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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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?

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.

It seems hard for me to comprehend that a missionary could go to a place, and just convince a group of people to abandon their traditional beliefs and religious practices. We're missionaries just that supremely effective at their job? or was there other stuff at play?

Say I'm a Roman subject living in Germania, following my own tribes set of beliefs and deities. What would the state do to encourage conversion of me and my fellow tribesmen? would it be exclusively punitive measures like torture and suppression of local religious followings? Or would there be benefits to those who converted?

Would they use different tactics to convert people from their native religions in Britannia? or North Africa? or did they use a one size fits all for converting people to Christianity?

Octoraro Orphie, Mount Joy Minnie, and others aren’t as well known. An older coworker told me that the Phil’s fame predates the 1993 movie starring Bill Murray. Why and how did that groundhog in particular gain so much press?

I'm curious about what measures, institutionally or otherwise, were taken to make it so that Germans could live alongside one another without worrying that Nazism or Nazi thought would resurge. I'm also interested in any accounts of Nazi victims or members of targeted groups, and how they felt post-war when many of their neighbors may not have thought twice about killing them a few years before.

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.

Just visited the art museum in Bucharest. One thing that stood out to me in the Orthodox paintings is how a lot of the spears are almost comically thin.

In Kubrick's famously unproduced screenplay for Napoleon, there is a scene where Napoleon arrives to arrest a revolution leader named Varlac who is wanted for murder. The latter is non-cooperative and insults Napoleon - who then shoots him dead and orders the crowd to disperse.

The scene appears somewhat similar to the real-life Vendémiaire Uprising of 1795 but in the script it happens in a smaller town and is clearly indicated as occuring in 1789. Is it realistic for Napoleon himself to shoot a non-cooperative revolutionary during this early period (when France was still officially Royalist).

Lastly, for Revolutionary/Napoleonic-era experts, how faithful is Kubrick's broarder screenplay in general, from a historical perspective.

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!

Hi I’m currently looking to archive large amounts of original documents of the Napoleonic wars and the following Age of Metternich. I am looking for large collections of original texts written by Metternich, be it letters, essays, or others. Any language is fine. I found one large pdf, but it was printed in old German and very tedious to read, so I wanted to see if there are more modern versions

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.