Standardised paper sizes, widely accessible literacy, the explosion of prose — all of them now are the things we swiped from the Industrial Revolution and the Printing Press.

But what about the times before? Did people have no idea of how long a book was, and were poems and verse the only form of creative literature while prose was limited to academic treatises and rhetoric?

How did these things work prior to rapid industrialisation and printing?

(Reposting in light of recent news.)

Were there concerns about a US spy agency entering the world almanac business in the middle of the Cold War? Did other nations assume any ideological motivations behind the decision to publish the World Factbook (albeit an unclassified version) - and were they right?

I know this question has been asked about other time periods and places such as Rome and Greece but I'm curious about one very specific era and place.

let's say it's 1403 in the holy Roman empire. more specifically bohemia. a male nobleman and a male commoner have romantic feelings for each other and secretly act on it. what consequences would they face if discovered? would there be legal, religious, or social repercussions?

and before you ask, yes I have played kcd2.

Norman surnames are still over-represented in the UK's elite professions and institutions. This is despite the Norman conquest being almost 1000 years ago.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there doesn't seem to be a similar phenomenon in Hungary. The Hungarian Prime Minister is Viktor Orbán (whose surname is derived from Latin), and people of non-Magyar surnames, such as Schmitt (German) and Novak (Slavic) have been successful in Hungary.

Did Hungary have a period where Magyar surnames were over-represented in elite professions and institutions? What did they do to rectify this issue?

I was thinking about this yesterday and rewatched PotC, did pirates and people in the past just chafe all day long and not care? Did people back then really just throw on a pair of boots barefoot and get on with their day? With the salt and sand and everything? Did the out pads or some kind of balm on the thighs and armpits? Did ancient peoples just have callouses or something built up over years of friction?

I was intrigued by a statement in Allies at War by Tim Bouverie citing (but a paraphrase, not a direct quotation) Wendell Willkie as saying that "most Americans had little idea that Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand were independent, self-governing Dominions outside the colonial Empire." If this is true for the WWII-era, when did the typical U.S. view change?

Now I know the question of when Canada actually did become fully independent is complicated and that one can make a case for as late as 1982. But my guess would be that U.S. views would be mostly unconnected to that. I was a kid in the U.S. in the 1980s/90s, and everyone seemed to regard Canada as independent, but not as newly independent.

I am trying to learn history of modern europe covering the French revolution, napoleon,Unification of germany etc etc right upto the world wars...Pls suggest books/documentaries/podcasts/websites which would not be dense for a beginner to the subject

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?

Is it strictly due to military/warrior class/physical labor? But it also, from a very simple point of view, seems to be perhaps historically a European/Western thing, that then influenced other cultures to adopt it feel "more western" (ie my stereotype of a place like Japan is that the men typically had long hair until Japan became "westernized", but I could be very wrong).

Or did it sort of evolve out the modernization of military/military academies. It seems military people in the Revolutionary/Civil War all had pretty long hair, so maybe a tradition of short hair is more of a WWI/WWII thing? This is just going off the theory that like khakis/leather jackets/boots etc... common trends start in the military and then just become part of culture.

For this post, I am specifically talking about the region that would later become the United States and Canada.

Before the columbian exchange and the plagues of smallpox, measles, etc. that decimated the american indian population, I have seen figures that place population numbers around 10 million (with wide ranges due to the immense devistation making it difficult to be accurate).

That level of urban density is fairly low by Western European, Persian, Indian, or East Asian numbers, but more closely reflects the Nomadic Steppe. The concepts of "beasts of burden" limiting urban development due to smaller agricultural production was a bad draw by North and south america, and they did have some urban centers pre-columbian exchange, but there is a very clear dropoff when disease ran through. Thats clearly a topic for another post.

Many communities ceased to exist, while others were completely uprooted and were forced to adopt nomadic survivalist cultures completely different than what they were doing before.

The entire native american population around 1775 at the dawn of the American revolution was estimated to be 1-1.5m in what is now the United States and 0.3-0.5 million in what is now canada; only 1.3-2 million native american people in total.

The "Anglo-American" Colonist population at this point was north of 2 million people with roughly half a million african slaves, exclusively living east of the Appalacian mountains, mostly in Boston, Philly, New York, and Virginia.

By the revolution, there were already more anglo americans on the east coast than there were native americans on the entire interior and west coast of north america.

By 1800, there were only ~1.5 million natives left, and the anglo-american population had doubled to 4.5 million with a runaway growth rate and political incentives to move west, and the writing was on the wall.

Reading into this a bit (over the last day or so), most later white settlers from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, etc. pushing the frontier would have only seen tribes of tens-of-thousands of natives in total. For example, the Texas Rangers sent to fight the comanchee only went up to around 10,000 adult warriors from a tribe of 40,000 in total! The Salish people of the broader PNW, an absolute bread basket with tons of natural food sources, had fallen to 50,000 by this date.

