Questions tagged [social-class]
Questions related to the subjective stratification of society into different groups according to economic, political, social and cultural status or classifications, the most common in modern Western civilization being upper, middle and lower classes. Social classes change through history and can vary greatly in different political and economic systems.
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Were there universities that treated socioeconomic status as a major factor in college admissions? [closed]
For many years I have been asking myself the same question: Are there universities that treat socioeconomic status as a major factor in college admissions (without taking race into consideration at ...
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What legal test, if any, distinguished gentlemen from commoners in Tudor England?
I read today that, as part of the dubious legal proceedings which Henry VIII used to get rid of Anne Boleyn, five men were tried and executed for having treasonous relations with the queen: Mark ...
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Were there luxury restaurants in East Germany?
I was recently reading the excellent book Mac B, Kid Spy: Mac Saves the World by Mac Barnett.
It is set in 1989, and Mac crosses the Berlin Wall to infiltrate the Television Tower in East Berlin.
I ...
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What was middle class in Sweden in WW1?
This is written in the English Wikipedia article for "Madicken": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madicken
Du är inte klok Madicken is about a 7-year-old middle class girl, during World War I.
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Were freedmen part of the "familia"?
In LINGVA LATINA A Companion to Familia Romana Second Edition by Jeanne Marie Neumann, an unofficial companion to the Lingva Latina course, she states that:
When a master manumitted … a slave, that ...
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What was the involvement of the upper social classes of Russia in Kizhi?
Kizhi Pogost, a UNESCO World Heritage site, was built in the 17th - early 18th century in Karelia (north-west Russia). Its architecture is remarkable, and it's quite big. The only personality ...
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Has a British peer ever come to live in a typically lower class way?
Recognizing that social class in Britain does not correspond to wealth, that that peers have been gambling away fortunes since time immemorial, has a hereditary peer, a duke, marquess, or earl, ever ...
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Do revolutions always need public support in order to succeed long-term? [closed]
I normally frequent Worldbuilding StackExchange, and I recently asked a question about werewolves attempting to declare themselves an independent, sovereign state in the American West. However, this ...
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Did Northern troops attempt to re-enslave African Americans in Southern plantations during the Civil War?
In Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois argues that during the war, Northern troops - in this case under the command of Nathaniel P. Banks - sometimes tried to get enslaved people back to ...
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Beliefs on the Fragility of Ruling Class Women in and Around the 18th and 19th Centuries
One thing that has always struck me as bizarre when reading the likes of Austen or the Brontes, for example, is how pathetically fragile they make ruling class women. Get caught in the rain or go a ...
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Was the 35 year age minimum chosen for US president roughly equal to the average life expectancy for a reason?
In a recent comedic stand-up monologue the following was said:
You know when they wrote the constitution, people like George Washington, no one expected to live to age 78. The average life ...
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Until when did Castile consider all Basques to be noble?
According to J. I. Israel's Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico: 1610-1670 (pp. 112-113), Basques in the Spanish empire had a special universal claim to nobility:
Perhaps the most ...
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Who was part of the Raznochintsy class in 1800s Russia?
In the system of social estates of Imperial Russia, someone "of miscellaneous rank" was a member of the raznochintsy, at least until the category was abolished. В.Н.Разгон says this happened at the ...
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Were surname upgrades a well known practice in the Spanish Empire?
People everywhere have names, and some seek to change their name. Spanish speaking people in particular generally have two surnames, paternal and maternal, in that order. Whether the maternal one ...
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How do we know baroque art depicted obese ladies because of a different ideal of beauty?
I've often heard that the obesity of women in baroque art signs that such women were the ideal of beauty. How could we know that? And how could we know it wasn't just "cultural rationalization" of a ...
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What was the average day like for a 15th century English peasant or agricultural Labourer?
Because I live in a major urban American city of nearly 500,000 (Colorado Springs), I am finding it difficult to wrap my head around the idea of medieval subsistence agriculture. I am particularly ...
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What social relationships existed between the popular mobility and the political elites in the revolutionary American colonies?
What social relationships existed between the popular mobility and the political elites in the revolutionary and potentially revolutionary British American colonies?
For those unfamiliar with 18th ...
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Did any British working class men have the vote before 1918?
I was watching the film Suffragette recently and she mentioned her husband having the vote.
I thought he looked too poor to already have the vote, but this didn't look like a film to just ignore ...
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Which French Revolutionary figure thought black slaves could oversee monkeys for labor?
I'm operating off of fuzzy memory for this question but I know I have encountered this bizarre (and offensive: fair warning) historical figure who I am inquiring about here before in my previous ...
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How many British navy officers were from lower classes at the end of 18th century?
Helping my daughter with a presentation about Cook, I looked for English sources about his biography and was surprised to read that he was a son of a farmer hand - practically, the bottom of the lower ...
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Historic leisure activities (especially the elderly) [closed]
I am curious to know how people, especially elderly people, used to spend their time in the past.
Did they work until their death?
It would also be interesting how these were different concerning ...
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What kind of training did Imperial military officers receive? [closed]
In the early modern period, European empires maintained their faraway colonies with great armies and navies. Many enlisted soldiers and sailors were barely trained; imperial officers were often ...
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Class-conscious, non-Marxist historiographies
Marxist historiography focuses on social class and economics forces, and assumes an inexorable trend towards socialist revolution.
What kind of historiography shares the concern about class ...
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Why were gravediggers, actors and former gladiators (but not slaves) banned from the Colosseum?
