Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 December 30

= December 30 =

Colorado 2024 presidential primary/caucuses
2024 United States presidential election in Colorado says
 * The Colorado Republican caucuses are scheduled to be held on Super Tuesday, March 5, 2024.
 * The Colorado Republican caucuses are scheduled to be held on Super Tuesday, March 5, 2024.

The linked article about the caucuses though actually redirects to an article about a primary election.

As we know, the CO Supreme Court (held pending SCOTUS appeal) threw Trump off the primary ballot in that state. I heard some talk of the GOP converting the primary to caucuses in response, since caucuses strictly speaking don't have a ballot, I guess. Is that what happened here?

In Maine, quotes the Maine secretary of state, "I am mindful that no secretary of state has ever deprived a presidential candidate of ballot access based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment..." so my immediate thought was "what about Colorado?". It looks like CO's decision was made by a court rather than the Sec of State. Does that distinction really matter? The news articles and Wikipedia articles that I've looked at (not very thoroughly) don't say much about the history of either state's challenges. Particularly I wondered whether CO's SecState decided anything, or is just taking directions from the courts.

Disclosure: I'm viewing these proceedings with skepticism but also amusement. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:0:0:0:1927 (talk) 02:29, 30 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Maine is the only state that requires it to be done by the SOS instead of courts. — THORNFIELD HALL (Talk) 06:47, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * citation needed. --Lambiam 10:43, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Maine is the second state to bar Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution — a decision the Trump campaign said it would appeal. It is the only state where a challenge to a candidate's qualification is initially the responsibility of the secretary of state rather than a court. — THORNFIELD HALL (Talk) 10:53, 30 December 2023 (UTC)


 * FYI… Trump is apparently back on the Colorado ballot. Blueboar (talk) 13:53, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * . 2A00:23C7:9CD1:3901:814B:BC3C:8CC4:37EF (talk) 16:09, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Saying that Trump is back on the Colorado ballot is a little bit misleading since the ballots have not yet been printed. What is true is that the ruling can be appealed to federal courts. If Trump appeals to the US Supreme Court as expected, and they rule in his favor, then he will be on the printed ballots. If Trump does not file a valid appeal, or if the US Supreme Court declines the case or rules against him, he will not be on the Colorado ballot. No prediction from me about which way it will go. Cullen328 (talk) 03:13, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * ...has been appealed (by Colorado Republican Party).
 * 5%: The Court denies certiorari or the case otherwise goes away before the Supreme Court decides it.
 * 40%: The Court reverses the Colorado Supreme Court, holding that, as a matter of law, Trump isn’t disqualified under Section 3.
 * 40%: The Court vacates the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision in a manner that leaves the door open to future Section 3 litigation.
 * 15%: The Court affirms the Supreme Court of Colorado.
 * prediction from Adam Unikowsky. fiveby(zero) 04:25, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

The American revolution in American schools
It may have changed since my time in school (but I doubt it), but why is what is taught in middle/high school classes about the American revolution so incomplete, one-sided or flat out incorrect? Or did any of you fellow Americans have a relatively complete education on it?

They would have you believe the colonists were overwhelmingly patriots and the loyalists were a small minority, that George III was an absolute monarch that could have anybody hanged for any reason, and that no peace efforts like the Carlisle Commission (or the Conciliation Plan), were made. The PM, Lord North is never mentioned, nor the fact the war was effectively ended by the no-confidence motion in him in parliament.

French assistance is often mentioned, but that of the Dutch (guess you can toss in Spain and the indian tribes too) never is. The Gaspee affair is unacknowledged. The unusual and precarious situation of the Vermont Republic is ignored. The founding fathers are portrayed as best of friends, however there was of course much tension in the triangle of Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson.

I guess you could say it is because of time or curriculum constraints or the fact much of the above perhaps paints the patriots in a less-favorable light but these seem like quite glaring holes that I don't recall happening when being taught about later conflicts like the Civil War. — THORNFIELD HALL (Talk) 10:52, 30 December 2023 (UTC)


 * I should also mention the fact many think Maine was one of the 13 colonies (it was actually part of Massachusetts until 1820) — THORNFIELD HALL (Talk) 10:55, 30 December 2023 (UTC)


 * I strongly suspect that in most countries also today the school education in national history has a patriotic bend, portraying people considered founders of the nation as heroes and the nation's side in any wars as more just than the side of the enemy, glossing over the ugly parts. --Lambiam 14:30, 30 December 2023 (UTC)


