During the crisis of the 3rd century, there was a year (238 CE) in which there were six different emperors:

• Maximinius Thrax: a legionary general who was elected by the Praetorian Guard after Emperor Severus Alexander was assassinated by his own army. Thrax was very unpopular in the Senate (in part because he was executing a lot of Senators for plotting against him), and then faced a revolt in North Africa which led the Senate to name someone else as Emperor. In the process of crushing these revolts, Thrax led a very poorly-organized siege of Aquileia, and when he ran out of food and sickness spread because of tainted water, his men assassinated him, his son, and his lieutenants and sent their heads on pikes to Rome.
• Gordian I and Gordian II. When the North African revolt started, the revolutionaries proclaimed the governor Gordian to be their emperor. Because he was 80 at the time, he made his son (also called Gordian) co-emperor. The Senate in Rome recognized both father and son, but unfortunately the governor of Numidia hated the Gordians, invaded the province of North Africa, and defeated the Gordians at Carthage. Gordian II was killed in the fighting and Gordian I hanged himself when he heard of his son’s death. It wasn’t all bad for them, they ended up declared gods by the Senate after their deaths.
• Pupienus and Balbinus. After the death of the Gordians, the Senate needed a new emperor to lead them, because Maximinus was barreling down on Rome with his army (before he got stopped at Aquileia and it all went bad). So they elected two senior senators to be co-emperors. This was not popular with the people of Rome, who rioted. While Pupienus was sent out with an army to fight Maximinus, who died without Pupienus doing anything, Balbinus was supposed to keep order in Rome and failed miserably. Riots led to fires, the two emperors couldn’t get along and literally divded the imperial palace between them like in the Odd Couple, and the two became incredibly paranoid about the other, so wouldn’t let the army come into the city to restore order lest it be used by one against the other. Finally, the Praetorian Guard, who hadn’t liked the Senatorial revolt against Thrax, seized the two of them mid-argument, tortured them, and then hacked them to death in the Praetorian bath house (presumably because it had drains to deal with the blood).
• Gordian III. Remember how I said the people of Rome didn’t like Pupienus and Balbinus? Well, for some reason, they prefered the thirteen-year-old Gordian III, the grandson of Gordian I. To placate the people of Rome, Pupienus and Balbinus named Gordian to the rank of Caesar, making him the heir-apparent to their wise old caretakers. After the assassination of those two, Gordian III became sole emperor, but with the Senate running the government and buying off the Praetorians by marrying Gordian to the daughter of the head of the Praetorian Guard. He made it to 244 before dying in disputed circumstances, and also was declared a god by the Senate, picking up the hat trick for the Gordian family.

And thus passed the Year of the Six Emperors. If you’d like to know more, I highly recommend Mike Duncan’s HIstory of Rome podcast. 

Good question!

I think it would depend on how Renly approached Ned, and given how he approached Ned in OTL, the odds are that Renly would botch it.

See, the thing is that coming up to Ned and saying “I don’t like the Lannisters, I have a scheme to replace them with the Tyrells” is the worst possible pitch. Ned doesn’t like this kind of politics at all and would probably refuse to participate.

However, if Renly came up to Ned and told him about the incest and that the Lannisters have to be removed before they kill Robert and seize the throne, I think Ned would go along with that. He would probably be somewhat disillusioned afterwards when Robert married Margaery and the Tyrells replaced the Lannisters and the whole game kept going as before, but in the moment he would respond to a call to save the realm. 

1. According to GRRM, there is precedent for a king releasing someone from their vows to the Night’s Watch.
2. The anti-Bolton faction in the North needs a Stark to rally around in order to create the legal and political conditions for survival. Ned Stark’s oldest son with a direwolf to prove his Starkness, a proven warrior who’s defended the North from the wildlings, with an army and a king backing his claim? That’s not a half bad pitch.
3. Stannis doesn’t think he’s a pretender, but the king by right. As to whether his decrees will be accepted, it depends on who recognizes him as king. 

I’ll get into this more when I get to ADWD, but it was definitely planned in advance. If you look at how Jon’s assassination went down, you don’t get that kind of Julius Caesar-style coordinated assault without prior planning, and no one knew about Jon’s planned march to Winterfell before he opened his mouth.

I believe that Marsh began planning his coup the moment Jon agreed to let the wildlings through the Wall, and I think his plan for survival was and is a coup, with either Marsh or one of his allies declaring themselves the 999th Lord Commander. 

In the moment, the issue was less whether they would help overthrow Joffrey and more whether they would literally stab Ned’s men in the back.

However, I would say that if you look at the history of revolutions and coups, the officer corps is hugely important in deciding the decisions of the rank-and-file, in no small part because the rank-and-file spend a lot of time being trained to obey orders from their officer corps. 

So would all of the Gold Cloaks have eagerly joined in Ned’s coup? Probably not. But enough of them would have to give Ned the edge he needed vs. Cersei’s hundred men at arms, and the rest would likely have remained inactive without Slynt’s leadership to give them direction. 

helix-eagle-hourglass-nebula:

publiusmaximus:

racefortheironthrone:

Ah, ranked choice voting. I know it’s something that a lot election wonks like; it’s got certain advantages over first-past-the-post, but also certain drawbacks. (Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a harsh mistress.)

