Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 June 15

= June 15 =

Thermopylae
Why didn't the Eurypontid king of Sparta fought alongside Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.77.216.51 (talk) 01:29, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * You may be able to find out more at Battle of Thermopylae. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:43, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * See Spartan Constitution. By that time Sparta had passed a law requiring one king to always stay home. Basemetal  02:17, 15 June 2018 (UTC)

Synthesis in articles
Take this content dispute to the article talk page - Arch dude 16:14, 18 June 2018.
 * x2 Both the article and the talk page are protected.


 * Link to latest discussion Special:Permalink/845717829

At Souliotes a claim that the Italian word Albanese means (among other things) "Albanian soldier" was removed as synthesis because it was sourced to a military, rather than a general dictionary. At Islamic calendar there is a far more blatant synthesis which has defied removal for nine years despite having no source whatsoever. Its basis is that a picture coincidentally appears at a point in Al-Biruni's text where he discusses Muhammad's prohibition of intercalation and must be, therefore, a picture of that event. When it is pointed out that Muhammad made the ruling while seated on a camel far from the nearest mosque the supporters of the description just roll their eyes and say nothing. I say "coincidentally" because the next picture, two folios along, is "Isaiah sees the Messiah accompanied by the prophet Muhammad", but Isaiah is not mentioned in the book. Can we get consensus to remove this description once and for all? 80.47.0.15 (talk) 15:31, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * This is the Humanities reference desk. discussions of article content should go to the article's talk page, and if consensus cannot be achieved, shou8ld follow the dispute resolution procedures. See WP:DISPUTE. Note that "synthesis" is often brought into these discussions in various inappropriate ways, so you have my sympathy. See WP:SYNTH, WP:NOTSYNTH, and the many related essays. -Arch dude (talk) 17:05, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I support Arch dude's statement: what reference do you need? If you want to resolve a dispute, that is not going to be done at the reference desk. --Lgriot (talk) 14:42, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

The article's talk page is not protected and has never been protected as far as I can tell from the logs. If I am wrong, please provide a link to the log. In any case the humanities reference desk is not the forum for any stage of the dispute resolution process, so even of you cannot edit the talk page, you still need to go elsewhere. See WP:DISPUTE. Further attempts to use this page inappropriately will cause someone, probably me, to recommend that you be blocked. This has nothing to do with the validity of your arguments: I have no opinion on the subject. If you want your arguments to be considered objectively, you must take them to the correct forum. -Arch dude (talk) 21:27, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
 * The IPs in this thread were the usual User:Vote (X) for Change socks. Removed some of their stereotypical rants. Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:38, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Teaching history in young countries millenia from now
How would history teachers and professors, and textbooks in young countries like the United States teach a history school class or a college/university course without missing any details 1000 years from now or 5000 years from now? Let me use the U.S as an example because I grew up and live there. How will things like the Civil War, the Great Depression,m, 9/11, etc. be taught millennia from now? Will some details or events not be taught anymore to cram up everything in 1 textbook, class, or course due to time and number of events that have taken place? Can some light into this be shed in how American history was taught 100 years ago or is it still too early and few of years to tell?