 * As far as I can remember, my high-school's treatment of the Revolutionary War didn't display any obvious biases, but it was rather dumbed down and we didn't have time to explore the details. The colonists of British North America weren't all that oppressed by the standards of the late 18th-century, but they wanted recognition of the fact that they had become established settled societies with significant populations who wanted to enjoy English liberties, not sparse settlements barely hanging on to the seacoasts, or tiny Caribbean islands.  On the political level, they wanted either direct representation in the parliament of Great Britain and/or constitutionally-entrenched rights and protections which couldn't be overturned by a simple majority vote of a future parliament.   Influential British politicians basically refused to even seriously consider making such changes... -- AnonMoos 21:23, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * "Dumbed down" fits, not just for history but for most any subject. It was in college that we began to learn more of the real truth. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:10, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * including reading, riting & rithmetic, not to mention show and tell?!?! ---Sluzzelin talk  01:19, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * User:Thornfield Hall, judging by userboxen on your userpage, your generation may have experienced the worst period of American primary education in recent history. I recall a number of colleagues who had quit teaching in the US public school system during the mid-2000s, after the passage of the No Child Left Behind act.They uniformly complained how that law had wrecked their ability to teach the curriculum they thought was appropriate, forcing them instead to teach a much narrower curriculum designed to allow their district's pupils to achieve adequate scores on their state's standardised tests, so that their school's funding would not decrease. If I recall correctly this was paired simultaneously with forced integration of students of all skill levels, including children who properly should have been in assisted living facilities rather than the public school system, and the test scores of those students were assessed without accounting for their disabilities.Having said that, these former colleagues had all come from STEM fields, and it's possible the humanities were not hit as badly, and I'm sure my anecdotal memory suffers from sampling bias, since again these were all people who had made a career change to leave the US public school system due to some silly law. It's easy to extrapolate that the "Revolutionary War" curriculum was pegged to some state educational board's determination of which set of multiple choice compliant facts would contribute to allocation of funding to different districts in their state, and that the situation may have improved some since the problematic law was superseded by a thing I just learned of called the Every Student Succeeds Act, which gave more control back to the states over the interface between standardised test scores and funding apportionment.As a further bit of anecdote, an American friend of mine recently (c. 2020) told me that his daughter, then thirteen, had learned more early US history from Hamilton (musical) than from school (and that family had always specifically selected addresses within the "good" school districts in their city). Folly Mox (talk) 01:51, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

What the OP wrote is typically taught at the university level, which suggests that OP's complaint is that younger students are not taught subjects at the same level of sophistication as older students. Perhaps OP might ponder why that might be. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 21:18, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * (Responding to original poster.) I don't actually know very much about North.  Looking him up quickly in Wikipedia and following links, though, it appears that the war was effectively ended by the Patriot victory at Yorktown, which in turn forced North out of office when he was unable to come to terms that would keep the Colonies under British rule (though naval engagements continued for some time). --Trovatore (talk) 21:32, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * No. It's clear that you need to simplify what you teach in school - but simplification should not result in either falsification or white-washing. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:14, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Treatment of slaves in the Islamic Middle Ages
Is it true that slave owners in the Islamic Orient castrated their slaves in the Middle Ages? 2A02:8071:60A0:92E0:39E3:6BAD:12E7:23BB (talk) 15:33, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Eunuch would be the or one article to read. However, it doesn't seem to go into detail on how these slaves (certainly not all slaves) came to be eunuchs in the first place. --Wrongfilter (talk) 15:39, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * We have an article Kizlar agha... AnonMoos (talk) 21:27, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Castration is pretty clear about it. You buy them already cut. --jpgordon&#x1d122;&#x1d106;&#x1D110;&#x1d107; 01:57, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * To clarify, eunuch slaves were bought pre-cut, not all male slaves. Grand Vizier Ibrahim Edhem Pasha, who was brought as a slave to Constantinople while still a very young boy, fathered painter, archaeologist, museum curator and Kadıköy mayor Osman Hamdi Bey. --Lambiam 12:18, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * There are some sources at Slavery in the Ottoman Empire. 2A00:23D0:C82:9A01:844E:39:F208:D382 (talk) 15:33, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The Hideous Trade. Economic Aspects of the 'Manufacture' and Sale of Eunuchs (you can access JSTOR articles by opening a free account or via the Wikipedia Library). The upshot is that mutilating slaves was prohibited by Islamic law, the penalty being a similar mutilation on the perpetrator, but it was considered acceptable to acquire slaves mutilated by somebody else. There were also some unpleasant economic considerations for performing the operation before transporting the boy slaves to market. Alansplodge (talk) 12:01, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Chigi Zondadari vs Zondadari
What do you know about the Zondadari and the Chigi Zondadari? Are they the same family? In other words are all Zondadari a branch of the Chigi family? Or are the Zondadari and the Chigi Zondadari two different families? There are two Zondadari with their own articles on WP. One does have an alternate family name "Chigi Zondadari" according to the article, and the other does not seem to, or at least the article does not mention it. On the other hand that other guy's mother was a Chigi. Confusing. I've also checked the Italian WP and there's nothing more there. Is anyone able to find anything more? Thanks. 178.51.15.36 (talk) 21:53, 30 December 2023 (UTC)


 * There were two noble families, Chigi and Zondadari. The Chigi Zondadari branch of the Zondadari family arose when Agnese Chigi, a niece of Pope Alexander VII, married Ansano Zondadari. Their offspring advertized their dual noble descent by using the double-barreled family name "Chigi Zondadari", although some just used, or were known by, the family name "Zondadari". Marc'Antonio Zondadari was a son of Agnese and Ansano, as was de:Alessandro Zondadari, while Antonio Felice Zondadari was the son of another brother of Marc'Antonio and Alessandro, it:Antonio Felice Zondadari senior. --Lambiam 11:21, 31 December 2023 (UTC)