguished themselves from the eastern Persians, but they did not align themselves any more with the barbarian tribes in most of Europe at the time. In fact, they at least appreciated the civilisation of the Achaemenid Persians. Other factors, most notably the Roman Empire and ...
3
If you go by official definition (e.g. on Wikipedia), then yes, Cold War - defined as geopolitical conflict between USSR-led communist block and Western democracies - was officially over December 25, 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR.
However, if you see Cold War merely as a specific manifestation of a generic geopolitical conflict between Russian ...
3
I believe that's because the Pacific Ocean is the world's largest body of water, and hence, the hardest to cross. (The Atlantic is the world's second largest body of water).
There is a large continental mass which I refer to as "EuroAsAF" that contains the majority of the world's people. Within this large land body, it's easy to characterize "east" and ...
3
The US does provide money abroad for humanitarian reasons, although I am sure some money can go through certain channels (or agencies) and find it's way to foreign political parties that are pro-US. This is certainly the case with governments which receive funds from the US in order to keep the party in power, or certainly influence a pro-US point of view. ...
3
If we grant that the dollar changed insignificantly until the 1934 when the dollar was detached from the gold standard, then we are left with some way of attaching value to something else that is constant.
Because all companies and their products are expressed in dollars, it would be a circular reference to attempt to use those. I see only one constant: the ...
2
Without access to the deliberations in the Russian Presidential cabinet, I doubt we'll ever know for sure, but it looks like it was built as a propaganda project. It's a showpiece, and not meant to fill a practical role. Despite the enormous cost, there are three reasons why it may have seemed a good idea at the time.
1) China is rapidly modernizing, and ...
2
The phrase "green on blue" originates from the colour assignments for the various forces in a theatre of operations as shown in the tactical displays. These displays are now all electronic, but this holds true for older systems of markers on paper maps as well.
Red traditionally signifies danger, and is therefore used to show the enemy.
Both green and blue ...
2
Modern scholarly points about Nazism are kind of beside the point, since any one of them extremely depends on ones ethical, moral and philosophical axioms and bases the scholar has, and most of them are quite contrary to each other.
As a couple of random examples:
Communist types criticize Nazism for (1) its nationalist structure - proper communism is ...
2
America is a country born in revolution and come of age in civil war.
Basically, it was a country that was "settled" by people who liked to fight, and who were "troublemakers" in their home country. Which is why an embryonic nation could wage a war against its mother country and win. This was true not only of the original settlers, but of most of the people ...
2
Like virtually every other country, Iran values having a culture that is not simply defined by its predominant religion. Iran, therefore, has a close attachment to its pre-Islamic (or better, non-Islamic) civilisation. Besides being a source of pride in its own right, this heritage also serves to differentiate the country and people from its surrounding ...
2
When i[sic] type in the "Howie huber[sic] love[sic] to receive his bonus in the bank" into Google, it doesn't show the notoriously[sic] Howie Huber.
I can answer this part at least!
This is probably because his last name is actually Hubler, with an "l", not "Huber".
2
I have never heard this theory, and I suspect it's rooted in racism from victors who want to get rid of their enemies. I do not think it has any basis in science or biology.
You might as well ask about the theory that Jews have deceitful genes and bad blood that will make them treacherous, another thinly cloaked racist pseudotheory.
1
You might be better placed than most to dig up an answer to that one. Here in the USA, I have never heard that one before. My guess is its a modern invention in a specific area (and thus probably isn't really "History").
Such arguments in the USA generally revolve around culture, not genes. The idea being that Despotic Culture X goes back thousands of ...
1
A favorite analogy of mine:
Say you have a bucket, and in that bucket you have tennis balls and baseballs. Definitionally, it is diverse. This is very useful if you want to play baseball and tennis, but if you only want to play either baseball or tennis, the bucket becomes less functional. If, on the other hand, you wish to play golf, the entire bucket ...
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