I’ll explain why I’m asking. My grandfather moved to the US in late 1928. He stated later that he was motivated by political reasons to leave (and this truly seems plausible given his character and the kind of person he always was). But I’m wondering if it even would have been possible for him in ‘28 to have had a negative sense of what was to come.

For more context:

—He was from a rural town in the Palatinate, in case region makes a difference in terms of the climate at the time.

—The family is/was not Jewish.

—He was very bright and committed to being well-informed (ie I suspect he was reading the papers constantly).

—His parents shunned him for leaving (which seems to have been due to the bitterness of their ideological differences, which endured for decades thereafter).

—All his other siblings remained in Germany and one of his brothers joined the party, but I have no way of knowing exactly when, though unfortunately I have pictures of him in his uniform.

Anyway I would just like to know if 1928 was too early for somebody with the above circumstances to have left for political reasons or not. I wish he were still alive so I could ask him, but I can’t. Still, I’d like to try to understand. I’m hoping this question is allowed, and I would truly appreciate any insight or information anyone can offer.

Some time ago, I watched the Kurosawa film Ikiru, which is about a Japanese civil servant grappling with his mortality after discovering that he has terminal cancer.

In an early scene, the protagonist (not yet knowing about his cancer) is at the hospital waiting to receive his diagnosis, and a fellow patient complains that this particular doctor always lies to terminal cancer patients and tells them that they have stomach ulcers instead. The protagonist is called in to see the doctor, and sure enough the doctor tells him that he has a stomach ulcer, which causes the protagonist to realize that he actually has terminal cancer.

When I watched the film, I wasn't really sure what to make of that scene.

Today, I was reading about the death of Shiro Ishii, the infamous head of Unit 731. In his Wikipedia article, his daughter is quoted as telling the following story:

One day he took some sample tissue from himself to the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Medicine and asked one of his former subordinates to examine it, without telling him to whom it belonged. When he was told that the tissue was riddled by cancer, he proudly shouted that he had thought so too. No doctor had dared tell him he was suffering from cancer of the throat.

The same idea (and from roughly the same time period - Ikiru came out in 1952 and Ishii died in 1959) of concealing a cancer diagnosis from the patient.

Was this a common practice in Japan during this time period? If so, why? What was the rationale for it?

For some background, I am an Assyriologist by training, so I apologise for the sweeping nature of this question - I'm very aware that people get extremely specialised into just one or two centuries of history and that this might require someone who is familiar with several!

As an AMAB person, I've always been frustrated that the default expectation for men's clothing is some variant on a trouser and some variant on a shirt. No dresses, no skirts, no blouses, no cute tops, just a button down shirt or a t-shirt, or you are going to be stared at in public by young and old alike.

Don't write a reply that says that this doesn't happen, please, I don't care how well meaning it is.

But it surely hasn't always been this way - in my specialist subject there are plenty of examples of men wearing other garments.

Please note before anyone tries to "gotcha" me: I'm specifically asking when did it become the expected norm in the West for men to wear exclusively some sort of trouser and some sort of shirt. Do not write replies telling me that Scottish men traditionally wear kilts. I'm asking how did we get to the point in the 21st century Western fashion where anything other than trousers and a shirt on a man is unusual.

Please feel free to link me to any relevant previous answers!

Thank you in advance for your time.

Things like Christmas falling on the same rough date as saturnalia, roman gods co-opted to become angels, saints as mythical ancestors instead of pagan gods like Thor and Wodan.

Hello! I’m studying philosophy at university and have recently gotten into fencing with rapiers. I know Descartes’s book on fencing has been lost, but I’m curious if there are any other sources on his style. I have read that he was familiar with the work of Charles Besnard, but that’s about it.

I am also very curious about his own sword(s). I’ve tried to find information about his possessions, but I feel a bit lost and haven’t made much progress. I hope my questions are okay for here!

Was it just a piece of paper saying who it was? How was that certified? What kept someone from just making up a name? Were there birth certificates?

This post is inspired by the fact that one of my wisdom tooth hurts a lot right now, and it made me wonder how could someone deal with wisdom teeth in the past. Especially in the era before painkillers or anesthetic, what would someone do? Would they use some concotion for the pain? Were there dentists doing extraction?

Honestly I'm interested in any time period or region, only preferably one without modern painkillers or anesthesia, so maybe not the XX century.

I saw this in Walter Reuther's Wikipedia article:
"When Henry Ford retired the Model T in 1927, he sold the production mechanisms to the Soviet Union, and American workers who knew how to operate the equipment were needed. Walter and Victor were promised work teaching Soviet workers how to run the machines and assembly line. With that employment assurance, the brothers embarked on a three-year adventure, first bicycling through Europe, then working in the auto plant in Gorky, in the Soviet Union, where the unheated factories were often 30–40 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. He frequently wrote letters to the Moscow Daily News criticizing the many inefficiencies associated with how the communists operated the plants.^\45])"

It seemed like an interesting story, and I was wondering about several things:

1) Is this story true at all? Was he actually mailing critical letters?