According the website Colosseum, some people were banned from attending events at the Colosseum. The same information is given on the Wikipedia Colosseum page which cites the book Rome: An Oxford ...
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Has there ever been a society with impartial distribution of privilege and punishment where all members of the society have equal status.
It seems from my non-expert knowledge of history that most societies are characterized by a privileged elite class exploiting an oppressed class to some degree.
Are there examples of societies where ...
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Who was a "gentleman" in USA in the times of Tom Sawyer?
Reading american books about that time, (mostly Mark Twain), I often met the term "gentleman". But what did it require to be "gentleman" these times in America? Were there some official definitions of ...
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What do Marxists mean by "class basis of law"? As seen in linked article
R. Judson Mitchell's article The Brezhnev Doctrine and Communist Ideology uses the term "class basis of law".
I'm not sure but I think:
Because this concept almost always appears hand in ...
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What was the status of travelling perfomers in the Middle Ages (specifically, 13th century Germany)?
I had previously thought that medieval travelling performers were regarded as being of a low social class, not for respectable people to associate with, but upon researching it I found out that many ...
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What was the social class of priests' children in Imperial Russia?
Imperial Russia considered all its subjects to fall within a social class or estate (petty burgher, noble, privately held serf, native, etc.) Most of these categories are hereditary, but a couple ...
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What is the impact of 18th to 19th century colonialism on the live of the common people of the colonial empires
This topic suddenly came to me when I was doing my homework. I went online to search but most of the articles only talked about the impacts on the country or place that was being colonized.
According ...
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Is the son of a Freedman a Freeborn?
We have a worksheet for history, where we need to guess an ancient Roman person's class depending on their point of view in a piece of text they wrote. I have searched the internet for help in one of ...
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Why did the Social Gospel movement of the early 1900's fail to reach the working class?
I've been reading about the Social Gospel movement and it seemed that the movement failed overall because it never reached it's target audience, the working class. Instead, it had a flare of movement ...
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How do we know the patricians of Rome?
This question asked whether we know the list of patricians from who was consuls. I don't think that is it because I always read that there were originally 100 individuals who were the head of ...
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Was classical Alexandria really this brutal and class-segregated?
"The Perniciously Persistent Myths of Hypatia and the Great Library" by David Bentley Hart in the journal First Things claims that while Hypatia was indeed murdered by a mob of angry ...
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How did the upper class stay wealthy in the past?
If I am not mistaken, people in the past tended to have enough offspring so that they increased the population of their family until the maximum sustainable population was reached, due to the lack of ...
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English society in the early 19th century: Was aristocracy including royal members?
I'm currently working on english social classes in the early 19th century, and wondered: was aristocracy including royal members, or only gentry + peers?
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Historical, academic explanations for the near-universal second-class citizenship of women?
I just heard on the news that, in 70 countries, girls face risks by simply going to school and being girls.
How did women come to be second-class citizens throughout the world? Are there any ...
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Was literacy ever used as a tool to oppress the population by higher social classes? [closed]
In this question, one of the answers stated that
Actually, states can interact well enough with their subjects in the villages without widespread literacy. It helps to have someone literate who can ...
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Why did meat and dairy drop out of the working people in Britain's diet during the industrial enclosures period?
During the industrial enclosures period (1750-1832) meats and dairy dropped out of the diet of working people in Britain. This change was regional (oatmeal regions maintained milk consumption, bread ...
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Gap between poor and rich in the Roman Empire
Was the difference in purchasing power between the poor and the wealthy in the Roman Empire, greater than or less than than the difference between rich and poor people in modern western economies?
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What major approaches to "class" as a theoretical category do historians commonly use?
"Class" is a set of connected, but not identical, theoretical approaches to social division in human societies, including past human societies. Historians regularly make use of "class" in their ...
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Who did the middle class in ca. 1850- ca. 1900 France constitute of? [closed]
I am learning about nationalism in Europe in the latter half of the 19th century, and my history book uses the terms "urban working class", "middle class", and "land-owning peasants". What were some ...
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When did dueling with weapons become socially unacceptable in the western world?
Now in the modern days, the phrase "lets settle this like men" would imply a fist fight. Yet as little as 200 years ago, "settling it like men" would either involve swords or pistols; the fist was the ...
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Have there been any notable people that have claimed that classism and not racism is the current cause of racial inequality? [closed]
Particularly in the United States, class and race seem to be interrelated, i.e., people are generally separated by both their wealth and by their race. Given the history of racism in the United States,...
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Status of merchants in feudal Europe
What was the status of merchants during the feudal age in Europe? Did they, like peasants, serve/have allegiance to certain land owning lord? If yes, do they have different status or privileges from ...
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What was the status of specialized workers during Greek times?
In Ancient Greece, what kind of social status would specialized workers have? Did they have any extra privileges when compared to the average person, and did they have less rights than rulers and ...
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What was the status of specialized workers during the Roman times?
It's obvious that people in the Senate or people with political power would be considered of higher status, while ordinary plebs, such as farmers, would have a lower status. However, where exactly ...
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Were there Samurai equivalents in Korea or China?
Considering that the Samurai class had its distant roots in Chinese political structure, did China or Korea have a similar warrior class?
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What was the societal wealth demographics when the major pyramids were built? [closed]
All this talk about wealth distribution (1% of US Citizens etc. etc.) got me wondering about the wealth distribution in other periods of history when - let's call them - great edifices were built.
E....
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Have fair-skinned peoples ever been the lower/oppressed class?
In many societies around the globe today we see that the darker skinned peoples are generally of a lower social status than the fair skinned peoples of the same area, or that fair skin is considered ...
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