Quotulatiousness

July 1, 2019

Very Early Mars Pistol #4

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 17 Apr 2015

Sold for $46,000.

Until the midle of the 20th century, the most powerful automatic pistol made was Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax’s Mars pistol. With the .45 caliber version approaching the energy of a .45 Winchester Magnum, it was quite the accomplishment for a gun designed initially in 1898! Well, RIA has a very early example of the Mars – serial number 4 – coming up for sale. This gun (chambered for the .360 Mars cartridge) has a number of features that differ from the more “typical” Mars pistols (all 80 or so that were ultimately made). These include a very long barrel, a tangent-style rear sight, and a 3-lug bolt instead of the standard 4-lug type. A very cool pistol to have a look at!

June 30, 2019

Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Treaty

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael Filozof on the hundred-year anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles and the American President who had so much to do with the casting of the treaty:

Eight months after committing troops to war, Wilson cobbled together a list of progressive war aims in his Fourteen Points. They demanded an end to secret deals (i.e., the Treaty of London and the Sykes-Picot Agreement); “ethnic self-determination” for Poland and Austro-Hungarian territories that would soon become Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia; “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,” and finally, a collective security organization, the League of Nations, which would be formed by a “covenant” (using the biblical term for a pact with God Himself) to maintain peace and territorial security of all nations.

Woodrow Wilson, 1919
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Upon reading the Fourteen Points, French prime minister George “the Tiger” Clemenceau is said to have sniggered, “God gave us only ten.”

In 1919, Wilson became the first sitting president to venture overseas, practically abandoning his domestic duties and spending six months at the Paris Peace Conference personally negotiating the Treaty of Versailles. He was joined by “The Inquiry,” a group of over 100 academics and professors who surely knew how to fix the world and usher in Wilson’s global utopia.

Initially, Wilson and his Fourteen Points were wildly popular. He was greeted as if he were a latter-day rock star in France and Italy. Delegations from ethnic groups around the world came to Paris to beg Wilson for “self-determination.” (His French and British counterparts, Clemenceau and David Lloyd George, sneered that Wilson “thought he was Jesus Christ.”)

But they were soon to be disappointed. Wilson’s aims were so grandiose that they could not possibly be fulfilled. Italians, who had switched sides in the war to gain territory on the Dalmatian coast, became disillusioned when Wilson refused to accede to Italian demands. The negotiators did create Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, but all three were destined to become communist dictatorships, and the latter two failed to outlast the twentieth century.

Worst of all was Wilson’s hypocrisy when it came to dealing with Germany. Wilson had railed against German imperialism, but turned a blind eye to the biggest empire at the Conference: Great Britain. A pro-British bigot, Wilson was contemptuous of Irish demands for self-determination and had been disgusted by the Easter Rising of 1916. Wilson granted Britain and France Ottoman territories they had secretly agreed to divvy up in the Sykes-Picot agreement — not as “colonies,” but under the guise of League of Nations “mandates.” He willingly partitioned Germany into two non-contiguous territories, separated by the Polish Corridor, and placed millions of ethnic Germans in the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia and the Free City of Danzig.

On a slightly lighter note, Al Stewart’s “A League of Notions” does a wonderful job of capturing the machinations at Versailles:

Hitler ❤️ Paris – WW2 – 044 – June 29 1940

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Italy, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 29 Jun 2019

Hitler goes to Paris, while Stalin occupies more territory… but something is on Stalin’s mind. News of the sudden success of the Wehrmacht in the West is not what he had hoped for. Churchill also looks to the West for help while a German invasion of the British Isles seems imminent. Far East the Japanese are on the advance.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_t…
Join our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/D6D2aYN.
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Map animations: Eastory

Colorisations by Norman Stewart and Julius Jääskeläinen https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Eastory’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
2 days ago
We have been experimenting with some “catchier” titles in the last couple of weeks. At the moment, YouTube mainly looks at two things when deciding how often to recommend our videos. The first is average watch time. We’re doing great there. The second is called “click through rate”, which means the percentage of recommended videos getting clicked. That puts a huge emphasis on titles and thumbnails. So, we’ve been doing this and it has been quite successful in terms of viewer and subscriber growth. This has caused a great rise of comments as well, and as we still want to read everything and answer most of you, we have asked some community members to help us out. We are using software allowing to review, assign and share comments. This does mean that not all comments are made by someone you know (although Spartacus and Joram are still commenting a lot). We might later decide to have everyone commenting use their own name or a pseudonym, so you know who did the commenting. Just wanted to share that.