On the same line, once a country gains independence, how many years does it usually for textbooks to be written and for school classes and college courses to be made about the full history of that country? Willminator (talk) 16:09, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * As it says at the top of the page, we don't predict or speculate here. In this case we would need to make predictions about the nature of civilization and humanity 1000 years hence. Your question assumes that civilization would teach history approximately as it does today (teachers, professors, textbooks...) which is extremely unlikely. See technological singularity as one of hundreds of alternatives. -Arch dude (talk) 16:59, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * You necessarily have to "miss details" in order to cover 5,000 years worth of history. Consider World War II, where there's a ton of material. Even today, how would you cover every detail of the war in a conventional history class? The answer is that you wouldn't. You would have to summarize, and the more years that pass, the more you would have to summarize, to hold the class down to a couple of semesters. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:17, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * To address your last point, in the case of Lithuania which became independent from the USSR in 1990, the first history textbooks were produced within a very short time, as the pre-independence books were heavily dominated by Soviet ideology. Lithuanian historians attended various seminars and courses at Western European universities before writing the next generation of textbooks which conformed to modern educational theories and about 50 history textbooks have been produced in Lithuania since 1990. See Contemporary History Textbooks in Lithuania: The Case of Innovations (pdf download). Alansplodge (talk) 17:26, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * We are not supposed to make predictions here, but I very much doubt whether any American history will be taught at all in 5000 years (or any British or European history). Such organisations will probably be totally forgotten except possibly for specialist research.   Dbfirs  19:02, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I mean, yeah, looking back 5000 years ago, famous cultures included the Egyptians, the Indus Valley Civilization, the Sumerians, the Minoans, the (Shang and Xia dynasties, and the beginnings of the Trojans. The Egyptians are mentioned in what is currently the most widespread religious text (and Egyptology was a huge craze during the Victorian era), while the Trojans are mentioned in a rather popular legend that gets the occasional movie or miniseries.  If I met someone offline who had even heard of the others, I would not regard their knowledge of history as "average" by any means.  Then there's the nationalist focus that most nations' high school history courses have, and the simplification of complex issues to make things more testable.  During the late second millennium, a region called "Murica" occupied a middle strip of modern Norama on Sol IV (at that time Sol III).  Murica discovered electric and nuclear power, developed space flight, and began a centuries-long but ultimately successful peasant rebellion in 1776.  This rebellion resulted in the most popular model of government until humanity's extinction several centuries later -- anarcho-totalitarian communo-capitalism.  Our current system of government was created in response to the flaws of anarcho-totalitarian communo-capitalism, which had not only caused humanity's extinction but had also denied political rights to dolphins.  Ian.thomson (talk) 21:12, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
 * And the first major battle of that rebellion was 1775. Pfft, 8th millennium dolphin history.. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:18, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Nah... all of knowledge of Earth’s history will be forgotten during the dark age that will sweep the solar system after fall of the Martian Empire. Blueboar (talk) 02:41, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
 * The dark age may already be creeping up on us; "...one in six youngsters said they thought Auschwitz was a Second World War theme park".  Alansplodge (talk) 09:56, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Add to that, the number of Holocaust deniers. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:38, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

You're probably best off turning to science fiction for explorations of this topic, since any "non-fictional" predictive attempts will probably be as far off-base as Albert Speer's designs of buildings for ruin value turned out to be. Assuming the absence of catastrophic events like civilization collapse of human extinction though, and also the non-occurrence of a technological singularity, there will be a lot more recorded materials preserved than we in the present day have from the time of (say) the ancient Sumerians. So that can possibly give a different understanding. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 22:14, 16 June 2018 (UTC)


 * TV Tropes has examples of this kind of thing in media. Future imperfect--Pacostein (talk) 10:02, 17 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Five thousand years previously, 3000 BCE, we lack adequate texts to apply the techniques of the modern understanding of the written past (History / Historiography). Currently the scholarly discipline of "History" has a lock hold over adequate accounts of the "written past," (WP:HISTRS) which is how most people perceive "history," as opposed to other disciplines regarding the natural past or physical remains of cultural beings.  As far as the dolphins go, Posadas was right, drop the bomb now. Fifelfoo (talk) 11:23, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Have you read The Histories by Heroditus? I guess not - I suppose that fate awaits our current histories. Perhaps they will even disappear like many of the histories which disappeared with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Or perhaps they will just seem strange like the histories of China, much of which was also burnt. Dmcq (talk) 15:20, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

