Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2020 August 27

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Humanities desk
< August 26 << Jul | August | Sep >> August 28 >
Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.


August 27[edit]

Historical evidence of Apostles[edit]

I have seen that all of the Apostles have their burial locations agreed upon by the Catholic Church. Is this just based on Christian tradition, or have scholarly inquiries shown evidence for their existence and specific travels after the burial of Jesus? —Naddruf (talk ~ contribs) 21:35, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There's a related Quora query (say that 3 times, real fast) that references the following 481 page Doctoral thesis:
  • McDowell, Sean (31 March 2015). "A Historical Evaluation of the Evidence for the Death of the Apostles as Martyrs for Their Faith". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
107.15.157.44 (talk) 22:42, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Where Are the 12 Apostles Now? also has some information. It seems that the answer to your question is "both". Some are only ever going to be based on tradition, while others can be proved to match the time and place that is consistent with historical records. Alansplodge (talk) 14:39, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

home front casualties during WWII[edit]

How many riveters and welders died on the job in the United States home front during World War II?2604:2000:1281:4B3:8159:3817:9710:CB6B (talk) 22:06, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting question. I'm not sure there's going to be a clear answer from statistical data. Especially broken down by job description like that. OSHA didn't come into existence until the 70s, meaning that everything previously was tracked—if at all—at the state or perhaps local level. And the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries project didn't start until the 90s. If your question about riveters and welders is specific to people doing defense production work, there might be War Production Board statistics, maybe; their records are held by the National Archives and are probably not digitized. Otherwise you might find ballparked numbers extrapolated from other statistics of the period from historians. 199.66.69.67 (talk) 23:45, 27 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Some extrapolation may be possible as well by looking at reports from the U.S. Maritime Commission's safety program launched in 1943, dealing with occupational safety in shipyards. There is a Bureau of Labor Statistics report for 1943 and 1944 dealing with fatal accidents at shipyards as well; during those two years there were an estimated 700 work-related fatalities at shipyards compared to 173,000 nonfatal "disabling injuries" (disabling here likely refers to both temporary as well as permanent disability, that is, an injury that resulted in the employee being unable to perform his or her job duties while healing). Of course, shipyards were only one area of defense production and I would suspect that, for welders and riveters, they were not any safer than any other workplace that employed them. 199.66.69.67 (talk) 02:01, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Workers in the home front were speedloading a shipment of shells in Los Angeles with crappy safety. One fell on the dock but didn't explode. At least one person ran when they saw that. Later that day the ship and maybe other ammo exploded in a mini-Hiroshima. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 01:39, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
It was likely another artillery shell was dropped (anyone who saw immediate cause was in too many pieces to tell) and this time the fuse or other part of the boomy filling did go off and cause a sympathetic detonation chain reaction of thousands of tons of woefully unsocially-distanced chemical explosives. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 13:22, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps referring to the Port Chicago disaster in 1944 which killed 320: "the cause of the explosion could not be determined [by the Board of Inquiry], but implied that a mistake made by the enlisted men in the handling of the ordnance was most likely at root". Alansplodge (talk) 14:04, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yes that was it. And it was the northern Californian population center and the loaders were not civilians, my bad. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:54, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Comparing large explosions to Hiroshima by analogy is a common practice. I certainly wasn’t confused. 199.66.69.67 (talk) 16:56, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Beirut explosion had 10 pct of Hiroshima atomic bomb’s explosive power. Alansplodge (talk) 17:08, 28 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
[Note: the above discussion now reads a little confusedly because one participant has subsequently removed their two posts. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.122.2.158 (talk) 03:14, 29 August 2020 (UTC)][reply]
[Courtesy link.] --184.146.89.141 (talk) 06:14, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]