Cheers,
Joram

June 29, 2019

Estonia and Latvia Fight For Independence – Russian Civil War Baltic Front I THE GREAT WAR June 1919

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 28 Jun 2019

GAME OF TRENCHES: The first 20 players to register at: http://bit.ly/GameOfTrenches will receive in-game rewards worth a total of 10 600 Gold

Estonia and Latvia had declared their independence from Russia in the late 1918 chaos. Over the spring of 1919 both countries’ new governments needed to defend that independence not only against the Russian Bolsheviks: there was also a violent internal struggle about the future of these countries. The Baltic Germans didn’t want to give up their social status and the even the anti-Bolshevik Russians considered the Baltics as part of the Russian Empire.

» SUPPORT THE CHANNEL
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thegreatwar
Merchandise: https://shop.spreadshirt.de/thegreatwar/

» SOURCES
Bennett, Geoffrey Martin. Cowan’s War. The Story of British Naval Operations in the Baltic, 1918-1920 (London: Collins, 1964)

Chester, Geoff. “When the Capital of Latvia was a Ship Called Saratov” (Deep Baltic, 2016). https://deepbaltic.com/2016/06/13/whe…

Fletcher, William A. “The British Navy In the Baltic, 1918-1920. Its Contribution to the Independence of the Baltic Nations”. Journal of Baltic Studies, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 1976, p. 134-144.

Gerwarth, Robert. The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (Penguin, 2017).

Hatlie, Mark R. Riga at War 1914-1919. War and Wartime Experience in a Multi-ethnic Metropolis (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2014). https://digital.herder-institut.de/pu…

Jēkabsons, Ēriks: “Cēsis, Battle of”, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Ibid. “The Latvian War of Independence 1918-1920 and the United States”. In: Fleishman L., Weiner A. (ed). War, Revolution, and Governance: The Baltic Countries in the Twentieth Century (Boston, 2018).

Kirby, David. The Baltic World 1772–1993. Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. (London: Longman, 1995).

Raun, Toivo U. Estonia and the Estonians, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Hoover, 2002).

Sammartino, Annemarie H. The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922 (Cornell, 2014).

Sullivan, Charles L. “The 1919 German Campaign in the Baltic. The Final Phase.” In The Baltic States in Peace and War, 1917–1945, ed. V. Stanley Vardys and Romuald J. Misiunas, 31-42. (University Park: Penn State, 1978).

Tammela, Mari-Leen. Saaremaa Uprising. Estonica (Estonian Institute, 2012). http://www.estonica.org/en/Saaremaa_U…

Uustalu, Evald. The History of Estonian People (London: Boreas, 1952).

Von Rauch, Georg. The Baltic States. The Years of Independence 1917-1940 (London: Hurst, 1995).

Smele, Jonathan. The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916-1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (Oxford University Press: 2016)

Palmer, Alan. Northern Shores: A History of the Baltic Sea and Its Peoples (John Murray, 2005)

»CREDITS
Presented by: Jesse Alexander
Written by: Jesse Alexander
Director: Toni Steller & Florian Wittig
Director of Photography: Toni Steller
Sound: Toni Steller
Editing: Toni Steller
Mixing, Mastering & Sound Design: http://above-zero.com
Motion Design: Christian Graef – GRAEFX
Maps: Daniel Kogosov (https://www.patreon.com/Zalezsky)
Research by: Jesse Alexander
Fact checking: Florian Wittig

Channel Design: Alexander Clark
Original Logo: David van Stephold

A Mediakraft Networks Original Channel

Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2019

Determining who the “original” inhabitants were

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Australia, Europe, History, Pacific, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s become quite common in some countries to pay formal lip service to the “original” peoples who inhabited the land before being dispossessed of that territory by various Europeans. Actually determining who were the first human inhabitants, however, is much more fraught … you can’t exactly expiate some residual guilt of your culture by acknowledging the previous culture if the previous culture in their turn dispossessed an even earlier group, can you? How far down the rabbit hole do you need to go? Tim Worstall explains:

Detail from a 1688 map of western New France by Vincenzo Coronelli that locates “Lac Taronto” at Lake Simcoe.
City of Toronto Culture Division/Library and Archives Canada via the National Post

… within all that the accurate answer to “Whose land are we on?” is the land of the latest bunch of murderous bastards who killed all the previous inhabitants. Perhaps moderated to say the peeps who killed all the previous men then dated the remaining womenfolk. Because once we’ve got past that nullius stage that’s the way it has been. The Moriori are in short supply these days on the Chatham Islands given that the Maori decided to eat them.

The original inhabitants of the British Isles, the Beaker Folk, were entirely replaced by the next lot, the Iron Age Celts and similar. The Angles displaced to the west the Romano Celts in their turn, detailed DNA studies showing rather more of the female side of the R-C’s bred into the new population than the male. The Franks weren’t indigenous to France, the Allemani to Germany, the Turks to Turkey.