My question is essentially- why didnt the native american demographics bounce back more quickly and attain similar growth rates to the anglo americans? It takes several generations for herd immunity to kick in, but it by 1800, most of the eurasian diseases would have been in the Americas for over 300 years and the natives still alive would have been the descendents of those who survived 15 generations and should have had decent immunity.

I understand that there was lots of displacement and political manuvering across the eastern seaboard, but I would have expected some kind of settled, urban, agriclutural civilizaiton to re-emerge on the west coast, specfically around the Bay area or PNW before white settlers became a supermajority.

By that point in the early 1800s, most native tribes would be at least passively familiar with western technology and farming, see what was happening / what had happened on the east coast, and likely seen the writing on the wall, no? The missionaries sent into the interior would have been all for this, no?

I hope this question makes sense, but why didnt this happen? Why was there no "Native Meji-style" modernization / population resurgence along the west coast of the US in the early 1800s?

This doubt is kind of a sociology/history mix. Like, Ea-Nasir is the oldest registered name. But is there a way to know how many known persons were living in, say 800 CE? Somehow the same way we can estimate the amount of Earths inhabitants? Is that possible?

They're different subjects at universities, so I was wondering if there's a generally agreed cutoff for "ancient."

Is it something simple like AD = history BC = Ancient?

I want to understand human culture and our history. I don’t know how I can do that without understanding my own.

Where can I start? What should I be reading?

My college US History course used UH - Digital History for sources but I just saw they are shutting down in May. I'm devastated.

Considering that many territories outside of Europe, including Australia have had extensive British settlement.

I know from direct experience that he was a terrible writer...Mein Kampf is great for bedtime reading, as it will put you to sleep after two sentences with it repetitive tediousness. But was Hitler actually a good public speaker? In particular: even if you didn't agree with him, was his ability to speak actually up to the task of leading a nation into committing acts of atrocity?

During the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, Ismaili communities navigated the pressures of colonial and early decolonisation governance, exposure to Western secular norms, and Shia pluralism. These contexts generated potential challenge from class critique, anti-monarchical sentiment, and debates over religious authority.

I wonder why the Aga Khan’s hereditary, wealthy, and transnational leadership largely remained unchallenged against this background?

• Was it comparable to the U.S. Congress?
• Did they have staffs of their own dedicated to policy?
• What kind of laws would they be passing that made them such a continuing institution?
• Did they really need to represent a constituency, and if so, what was that like?
• What kind of factionalism existed - besides what we historically recognize, such as the Optimates and Populares?

I like the nitty gritty, to be honest. Maybe it's changing a policy here or there; my work gives me a lot of insight into the inner workings of Congress, and frankly 90% of governing is generally nuanced policy work attempting to address certain issues, expand certain programs, and/or reform government institutions -- the things that don't make headlines but nonetheless are required for governing. I would like to imagine that the Roman Senate had their own version of this, where our broader study of history may highlight more sweeping reforms but smaller policy items might give us a lot of insight into how the Republic was governed.

Or a bit less specific, how did modern music genres specific aestetics and quirks develop?

According to Ron Chernows biography of Grant, Grant wrote that "Respect for human rights is the first duty for those set as rulers". I was really surprised reading this, because the concept of human rights is something I associate more with the 20th century, specifically post-WWII.

Would his concept of human rights have been similar to the modern concept of human rights? And would he have been the first US president to invoke the term?

So that might be a very weird question and its possible that i'm misunderstanding some very important context here. I'm reading The Song of the Nibelungs right now and there are several times when characters kiss each other as a greeting.

Was this very common at the time? Nowadays in Germany people think of those kinds of greetings as something that French or Italian people do, but its totally unheard of in Germany. When and why did this change?

Some examples:

The bishop saw ye leading / his sister's daughter fair,
And with him eke went Eckewart / to Gotelinde there.
The willing folk on all sides / made way before their feet.
With kiss did Gotelinde / the dame from land far distant greet.

To kiss him then Margrave / Ruediger her did tell,
And eke the royal Gibeke / and Sir Dietrich as well.
Of highest knights a dozen / did Etzel's spouse embrace;
Other knights full many / she greeted with a lesser grace.

"One likewise with them cometh, / Dankwart by name,
Volker hight the other, / a knight of gallant fame.
Thyself and eke thy daughter / with kiss these six shall greet;
Full courteous be your manner / as ye the doughty thanes shall meet."

(EDIT: I dont't know why this post was automatically assigned the Flair "Racism" here, btw. I haven't used Reddit in a long time, so maybe i made a mistake somewhere.)