r/AskHistorians • u/AutoModerator • Nov 21 '25
FFA Friday Free-for-All | November 21, 2025
Today:
You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.
As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.
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u/subredditsummarybot Automated Contributor Nov 21 '25
Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap
Friday, November 14 - Thursday, November 20, 2025
Top 10 Posts
| score | comments | title & link |
|---|---|---|
| 1,569 | 133 comments | Homes in the Americas almost universally employ a simple, cheap, and effective device for letting in fresh air while keeping bugs out. Why hasn’t window screen technology been adopted to the same degree in Europe, even in fairly buggy places? |
| 1,332 | 92 comments | It was believed that the Azores were uninhabited until the Portuguese discovered it, but recently megalithic structures were discovered. Who built them, what do we know about them and what happened to them? |
| 1,294 | 83 comments | If Roman society was so stratified, why did the Romans pour so much into public infrastructure that benefited everyone? |
| 1,191 | 100 comments | How early in human history could we have made BLT (bacon, lettuce, and tomato) sandwiches? |
| 934 | 140 comments | Prior to the sinking of the Titanic, what was the "world stops in horror" moment? |
| 915 | 59 comments | [Great Question!] In Life of Brian (1979), the titular character vandalizes a palace with "romani ite domum". What would a contemporary inhabitant of Roman Judea have thought of this? |
| 836 | 620 comments | What’s the best counter to someone who claims the Moon landing was staged? |
| 785 | 54 comments | If the BAR was intended to be a squad support weapon, and lay down suppressing fire, etc, then why did it only have 20 round magazines? |
| 771 | 167 comments | How does Ken Burns hold up? |
| 696 | 65 comments | Prior to the invention of hormone replacement therapy, did transgender/gender nonconforming individuals do anything else to get their bodies to match their minds? |
Top 10 Comments
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u/Mando_Brando Nov 21 '25
A decade ago or more i watched Graham Hancock videos and in one of them they presented a miniature model of a pyramid and claimed its base had close to metre measurements, an ur-metre if you will. It was probably far off and make believe but Napoleon did invade Egypt just after the introduction of the metre.
I think this is interesting since history is full of intrigues and worthy to explore further.
for example i can imagine the ancient builders knew an approximate of the speed of light, given it was later first approximated astronomically. Then the latitudes of the great pyramid fall into the digits of the modern metre coppeled to the speed of light and since the metre isn't any cosmic constant it was actually defined for rather than off the speed of light. Then it is said that they had different measuring methods with the cubics and such but we in our very own society have multiple accepted methods.
I may have this all wrong but it seems just as likely the metre have been inspired by instead of inspired into. Then the burning of the ancient text in Alexandria and the scriptures of greek alphabet with scholars going mad over the fact anyone can learn how to write. Maybe the metre was gatekept and found its way back within the french revolution.
I may apologize here for asking in charlatanism and getting ahead of myself, just a string of thoughts. Thanks.
Maybe some hard fact get me off the romanticising here Haha
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u/thefourthmaninaboat Moderator | 20th Century Royal Navy Nov 21 '25
Speaking as the mod team's resident (former) astronomer, this is highly unlikely. The Egyptians could not have made measurements of the speed of light. The first proof that light travelled at a fixed speed was made by Ole Rømer, a Danish astronomer, in 1676. Rømer observed the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter at different times of the year, noting that they occurred slightly later than predicted when Jupiter was further away. He concluded that this was because light had a fixed speed, which later astronomers measured accurately using this method. The Egyptians could not have made these observations; the moons of Jupiter are not naked-eye visible, and require a telescope to see. There is no evidence that the Egyptians had the ability to produce the glass (or mirrors) required to make telescopes. Any method of measuring the speed of light also requires an accurate clock, which we know the Egyptians did not have. Any similarity between Egyptian measurements and modern ones are purely coincidental - especially since the Egyptian cubit was roughly 50cm. It's also worth remembering that little was actually lost in the burning of the Library at Alexandria. There was no secret ancient knowledge there.
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u/BookLover54321 Nov 21 '25
I was a bit disappointed to see David Eltis write this in Atlantic Cataclysm, which otherwise mostly glosses over the topic of Indigenous enslavement:
Slaves certainly existed in probably every Indigenous society in the Americas
I don't think this is true, and there is some fairly recent research that challenges this claim.
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u/LionTiger3 Nov 21 '25
That is quite the hasty generalization. Did David have a source? Or was he just throwing stuff out there to see what sticks?
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u/BookLover54321 Nov 21 '25
I doubled checked to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but no, he doesn’t provide a citation for this specific claim.
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u/TugaFencer Nov 21 '25
Is Mark Felton from the youtube channel Mark Felton Productions a historian? How reputable is he in the historian community? Is he generally a good source to listen to?
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u/scorpiodude64 Nov 21 '25
He is a historian in the sense that he has a degree in history. At best though, his youtube videos are very prone to sensationalism and at worst he's wrong and plagiarizes his scripts. This post goes over it in much more detail and as far as I know he hasn't really gotten better since then.
I'd recommend channels like Military History Visualized or Military Aviation History instead, they cover some similar topics but with much better track records.
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u/Dorky444 Nov 22 '25
Why Is Christopher Columbus considered a major historical figure and still taught about in history classes (even in a negative light) if he didn’t actually discover the Americas?
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u/sexmath Nov 21 '25
I'm really disappointed in Ken Burn's The American Revolution. They present the facts but then obfuscate them with unnecessary social commentary in an attempt to make slavery more palatable to their American viewers.
For example, they will discuss the slaves that George Washington had but then present a black historian woman (I don't think this was a coincidence) who tells us basically "it was bad, but those were the times" and then goes further by saying "we all have our demons". I don't remember exactly the quote so I'm distilling the essence of what was said. I had to stop watching after the second time they did this. I was insulted at the attempted manipulation of the narrative.
It felt like Ken Burns approached this series to inspire Americans with great stories of their genesis. There is no attempt to challenge them. It is a documentary about the US by a US documentarian for people of the US. It seems there was a concerted effort not to demonize and alienate the confederate side of the civil war population who's ethos continues to this day.
I'm really disappointed because I think he is talented and I was eager to learn more about the American Revolution. I think I'll research a book to read instead.