In fact, we’ve between little and no proof that the varied Amerinds were the original inhabitants of the lands where the White Europeans found then from 1492 onwards. In the case of both the Incas and Aztecs as political powers, proof they weren’t. And horses and Plains Indians simply weren’t a thing until the Eurasian horse was introduced post 1492.

Basically, this is indeed true. Anywhere is the possession of simply the last group of people to have slaughtered, or outbred, the previous group.

An interesting observation – if we apply the oft stated Americas example elsewhere, that Whitey stole it all and should give it back, then the Bantu should be back in Nigeria and Central Africa returned to the Pygmies, Southern to the Khoi San. We don’t say that and for the life of me I can’t work out why.

Ancient Rome in 20 minutes

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Arzamas
Published on 30 May 2017

Caesar, The Colosseum, Republic, Nero, geese, plebeians, legions – everything that you once knew, but forgot, in a crash course video by Arzamas.

Narrated by Brian Cox.

“Ancient Rome in 20 minutes” is a Russian version of a Russian video by Arzamas.

June 28, 2019

“Gott Mit Uns” – The Thirty Years War – Sabaton History 021 [Official]

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sabaton History
Published on 27 Jun 2019

The Sabaton Song “Gott Mit Uns” is about the Battle of Breitenfeld, fought between the Swedish under command of King Gustavus Adolphus and the Holy Roman Empire under Count Tilly. This battle was hugely influential in the Thirty Years War and the religious wars that were plaguing Europe in the 17th century.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to Carolus Rex (where “Gott Mit Uns” is featured):
CD: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexStore
Spotify: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexSpotify
Apple Music: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexAppleMusic
iTunes: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexiTunes
Amazon: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexAmz
Google Play: http://bit.ly/CarolusRexGooglePlay

Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Maps by: Eastory
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski

Eastory YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEly…
Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Sources:
– National museum
– National Portrait Gallery

An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.

© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2019 – all rights reserved.

Lesser-known details of the France 1940 Campaign

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The_Chieftain
Premiered on 22 Jun 2019

Your friendly history lesson, with a little bit of Op-Ed thrown in, some parts of the 1940 campaign in France of which many folks weren’t aware.
Why was Guderian relieved of command?
Why might condoms have changed the course of the war?
What’s a Niwi?
Was the French failure one of doctrine, or execution?
You get the idea.

Patreon link here:
https://www.patreon.com/The_Chieftain

World War Two channel, if you haven’t already found it… : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1A…

What does £1 trillion buy you?

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not much, apparently:

Tory MPs have been told by CCHQ to share this graphic boasting about their new commitment to make the UK carbon-neutral by 2050. No other major country has committed to the pledge although Theresa May is planning a desperate attempt at the G20 to talk other leaders into it. The fact that developed countries going ‘net zero’ simply means they’ll outsource all their emissions to the developing world instead seems to be completely lost on her…

The pledge will cost the UK at least £1 trillion, much of which will be borne by individuals and businesses rather than the exchequer, we don’t know the true cost as May hasn’t even done a proper Treasury analysis. Eco-fanatics love to talk about the burden this generation is placing on children and grandchildren. For a fleeting PR stunt Tory MPs are being told to boast about piling on mountains of economic harm for future generations by a leader who won’t be in office to deal with the consequences…

This is exactly the sort of virtue signalling that Justin Trudeau indulges in … I imagine he’s quite miffed that Theresa May got there first.

Panzerbüchse 39 German Anti-Tank Rifle

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 7 Apr 2015

Sold for $37,375.

Most countries still had anti-tank rifles in their military inventory at the beginning of WWII – the Solothurn S18-100, the Lahti L39, the Boys AT Rifle, the PTRD and PTRS, and so on. For Germany, this role was fulfilled by the Panzerbüchse 39, a single-shot falling block rifle firing a high velocity 8mm AP cartridge. It was nominally effective in the opening campaigns of the war, but was quickly rendered obsolete as Allied armor improved. German planners has a huge number (25,000) of these on hand for the invasion of Russia, where they expected Russian armor to be vulnerable to them – which was not the case. Most were subsequently converted into Granatbüchse 39 AT grenade launchers, which were then used until the end of the war.

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

June 26, 2019

Summer Stupidity: LONDON (City Review!)

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Food, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published on 25 Jun 2019

For more summer fun, we’re heading to London! Let us know what other fun side-content you’d like to see. We’ll see you with more long-form content on Friday!

