• ShunkW@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Hey! I was really into Greek mythology in middle school. And high school. Even got a minor in college. I even have a set of Greek/Roman mythology tattoos!

    Oh wait… I am gay. Fuck.

    • Stamets@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 months ago

      You’re in good company buddy. Don’t have the tattoo but I did have one planned. How can they blame us when half the mythological Greeks are just half (at least) naked hunks?

    • EpeeGnome@lemmy.fmhy.net
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      9 months ago

      TIL I’m gay? I actually carried around a copy of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths in my backpack, and I have basically zero attraction to other men. Then again, I was over it by high school, so maybe that’s why I’m not gay.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I love that book. I still have a copy. That said, it is an incredibly sanitized version of what the Greeks actually believed because every bit of the sex is cut out and it’s basically 90% sex.

  • Caveman@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Roman history is amazing. Everybody hears of Julius Caesar and maybe Trajan and Hadrian but then pretend that nothing happened after that. Like poof, it was dead, inevitable, Franks and Caliphates are now a thing.

    Then when you realise how much Rome had to screw itself over to even get to that point while being struck by famines, massive migratory invasions, the huns while still being in a moderately good shape… That’s the good stuff. The story of the fall is a marble being chipped away slowly while telling a beautiful story until there is nothing left of the Western Roman Empire. If Rome had a favorite hobby it would be waging war on itself.

    Eastern Roman Empire was alive and kicking until the 1450’s and if you think there’s not much there then look up Justinian’s restoration. They even had horseback archers like the mongols and huns for a while that had to train for many years. Hell, even look at a map that goes back some years pre-caliphate period.

    Even as recently as 1912 there were people in the Aegean islands that identified as Roman. I wish there would be a series that would cover the history of Rome properly and not just “CaEsAr KiLlEd gAuLs aNd sExEd cLeOpAtRa” for the billionth time.

    • sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz
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      9 months ago

      I want an HBO miniseries on Scipio Africanus vs Hannibal.

      Then I want another HBO mini-series on the Flavian dynasty. The eruption of Vesuvius, the first (?) Jewish rebellion, and the questionable conquest of Brittania all happened under Titus. I would love to see a dramatic reenactment of the Romans absolutely losing their minds at how fucking cursed their empire suddenly was.

      • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        off topic.

        Look up the old BBC series ‘I, Claudius.’ Based on the Robert Graves novels, Featuring Brian Blessed as Augustus and Patrick Stewart as Sirjanus

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I, Claudius is absolutely terrific and I’ve seen it more than once, but it is incredibly historically inaccurate.

      • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        If it’s “Game of Thrones”-like intrigue the people want, a miniseries about the Severan dynasty would kick ass. Let’s see what we get in just three generations or so:

        -Year of the five emperors, with Septimius Severus coming out the victor and establishing the dynasty after a five-way civil war.

        -Two brothers, co-emperors, who can’t stand the sight of each other with their mother mediating between them, with one eventually killing the other WITH THEIR MOTHER IN THE ROOM.

        -Caracalla then gets killed while on campaign by the brother of a soldier he had executed.

        -A grandmother putting a specific grandson on the throne, then changing her mind, having him and her own daughter KILLED and replaced with another grandson & his mother.

        -The first grandson being, quite probably, the first trans emperor/ruler in ancient history, with immensely, uh, interesting consequences.

        -The “Good” grandson becoming a successful and celebrated emperor, only to be killed by his own troops after trying to buy off peace with the Germanic tribes, thereby kicking off the crisis of the 3rd century which would need several miniseries in and of itself to really tell all its tales…

        • sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz
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          9 months ago

          This is so true, the Severan dynasty is so much more intriguing politically than the Julio-Claudians.

          Personally though, I’m sick of historical/fantasy political thrillers. I just want a sort of black comedy set around the Year of the Four Emperors and the Flavians. It’s actually absurd just HOW MUCH goes wrong for Rome, with a lot of it just due to natural phenomena or things out of their control.

      • Caveman@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        British history podcast is very nice for the history of Brittania. It covers the whole period and is very accurate.

    • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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      9 months ago

      Like poof, it was dead

      I wish, so much of history (and especially people talking about history) is just recounting Greco-Roman history or trying to embody it. Even American nationalism feels like Roman nationalism v4.3.

      I’m rather sick of everyone and everything trying to connect themselves to something roman or greek, then stopping dead. Everyone and their dog has a latin motto, multiple fields are all but written in latin, and that pantheon is the first and often only stop for mythology names; you’d think Caligula was still out there banging his worries away.