U.S. Regions - Is the U.S. Census Bureau's map definitive?
Hello, I have used the U.S. Census Bureau's map of the U.S. Regions as a guideline in my work doing market research because it makes sense that their map would be the best one to use to find what the U.S. government considers to be the correct regional borders. However, while Washington DC is listed as part of the South-Atlantic region in the U.S. Census Bureau map, it is listed in the Wikipedia article on Washington DC as belonging to the Mid-Atlantic region. When I clicked on the "Mid-Atlantic" link, it took me to the page on regions, where there clearly is a lot of disagreement about regional borders. I can understand why/how there might be some disagreement at the U.S. Census Bureau about regions before they make their final decision and publish their map - but once it's decided and the map is published, aren't all arguments put to rest? Thanks SouthATXEditor (talk) 22:02, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * There is no level of government between states and the federal government. The federal government lacks the constitutional authority to group states into regions in any mandatory way. Neither the federal or state governments can prevent individuals from speaking or writing about multi-state regions any way they want to. Jc3s5h (talk) 22:13, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * This might be the way it is in your country but that's not how it is in the US. Although different parts of the Census map have different levels of currency. i.e. New England is pretty much always the states northeast of New York if you're dividing by state but not even Midwesterners and Southerners agree exactly which states are those (besides their own state and usually the ones immediately adjacent) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:38, 15 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Note that Southwest Connecticut could still be considered to be not New England. It was surely more New Englandy before commuting to New York became practical but it now has a lot of New Yorkers that moved there for whatever advantage Connecticut has (I'm not making fun, state sales/property/fuel/income taxes, school spending etc. vary between states and I barely know 1 New Jersey tax rate much less anything about the further Connecticut) or just that it had the house/suburb/whatever they wanted and they didn't move for the state. Most NFL and MLB fans there root against the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox (basically the New England Red Sox) when they're playing their favorite team. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:00, 16 June 2018 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the responses, but to me they emphasize the point that there needs to be a single point of reference that everyone agrees on. There's no dispute about state borders or time zones; you can refer to a U.S. map and know exactly where the boundaries are between states and where the various time zones are. The same should be true for regions. We should not be in a situation where a bunch of people with various views on whether Virginia is or is not a Southern state are having a battle on Wikipedia -- changing it back and forth from South Atlantic to Mid-Atlantic (or more broadly, from South to Northeast). I just did a little more research, and the General Services Administration (GSA) has different designations on their map of regional borders than the Census Bureau. Why do two federally-funded agencies produce U.S. regions maps with conflicting data? Maddening. -- I suppose the answer to the question is that if you are using regional designations in your work, you need to pick whichever map makes sense to you and note that as your standard (similar to designating an editing style, like AP) so others referring to your research know which states you a referring to when you designate a region, such as "the South." - Cheers! SouthATXEditor (talk) 16:06, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Don't even bother with the GSA's regions, they're really, really bad. North Dakota doesn't even have Rocky Mountains and South Dakota is flat except for a small spot (Black Hills) in the southwest corner which is surrounded by vast plains. At least they got the Great Lakes and New England regions right. Their Heartland region's very, very Heartland (especially the non-Missourian ones) but some will say it's too small. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:39, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
 * We don't NEED Federally mandated regions. The entire concept is just a matter of convenience. For example, most people don't consider Florida to be part of "the South" because it doesn't fit their definition. It causes no harm. No taxes or laws are currently based on regions. So, if you want to make up your own region, it is a free country. 2600:1004:B126:1672:91F1:9E3F:F63A:4842 (talk) 23:20, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Digression: Florida as a whole, particularly urban Southern Florida, is not usually considered part of the South, but it's my impression that the Florida Panhandle is, and some of the swampy inland parts further south might also be. --Trovatore (talk) 19:06, 19 June 2018 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid there is no such thing as definitive U.S. regions. The Census Bureau regions were made specifically for collecting and reporting out Census Bureau data, they may or may not be appropriate for other uses, but they certainly weren't intended as anything other than a way to organize the Census' own internal operations. If they're convenient for you go ahead and use them, but other people are certainly going to use other regions, depending on what their own needs are.   Kmusser (talk) 17:45, 19 June 2018 (UTC)