PATREON: https://www.Patreon.com/OSP

OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProduction…
Find us on Twitter https://www.Twitter.com/OSPYouTube
Find us on Reddit https://www.Reddit.com/r/OSP/

June 25, 2019

Plan Z, or How Not to Prepare for The Battle of the Atlantic

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Historigraph
Published on 24 Jun 2019

Join us in #WarThunder for free using this link and get a premium tank or aircraft and three days of premium time as a bonus: https://gjn.link/Historigraph/190624

If you enjoyed this video and want to see more made, consider supporting my efforts on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/historigraph

To chat history, join my discord: https://discord.gg/vAFTK2D

#WarThunder #PlanZ #Historigraph

Sources:

Jonathan Dimbleby, The Battle of the Atlantic

Jak P. Mallmann Showell, German Navy Handbook 1939-45

Empire of the Deep, Ben Wilson

Philips Payson O’Brien, How the War was Won

Corelli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely

The Encyclopedia of Sea Warfare

Music:
Crypto, Incompetech https://incompetech.com

Stormfront, Incompetech https://incompetech.com

Mark Steyn on Boris Johnson’s very non-traditional lifestyle

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

With Boris Johnson’s domestic affairs back in the news after a noisy tiff with his current partner, Mark Steyn briefly discusses the less-than-traditional lifestyle of Mr. Johnson:

Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs at an informal meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council on 15 February 2018.
Photo by Velislav Nikolov via Wikimedia Commons.

The rather tired bon mot on Britain’s soi-disant next prime minister is that the only thing that can stop Boris Johnson is Boris Johnson. He was super-disciplined during the last month and managed to stick to his Trappist vows all the way through to the final round of the first stage of voting on Thursday. Then he celebrated his triumph by spilling red wine on his “partner”‘s sofa which led to her allegedly yelling “Get off me!” and then “Get out of my flat!” and him refusing to. “Partner” is New Britspeak for what old-school Tories would have called a “mistress”. Boris was recently kicked out by his second wife, and so moved in with the new bird, who happens to live in Camberwell, which is full of fashionable Labour Party types surrounding him on all sides with glasses held to the walls. And the cellphone has made the citizenry not only able but eager to play volunteer Stasi.

The standard gag on raffish Tories — you wouldn’t trust him with your wife or your wallet — doesn’t begin to do justice to Boris. He genuinely cannot answer the question how many children he has — or how many he’s sired whose mothers were persuaded to ensure junior never made it out of the maternity ward. Like Trump with the pussy-grabbing tape, his supporters are said to have priced all this in — that, if a flawed vessel is the only way to reach the policy destination, so be it. But Boris in a certain sense is taking Trump to the next level — that, as the bounds of acceptable politics have become ever narrower and more constrained, only a certain size of personality can bust through them, and thus in such a world a low moral character is not faute de mieux but vital and necessary — at least if you’re serious about screwing over the EU commissars. If, per America’s founders, a republic presupposes virtue; whatever it is we are now presupposes a lack of it.

Boris was not an early jumper on the Trump train. On political trends, he is something of a latecomer and an opportunist: Nigel Farage truly wants out of the EU; Boris — who knows? In British terms, Trumpesque policy populism lies with Nigel and the Brexit Party. Boris is offering personality populism, and banking that enough voters will figure the policy comes with it.

Mars Automatic Pistols

Filed under: Britain, History, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 1 Mar 2015

Sold for:
$74,750 (.45 cal example)
$40,250 (8.5mm example)

The Mars pistol was designed by Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax in England in 1898, and only 81 were produced by the time manufacturing ended in 1907. These pistols were chambered for several different cartridges, all of them tremendously powerful for the day (and really not equaled by another self-loading pistol until the Automag).

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

Theme music by Dylan Benson – http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

I first heard of these pistols in one of L. Neil Smith’s first SF novels, and they sounded so over-the-top that I assumed he’d made them up for the story. This is a fascinating piece of hand artillery that I’d be terrified to have pointed at me (but I’d probably be nearly as terrified to shoot).

June 24, 2019

History of England – Agincourt – Extra History – #5

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 22 Jun 2019

Henry V was formidable and ruthless. Leading an army struck by dysentery, he pressed on to claim more large swaths of France, forming the irresistible Anglo Burgundian alliance.

Henry V is a serious contender for the most impressive man ever to rule England. On his death, a chronicler wrote: “He did not leave his like upon earth among Christian kings or princes.” His only fault was to die young… well, that, and being so horrifically ruthless and cold, that another historian wrote of Henry that he was “conclusive proof that a man may be a hero and yet a monster.”

Thanks again to David Crowther for writing AND narrating this series! https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/pod…
Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress