39
votes
Accepted
How do I find the sources which determined the year of the fall of Babylon?
One way to go about this type of research is to simply dig deeper, one step at the time: review the bibliography of the articles you've run into, and read the citations of potential interest. Rinse ...
- 23.1k
27
votes
Accepted
When did horseback riding start? Are Doosheh cave petroglyphs authentic and correctly dated?
There seems to be something going on of the quite unreliable kind. The generally accepted 'history' and datings of horse domestication and riding practices are quite at odds with the dates for cave ...
- 80k
20
votes
Accepted
Which specific day of 1964 was the tree Prometheus (WPN-114) cut down?
An article in the Los Angeles Times gives a date in August...
The tree, called Prometheus, took root at the dawn of the Bronze Age, centuries before the ancient Egyptians began construction on the ...
- 18.8k
18
votes
Where can I find reliable primary sources written by Ancient Egyptian laborers?
We actually have a lot of good evidence written by workers from that period. The bulk of that evidence comes from the workers' village of Deir el-Medina which housed the men who built the tombs in the ...
- 76.9k
16
votes
Accepted
How did German racial laws affect people who weren't Jewish but one of their parents wasn't German?
How German racial laws affected people who weren't Jewish but one of their parent's wasn't German?
...
born to a British father and a German mother
...
So my question is that what was the protocol ...
- 8,602
15
votes
Accepted
Study of causal structures and dynamics in history?
There is an emerging trans-disciplinary field called cliodynamics which studies these ideas. There's an open access journal, Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, a ...
- 30.4k
13
votes
Hitler's Dental Records
Facts
Wikipedia has a good account of the facts:
by 11 May 1945, the Soviets had already confirmed through Hitler's dentist, Hugo Blaschke, and his dental technician that the dental remains found ...
- 26.6k
12
votes
Is there any evidence in history to suggest that there was a Melanchro (dark-skinned) population in Colchis as claimed by Herodotus?
tl; dr
The answer to the question in your title is that it depends on what you (and Herodotus) mean by 'dark-skinned'. There is certainly no evidence of any large black African population in Colchis ...
- 76.9k
10
votes
How do I organise my "What-if" research paper?
I'd say that the original flaw in your approach was to choose the conclusion and then look for evidence to support it. Working this way leads to cherry-picking evidence that suits your conclusion (and,...
- 4,717
10
votes
Accepted
Where is an image of the oracle bone that describes the nova?
There is a picture of that oracle bone in the chapter Chinese and Korean Star Maps and Catalogs by F. Richard Stephenson in the University of Chicago's History of Cartography (p514):
There is also a ...
- 76.9k
9
votes
Accepted
How to collate the available contemporary press coverage of the 1936 US olympic hockey team?
If you haven't found it or tried it yet, you might consider newspapers.com. The site allows you to search topics, keywords, etc. and look at actual scanned copies of newspapers from past years, going ...
- 106
9
votes
How, if at all, is published pseudohistory publicly addressed by scholars and academia?
The usual general attitude of professional historians to revisionist history is ignoring it. Except some publications specially written to refute it.
Your last sentence with the question is not ...
- 38.1k
9
votes
Accepted
Do Columbus' letters reveal that he was a Marrano?
While there are some not very widely supported theories out there that postulate some somehow Jewish origin for Columbus (esWP: Cristóbal Colón, Origen, Hipótesis secundarias, enWP: Catalan-Jewish ...
- 80k
9
votes
Accepted
Can anyone help identify this passenger steamship with double funnels and two masts?
Looks very similar to S. S. Harvard pictured here in 1907:
- 70.7k
8
votes
Accepted
What are the best resources for studying oracle bone inscriptions?
I don't know how useful this will be to you but hopefully these links will at least lead you to what you are looking for.
The British Library has more than 450 oracle bones and there are some links ...
- 1,284
8
votes
When did horseback riding start? Are Doosheh cave petroglyphs authentic and correctly dated?
Farsi wikipedia gives a number of different ages for those paintings (please note that my Farsi is not particularly good and English is just my second language, so the translation is probably ...
- 7,158
7
votes
How can we evaluate a country's historians for independence?
Caveat: I'm not a trained Historian, just someone who's read a lot of history books over the years, and has learned this the hard way.
First off, every writer has bias. Know that going in.
So if ...
- 114k
7
votes
Accepted
How much knowledge of the past was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries?
It is difficult to say exactly how much was lost. We have some sources that enable us to say what manuscripts were held by some monasteries, for example the library at Peterborough, or that at Syon ...
- 76.9k
7
votes
Origin of 'diff' tool
The Unix Heritage Society shows that while diff's man page appeared in V6 (1975), its source code appeared in V5 (1974). The algorithm is described there as being "due to Harold Stone".
- 27.4k
7
votes
Was there ever a male-equivalent to a harem in the Ottoman Empire?
[Due to the ambiguities of the wording, it's unclear if you mean to limit yourself to only the Ottoman empire. If so, then I'll delete this answer.]
If you're strictly looking for an Ottoman ...
- 948
6
votes
Accepted
Contracted Trade in the 18th century
Much of what you desire to know will be summed up by researching both the history of Marine Insurance, perhaps starting with the founding of Lloyd's Coffee House in about 1688; the history of the ...
- 70.7k
6
votes
What makes studying science different from studying the history of science?
A scientist learns the history of their science out of interest or because it is considered didactically useful. Chemists for example learn quite a few of the older, long disproved atomic models ...
- 4,734
6
votes
Does any library hold the archives of the Russian-American Company?
I have a copy (as yet unread) of Exploring and Mapping Alaska: the Russian American Era, 1741-1867, A. Postnikov & M. Falk, tr. L. Black, University of Alaska Press, 2015.
There are a few pages ...
- 9,062
6
votes
How, if at all, is published pseudohistory publicly addressed by scholars and academia?
Check its sources
Outside formally reviewed documents, there is no official quality control to ensure historical accuracy.
Individual books may inspire a debunking if a historian is sufficiently ...
- 421
6
votes
Accepted
Where can I find this paper by Jean Buridan?
On John Buridan's page in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, we have the citation:
Buridan, John, 1588 (actually 1518), In Metaphysicen Aristotelis Questiones argutissimae, Paris. Rpr. 1964, ...
- 76.9k
5
votes
Study of causal structures and dynamics in history?
You may find the field of "big history" relevant to your interests. David Christian's book Maps of Time is an excellent introduction. This work isn't as quantitatively oriented as what you are looking ...
- 17.8k
5
votes
Accepted
Does any library hold the archives of the Russian-American Company?
The archive of the Main Office [of the Russian-American Company] has not survived, and at present only individual groups of documents are known to have come from this archive.
-- Leonid Shur in "The ...
- 27.4k
5
votes
How can we be certain of customs in the primitive age?
The Durants' work is not history, or anthropology, or archaeology. The claims made are unknowable, in part due to bad theory and method on the part of the Durants; and, in part as the elements of the ...
- 14.6k
5
votes
How can we be certain of customs in the primitive age?
There's likely no such thing. Different societies have different ways of doing things, regardless of how relatively "primitive" they are. That's why we call them "cultures".
Take your topic of the ...
- 114k
4
votes
How do I organise my "What-if" research paper?
I would agree with Killing time. Adding to his answer I would say that a large part of historic investigation is being able to take a source, evaluate bias and weight it against your current evidence. ...
- 2,323
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible