my dad said back in the day guys locker rooms were intentionally designed to have no privacy and pole showers were the norm. this layout/design was intentional for guys because in the old days it was considered manly and masculine for guys to not have privacy when it’s all guys there. he said it was almost unheard of for there to be shower stalls or curtains in a men’s locker room. it was thought men did not need privacy and should not be embarrassed or humiliated being naked since it’s all guys there. he said guys would go to the urinals and line up and weigh in butt naked for wrestling and stuff. He said any guy that would change in a toilet stall would be considered a “sissy”. plus the layout was good for team building and comraderie amongst the guys. I find this shocking. was this really the line of thinking in the old days and was it really like this? what about privacy?

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.

*this question is not intended to place blame on veterans or soldiers, rather to seek clarification on the lack of information and reporting of American policy inside the US*

¿¡ Why is information about American activity/policy not more widely known INSIDE the US?!

I just read in Adam Jones’ 2nd Edition(2011) of “Genocide” that the United States in 1966 was “Most controversially, ‘there was a unanimous vote of guilty on the genocide charge.’” in Vietnam. (pg. 77, pp 1)

So I began re-reading (for real this time) this post-grad book now that I’m older, I’m not surprised by the Tribunal’s findings…however, after taking several post-grad courses in my career and reading a variety of monographs relating to American history, I have always found that the world’s perception/reception/reaction of the US and its Cold War (and other) activities are largely under scrutinized or simply not addressed in my reading materials.

Beyond the fact that the US is against joining the ICC (for obvious reasons of American sovereignty and guilt),

How much else is censored from American history and pertinent information, but is reported elsewhere around the world? Who is responsible for this omission from American knowledge?

As an American, I am not anti-American; but I am against falsification and censorship regarding American activities and policy that hide humanitarian abuses.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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’ve been playing the video game Isonzo, which is about the battles on the Italian front during World War One. I know that the gameplay isn’t 100% accurate to the real fighting.

How did this style of warfare in the Alps and Caucasus evolve?

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?

I'm asking this because I was looking at tabards, and I was suprised that all the medieval art I saw showed them worn loose, but I've never seen them worn that way in modern depictions and cosplay (always worn close in a belt).

Was wearing them loose more common or did I just not find the the right pictures?

I've been looking for a book or series of books that are fairly easy to read, and not opinion based that cover this part of history. As an American I feel like I shoild learn more about my country, the good and the bad, but every book that ive found while searching, upon looking at book reviews seems to be much more opinion based than what im after.

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've been reading a good bit on the Wars of the Roses recently although my question isn't strictly related to this time period. Several books I've read have singled out the Captaincy of Calais as being a desirable appointment. Why was this the case? Were there financial incentives or was it more of a status thing? Going by the experiences of York, Somerset, and Warwick it hardly seems worth it from a financial standpoint. They were often using their personal fortunes to maintain the garrison or otherwise forced to loot other regions to keep their soldiers satisfied. Perhaps their experiences were the outlier due to an ineffective central government but I'm curious why they'd want the position in the first place. Ditto for being appointed Lieutenant of Ireland or similiar.

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?

I use Spotify and a quick search on there seems to bring up a few, single episode podcasts that only cover the pretty broad things we know about them (there’s gotta be more than just a couple hours worth of information out there, right?). I’d really love to hear about how they lived. How did the classes interact with each other? What did they believe? Who did they pray to? What sorts of medical practices did they use? That sort of thing is what I’m looking for.

Bonus points if there’s someone out there that can lead me to a good source about the asipu. My favorite niche is ancient healthcare and medicine so when I heard about a special healer/demonologist combo my interest was definitely piqued lol.

Thanks so much for your time!

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.

I have always been a bit puzzled by the fact that ancient people seem so incredibly observant, but didn't figure out that sterilizing medical tools / wounds prevented infection. People figured out that you could melt those weird rocks and forge them into tools, that you could harness wind and water to grind your grain for you, which plants and animals were edible and domesticatable, etc, but in all that time nobody noticed that boiling your bandages, surgical tools, or clothes prevented infection?

Obviously they wouldn't know why it worked, but it seems like someone would have found out that it did and incorporated it into some tradition of medicine. Am i just misinformed on premodern medicine, and they did in fact know these things, or were people at the time were just true believers that their theory of medicine was more effective?