      Anyway, y’all should look up my boy Gilgamesh.

    • bort@feddit.de
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      9 months ago

      I wish there would be a series that would cover the history of Rome properly

      you mean like Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome?

    • Rolando@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Even during “the Decline and Fall” there was plenty going on that was just people living their lives – it’s not like every place was being pillaged and everyone was being slaughtered all at once. And there were plenty of centuries before then full of fascinating history with lessons for today, and that’s just the stuff that we know about.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    9 months ago

    “I like Viking stuff”

    Might be just into Norse mythology. Might be into Nazis.

    • UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      I loved all the Viking / Norse shit when I was younger. Comics, games, etc, I couldn’t get enough.

      But then I started talking to people who followed that aesthetic and was disappointed by exactly 100% of them.

      Still love the games. Lost Vikings, Rune, GoW, etc

    • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I like this band named Heilung, which has some Viking-ish costumes and lore etc. (although more like Conan’s Hyperborea). They have to put a disclaimer at the start of their videos which is basically a politer version of “Nazi punks fuck off”.

      • barsoap@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        disclaimer at the start of their videos which is basically a politer version of “Nazi punks fuck off”.

        The whole scene has been doing that since what 70 years or so now. After the war some groups of people started seriously wondering about what civilisation is, how it’s very much not rooted in whether or not you wear a suit or not, and started looking for roots. The old Germanic roots were at that time actually out of the question: The Nazis had appropriated and bent them to their brand of insanity, but Karl May existed and with the US there were actual Indians in Germany in the form of GIs. Cultural exchange happened, pretty much unnoticed by the general population, and with that came knowledge: Tradition is not the praying to the ashes, but the passing of the fire, that exchange helped people find genuine embers, small as they were. Once people started to flame the symbols of those embers Nazis came along and wanted to be part of it and promptly were told to fuck off – not just out of a general antifascist stance but also because Nazis, in particular, were the ones who poisoned the little that was left after Christianisation. Then time moved on and a lot happened. Baudrillard, for one. Bear with me:

        You might’ve noticed that Heilung doesn’t have Germanic symbology front and left and centre – it’s not about the, or any, symbology. They’re not Asatru or something, their costumes and historical references go back further than the Norse (pretty much as far as they can). About the closest you get is song titles written in runic alphabet and some consistent choices in graphic design looking quite like Nordic carvings – but none of that is religious stuff as-such.

        From what I can tell Nazis don’t actually try to get a piece of that particular pie: It’s not to their liking. They like their symbols, their flags to rally around, their fetishes, to distract themselves from realising what they’re actually doing. The “Nazi punks fuck off” part is there for people stumbling across it, vibing with it, and wondering whether it’s kosher. Yes, yes it very much is. They’re plain and simply modern shamans who happen to be history nerds, and western esotericism has been post-structural for long enough now that the lack of symbolic system shouldn’t really surprise, c.f. e.g. Chaos Magick. They write and perform rituals to speak to parts of the psyche that what we call civilisation may have forgotten, but certainly not the genome. That, you know, one great being that was always there.

    • Frostbeard@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Or Norwegian were this is legitimate part of our culture and thought in primary school.

      I am ex Norwegian Army, and we still use Norse imagery on unit insignias. And half sport tons of Norse ink.

  • denast@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    “I’m really into WW2 artifact collecting!”

    Only collects things associated with Wehrmacht / SS

    Yeaaaah, buddy, collector you are!

    • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      What’s crazy is I have a Jewish coworker just like this… and I’m not sure what to make of it. But he voted for trump, so now I’m like… “Ehhhh. I don’t think I like this guy”.

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I used to date a girl that had basically grown up in the antique shop that her father owned. It was amazing - we would watch Antiques Roadshow and she knew what everything was and almost exactly what the experts would say it was worth every time. After her father died she ended up with a ton of stuff in her house, and one day I went over there to find she had put up an “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!” poster from the 1930s featuring good ol’ Adolf above the fireplace. She wasn’t pro-Hitler or anything, just thought it was an interesting bit of history. I was like “babe, c’mon, we want to keep our friends”.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        The opposite is kind of weird too. My late Jewish father was absolutely obsessed with the Holocaust. He had virtually every book ever written on the subject. There was a room in the house my mother and I called (much to his chagrin) ‘The Holocaust Room’ because of the vast number of books on the Holocaust there were inside it.

        He did have sort of a reason for his obsession. He was in London from age 7 on through the war because his parents didn’t evacuate him and he spend the years 1939-1945 waiting for the Nazis to invade and put him in a concentration camp. So it made sense to me, but it was still going pretty overboard.

        He saw Shoah more than once. It’s 566 minutes long.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah_(film)

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      My last boss was like this.

      I loved listening to him when he brought up how his family was in WW2, his stories about his dad was a pilot in WW2 fighting Japan, and all the various battles in Europe.

      Then after a few years of trust, he showed me all of the “nazi memorabilia”. On one end, I’m a color person, so he must have really trusted me. On the other, wtf. Kinda feigned interest after that and moved jobs after a year.

  • yamanii@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    “The sengoku period is so interesting”: this person is a massive weeb. I would know.

    • Rolando@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      WW1 was discussed a fair amount last decade during its 100-year anniversary. There was also the recent film 1917 which was well-received.

  • JayObey711@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    As a history student I was really afraid that I would meet a ton of right wingers. But I must say the worst kind of people so far are history students that only study history to become teachers. They keep laughing at me saying that at least they have a future and that I will eventually switch sides and become a teacher too, I just don’t know it yet :(

    • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      You may have met a ton of right wingers. In hindsight, most of my high school history and civics teachers had a right wing slant to their anecdotes.

      • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yeah, it wasn’t necessarily in civics or history class for me, but I do remember a few transphobic and sometimes racist things that my teachers said or did in elementary and middle school. I remember one time all the 7th graders were gathered together and explicitly told to not use the internet for research because someone found that men could get pregnant. Mind you, they didn’t mention transmen at all but presented it in another way. I left feeling so hung up on how one would go about transplanting a uterus into a male and why they made a scandal of something I had never heard of that seemed impossible and impractical. I only had the epiphany of what that was really about a couple years ago. /tangent

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I don’t remember exactly which one said what, but I heard 1) The best thing that can ever happen to a county is to be invaded by the US because we will rebuilt their economy(only mentioned Japan though), 2) Disney fixed Times Square(yay Capitalism), 3) The real estate market only goes up(this was around 2003), 4) something something black mother with 12 kids wealthfare queen, 5) the only Unions that still do anything are teacher unions(completely unironic), 6) something something illegal immigrants.

          In contrast, I had one mention from a science teacher supporting climate change and that was only because they were directly ask by a student.

      • JayObey711@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        They have a point because I am European. Being a teacher in my area is pretty alright right now. Still, I was aware of what I was getting into and if everything goes downhill I can still work as a journalist or in an archive wich sounds waaay better than teaching history to children who really don’t care.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    “I’m really interested in the history of the great flood and how it explains how dinosaur fossils are so many layers down in the geologic column even though dinosaurs lived alongside humans only 6,000 years ago. Plus the the flood formed the Grand Canyon in only a few weeks.”

  • hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I’ve noticed that, after a relative lull, people are getting bullied for traditional reasons again. However the bullies code those reasons as deplorable, so that they can imply their targets are just assholes.

    • Stamets@lemmy.worldOP
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      9 months ago

      I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here. Are you suggesting that telling people to be wary of history buffs (after decades of examples of “history buffs” being code for wild bigot/racist) is actually just bullying people who like history? Because if so that’s a gross over exaggeration of what the post is saying. Or are you talking about the Greek mythology thing? Because the tumblr user who posted it is queer and so am I so that conclusion would also be pretty heavily flawed and wrought with heterocentric thinking.

      • hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        This post is laying the groundwork to say someone is somehow morally compromised for having certain interests. Those interests have been common interests for decades.

        Right now, there’s 100 percent a mood that people who are morally compromised deserve to be mistreated.b

        The end result of posts like these is nerds being bullied in the same way they used to before the whole anti bullying attitude started. Only this is even worse because the victims get told they are POSes who deserve it.

        The Roman one specifically applies to basically every male history nerd. Same with WW2.

          • hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            If you instantly judge someone for having extremely common innocuous interests, you’re an asshole.

            You do that, but leverage social justice rhetoric to act like you’re actually a good person for doing so.

      • Spendrill@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        I want to talk to you about the Greek mythology thing for a second: Are you now, or have you ever been a swan?

  • yokonzo@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    As someone who just really thinks its cool how an ancient civilization was able to become such a superpower with roads and infrastructure and then fall so harshly. 😢

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      It is. It’s impressive to me that the real founders of Christianity were 5 centuries behind their time. St. Paul was 5 centuries after Epicures, Aristotle, and Plato. This is really mind boggling. Imagine if someone from the Columbus voyages time traveled to modern times and within 4 centuries all of Western civilization was in flames mostly due to their actions. Over 99% of the written word of the Greeks and Romans were destroyed by the Church. Is there anything remotely comparable in history?

  • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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    9 months ago

    What about history pf philosophy? Im on episode 326 of the history of philosophy without any gaps podcast and I really enjoying it. We’re just finishing Byzantine philosophy and getting ready for the Renaissance.

  • Rosco@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    I’m interested in the subjects that I never learned in school, like Asian history or ancient Mesopotamian history. African empires seems interesting too, and I’m very curious about how the Polynesians came to be, seems wild.

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    9 months ago

    Scrolling through the comments.

    I like OP, this is my kind of person. Knowing stuff because it’s just fun and interesting to know stuff, and being willing to engage, share, and correct.

    I need more of this on the fediverse.

  • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    What about “Here’s an excerpt from a paper I wrote on how the Erfurt Latrine Disaster indirectly lead to the George W. Bush shoeing incident” ?

      • KISSmyOS@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        OK, so here’s the short version:
        Heinrich VI. who presided over the assembly of nobles in Erfurt had his belief in god’s favor shaken to its core by all the lords he invited literally drowning in shit inside a church. He then became Emperor after his predecessor Friedrich I. had drowned in a river while on a crusade, shortly before reaching Jerusalem - another proof that god wasn’t on the Holy Roman Empire’s side.
        His lack of faith, on which his own power as god-appointed Emperor was founded, was noticed by everyone around him. So the lords denied his attempt to instate a hereditary monarchy and removed themselves from his court, putting them in a position where they could deny or demand payment for following his commands.
        Driven by a deep longing to prove he was still in god’s grace, and to regain absolute power, he believed that his role on earth was to reunite the Eastern and Western church and become the prophecized “Emperor of Peace” who would bring about the end times. To this end, he started campaigning and preparing for another Crusade that would not only reconquer Jerusalem, but also the Byzantine Empire.
        His death from Malaria while besieging Messina as staging ground for his crusade put an end to those plans for now, but not to the ideas behind the crusade he had popularized.
        When the fourth crusade was launched just 5 years later, the most experienced crusading knights would have been veterans of his misguided campaign, and when it became clear that they couldn’t pay for the passage to the Holy Land, they would have been the ones to propose to conquer the Byzantine Empire instead as another valid target, just as their former Emperor had proposed. As we all know, the following sack of Constantinople destroyed the will of the church and the Christian states to unite and put any real effort into another crusade from that point on.
        The next German Emperor didn’t even participate in the Fifth crusade and delayed participation in the Sixth for so long he got excommunicated. From then on, any further crusades were called by individual kings, not the pope in the name of all Christendom.
        The Muslim rule over the middle east was secure for the coming centuries, the Byzantine Empire never recovered, and the Ottoman Empire rose into the power vacuum and eventually conquered it.

        Which leads us to Baghdad. The center of Islamic culture during its heyday and for centuries after, a shining beacon of civilization more developed than the attacking Crusader states. You have to understand what such a history does to the self-image of the inhabitants. And at the crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia, it was easy to see the region as the center of the world. Due to the aforementioned rise of the Ottoman Empire and its incorporation of today’s Iraq, the land became part of one of the greatest Empires in history.
        Until after a period of declining importance and influence, the British conquered the Ottoman Empire as well as Baghdad and drew their own borders in the sand, the US-lead league of nations sanctioned the new borders imposed on the people, and called the cobbled-together country “Iraq”, an entity with no regard for its history or former glory, and under western rule for the first time in a millennium.
        It’s a logical conclusion that Iraq would eventually unite with their neighbors and throw off the British rule, but also that without historic precedent (due to being part of a Muslim empire for so long), they wouldn’t have the experience to establish a stable democracy. One coup d’etat followed another, which always pushes the most ruthless leaders to power. And that was the Baath party. They promised freedom and a new, pan-Arabic union that would end western rule, which the pan-Islamic unions of the past had failed at.
        But also within the party, the most ruthless used the chaos to rise to power, and Saddam Hussein solidified his position by first killing those Baathists that didn’t support him, then thousands of his own citizens, and then starting a war, which threatened US influence in the region enough to eventually topple him - in a war that created so much anger and suffering that one man, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, saw no other way to vent his anger than to throw his shoes at the leader of the western world.