It’s used in a bunch of places, so it’s not intrinsically unworkable. When it comes to alternatives to first-past-the-post, I tend to prefer Mixed-Member Proportional Representation, but RCV seems fine. 

The biggest drawback to both ranked choice voting and mixed member proportional representation (I heart them both, but lean towards RCV) is that the electorate has to have a solid opinion on multiple candidates in multiple races or the whole thing just… doesn’t work. 

There’s “active and engaged citizens”, but then there’s “I have strong opinions on Federal Senator, Federal House member, State Senators, State Legislator, State Governor, Federal President, City Council member, Coroner*, School Board, Judge…”

That’s 11 offices, each of which might have 6 or 7 candidates to choose between. I’ve never heard of the phrase “democratic fatigue” to describe the inability to know or care who’s running for what, but I’d it’s a huge impediment to RCV once you’re past the level of 2 or 3 offices. 

*Yes, I’ve had to vote for coroner before. Because back in the robin hood days the coroner was a crown office and a check on the power of the sheriff- which was a local office. And somehow that tradition made it all the way out to California in the 2000s. 

In Australia at least the parties hand out how to vote pamphlets so if you only really care about one party winning you can just vote the order they tell you most benefits them.

American political parties also hand out slate cards, albeit usually in a FPTP context. I will say that in a lot of cases, the ballots aren’t designed to make it easy for people to do that. 

@publiusmaximus, the solution to that problem is party lists, which as a good social democrat I’m all for. It’s also the reason why non-partisan elections are a terrible idea in practice, because especially in those low information races like judges or water board or coroner, it’s removing an important piece of information that people can use to guide their judgements. 

Good question!

I think it depended on the circumstances: a cash-poor but land-rich family would probably prefer the latter, so they could use the money to make their estate profitable or just restore their balance books; a cash-rich family would probably prefer the former, because cash is usually a one-time injection fo capital whereas land is an asset that pays dividends every year.

I imagine it also depended on a number of other factors: where was the land in question located, and would it be practical to manage that estate from one’s pre-existing holdings? Did the bride’s family have land to spare, or was it more important to keep the fiefdom together for the sake of the heir? Which family was more important? Which one wanted the marriage more? 

So I think the first step is that you need to narrow down your topic. The cultural history of people of color is an overwhelmingly massive topic, so to make the project manageable, I’d suggest trying to get more specific in your focus:

• Time Period: is there a particular period of cultural history that interests you? This could be as narrow as a decade (the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 20s?), or entire centuries (the 20th century? the 19th? earlier?), etc. 
• Location/Region: since people of color are all over the globe, you need to think about whether there’s a particular place you want to focus in on: is it a particular city? a particular country? a particular region? (Regional studies are very big right now.) 
• Subject Matter: one thing that might help you focus in is what kind of cultural history you’re interested in writing about: is there a particular medium that you want to look at? Are you interested in popular culture or niche avant garde art? Where are the centers of cultural production located, since that’s probably going to be a good place to start?
• People: are there particular historical figures you want to study, whether they’re cultural producers or critics or what have you? Where are their historical records – whether we’re talking about diaries and papers or oral histories or published works – collected?

In terms of writing a history book…unlike many other disciplines, history tends to focus more on monographs rather than articles, so your dissertation tends to be a longer exploration of a given topic rather than a bunch of articles slapped together, which lends itself better into being turned into a book. It also helps that because we’re writing about history, chronology lends a certain “A led to B and then B led to C” structure to our work. 

To give an example of how I wrote my book, I knew that the programs I was studying started mostly in the 30s and then there was another program in the 70s that was the last, and then I needed to fill in what happened in-between. My book isn’t strictly chronological – my first three chapters are all about the 30s, then there’s one chapter on the 40s, one chapter on the 60s, and one chapter on the 70s – but there’s a broad arc that helped me to figure out how to chop up the whole project into individual chapters that I could work on one-at-a-time.

In terms of research trips, it really depends on where you are versus where your sources are. As an American historian living in America, my trips were mostly to the National Archives and then to the various Presidential Libraries, which was more affordable (although perhaps less exciting) than if I’d been studying the history of Medieval Europe or pre-independence Congo or the Vietnam War, which would involve extended stays in the countries where the relevant archives are located. And yeah, you really have to go there to do the necessary archival work to produce a manuscript that people are going to consider worth publishing. 

Fairly common. 

Depended on how propertied the family was. Peasants as well as nobility tried to improve the productivity of their land through strategic marriages. It was somewhat less common, in part because landholding tended to be less continguous so it wasn’t always possible to make that kind of advantageous marriage.

But the less property there is to inherit, the less that matters. Not that families wouldn’t be concerned about making sure that their kids made “appropriate” matches that would ensure the economic viability of the new household, but there was more flexibility.