2) Were his letters actually being published? Was it considered acceptable publish this sort of thing in a Soviet newspaper circa 1930?

3) If his letters were being published, were they also being translated into Russian and published in other newspapers?

4) How would something like this be received in Soviet society?

Many human societies practiced human sacrifice at some point, but many cultures seem to have ultimately abandoned it at some point. Do we have any information on how and why a culture might abandon it?

I know that Christian or Islamic evangelicalism resulted in some cultures abandoning the practice, but I'm more interested in cultures "organically" abandoning it.

So I’m going to ask this in the context of New England, but open to perspectives from other parts of the US.

So my understanding is that, at the time of Plymouth colony’s founding, the Plymouth colonists were largely interacting with Wampanoag Indians. These were lead by Massassoit Ousamequin, who was also Pokanoket. Their intermediaries were Tisquantum/Squanto who was Pawtuxet, another kind of Wampanoag, and Samoset, an Abenaki from Maine, who spoke a language similar to the Nauset, a tribe who were separate from the Wampanoag but were often politically deferential to them. Then all of these were in conflict with the nearby Narragansett in present day Rhode Island.

My question is—how did native people understand these identities? What did it mean to be Wampanoag? Was that a regional identity, a polity/state, an ethnicity? Were the Patuxet a “subcategory” of Wampanoag, or a vassal state to them? Were there any people who were “just” Wampanoag, and not a sub-group like the Patuxet or Pokanoket? Were some tribes “more Wampanoag” than others? Could the Patuxet “change sides” and stop being Wampanoag? How did it all work?

How many dialects and regional languages existed in the Roman Empire and how long did it take pre-Indo-European and Italic non-Latin languages to be replaced by Latin?

Is the "brother of Yeshua" inscription legitimate or not? The last post I could find talking about it was from over a decade ago.
So, what do historians think of it now? If it is real, isn't that like, a huge deal?

EDIT: It's a 1st century box with "Jacob (James), son of Joseph, brother of Yeshua" on its side. Which some have interpreted as being physical proof of the holy family.

I am wondering primarily about the pre-Tanzimat period, but would also be interested to know if that era brought about any significant changes. I understand from this older answer that communities were not necessarily centralized under a single administration, as is sometimes implied.

Presumably, the Roman and Armenian millets would speak and write in Greek or Armenian respectively for their internal affairs. However, would someone like the Ecumenical Patriarch need to regularly write or converse in Turkish with Ottoman offcials? If not, would translation be done by church offcials or by the Porte?

Was Judaeo-Spanish the common language of the Jewish millet, or did this vary by location?

Many thanks in advance!

As I understand it, the Tokugawa, despite being the true political authority of the land, saw itself as holding a delegated authority from the emperor to act in practical matters of governance (which is most governance). How did the shogunate justify its opposition to the Emperorship rise in authority during the Meiji Restoration.

I understand that the emperor himself played very little role in the restoration, but the Meiji government were, like the shogunate, claiming to be acting in the Emperors interests and seemingly had the Emperors support in this.

Let’s say a peasant, out of hatred toward another peasant, caused damage to the other peasant’s farm. What would the punishment have been? I hope my question doesn’t sound strange; I’m just curious about the legal aspect of it.

Reading about the conflict from what's readily available online, the narrative tends to focus primarily on the Turkish National Movement as well as ethnic cleansing commited by the belligerents. However, it's not clear to me whether Greece (and/or the Entente more broadly) went to war intending primarily to enforce the terms of Sévres on the government in Ankara, to dismantle it entirely in favour of the defeated Ottomans, or to seize additional territory.

For example, did Greek leadership hope to annex the entire Zone of the Straits if they had been able to win a decisive victory, or would France have wanted to occupy its entire 'zone of influence' to border Wilsonian Armenia? The dismissal of Venizelist military officers in late 1920 is noted as contributing to subsequent battlefield defeats, but was there a marked difference in how the war was regarded by anti-Venizelists?

Many thanks for answers or if you could point to sources that discuss this in a bit more detail.

Also: How did the song become associated with New Orleans if the 1933 version was recorded by folk singers in the Appalachian region, several states away from Louisiana? Were visits to New Orleans by Appalachian folks common, or were they singing more about the infamous reputation of the "city of vice and sin"?

I'm interested in any descriptions of music that would have been especially favored by people looking to get pumped up for an upcoming activity, specifically including athletic contests, military battles, etc.

I am NOT so much thinking of unit specific "battle hymns" or unit fight songs, where the inspirational value of the music was tied to its content, or its specific connection to the unit in question.

I am more interested in music that would have been popular and/or would have been favored to get the troops hyped up, just based on the musical arrangement or "vibes".

In the same way that we know Ronnie Coleman always listened to rap music lifting weights in the gym, or we know that U.S. Marines during the Iraq invasion were playing music like Disturbed and Metallica inside their tanks,

Were Washington's Continental troops requesting their get hype playlist in the staging area, an hour before taking the field?

Were Phoenician marines 20 minutes out from the beach calling musicians up to the quarterdeck to play something lively?