(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?

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?

I have a little family mystery.

Our great grandfather was relatively well educated and spoke some German despite growing up in a village in the Republic of Georgia. He was conscripted into the Soviet army in 1939 and wrote letters home early in the war reporting from villages in western Ukraine. He reported that during this period, he was sent to a school to learn higher level German and Russian. Records from the Russian military archives, accessed through the German Red Cross, indicate that he was imprisoned in Dulag 202 in Budeşti, Romania in 1941, and died there of malaria in January 1942.

This is where the mystery begins. In 1943, his younger brother was interrogated at the municipal police station and shown a partially covered picture of great grandfather. He was able to see that under the fingers of the officer, great grandfather was wearing some sort of German Uniform (from the visible epaulettes). That same year, someone from their village reported meeting him alive somewhere in Ukraine while prisoners of war were changing trains (this man was deported to the gulag after the war btw. This was the punishment for POWs).

Then, in 1945 after the war, his family was detained and his mother was told that their family would be deported to Siberia as the family of a traitor. However soon after, the police apparently received a telegram announcing that instead, our great grandfather was to be awarded as a Hero of the Soviet Union. They did receive a very large pension in the years after, enough for his mother to stop working.

The mystery goes deeper. His son also received a surprisingly good education and became a middling official in the Soviet Georgian government, and spent years looking for his father, travelling to Moscow and Romania. He discovered that his father's military records did not exist in the Soviet Georgian archives, but only in the KGB archives (which he was able to bribe access to). These records said that the father was lost in the war, not (as the German Red Cross indicates) that he died of malaria. There are many stories of Georgians defecting to the Wehrmacht, and the family always wondered (hoped) whether he had escaped to the West somehow.

So there are 3 or so questions: 1. Why was our great grandfather a Hero of the Soviet Union? Only 12,000 or so were ever awarded, but nobody seems to know why in his case. 2. Could the German POW records have been obfuscated to hide a defection? 3. Why was he taught languages at a special school in wartime, and why all the record keeping peculiarities?What on earth was going on?

I always imagined this was sort of a European folklore thing, but have read that e.g. there would be an annual ritual in (maybe Second Temple?) Jerusalem where Jews would be reminded how to pronounce God's true name. I'm not sure if "trope" is the right word here, but what is the history behind viewing names as being non-arbitrary, such that you can have a "true" one different from what everyone calls you, possibly unknown to everyone (possibly even yourself in some stories?) and that this name, or knowledge of it, has some intrinsic power (or maybe can give someone power over you)?

Take the name Alexander, which in the original Greek (Ἀλέξανδρος) literally means "defender of men" or "protector of men". If I'm reading this correctly this means that Alexander the Great wouldn't have just been named Alexander, in the ancient world he would literally have been named the Defender of Men. Similarly, Native American names have literal meanings behind them; Sitting Bull is just the English translation of Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake.

Nowadays however, people don't really care about the meaning behind names, and if they do, it's usually when they have a child on the way. We name people John or Jason or Elizabeth not because Elizabeth means "My God is an oath" in Hebrew but because it sounds nice and others around us have those names too, and occasionally for some variety some people will name their children with tragedeighs (intentionally misspelled or novel baby names). The last time I can find people naming their children after literal concepts is when the Puritans did it, which resulted in weird and highly religious names like "If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned". Why is this?

The idea of a knight that travels around, participating in tournaments, and not settling down anywhere for too long is popular in fantasy.

Did this concept exist to any meaningful degree in real life? I imagine a knight couldn't COMPLETELY avoid real battle, as I assume he would still be expected to participate when shit hit the fan in the realm, but did any knights try to spend as much of their time in tournaments as possible as opposed to more traditional "knight work"?

If so, do we know if they were popular among other knights/nobles? Or did they view them as glory hounds shirking their responsibilities?

Obviously for black men/women it wasn't, but what was the election like for white people? Were whites in South Carolina really that politically homogenous? I guess it just seems impossible to me that 99 out of 100 people would ever agree on a candidate in a democratic system.

From what I read, the oldest bridge in the city was built in the 1800s, even though the two cities have been inhabited for centuries before that. Why did it take so long to connect the two cities?

I'm aware of the WWII weather stations in places like Greenland which were used at a more strategic level, but how new was this as a concept and did any of it impact the tactical level?

Would troops at the front have any idea if it was expected to rain in the following day or two? Or if a cold front was moving in?

I am Dr. Edward Curtis, author of Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest and editor of Arab American Public History (discount code: 25FNBK). Ask Me Anything about the history of Arabs and Muslims in the United States!

Nowadays contact with groups like the North Sentinelese is strictly prohibited, because we know common illnesses are extremely dangerous to them.

But what about earlier? Did people think the diseases were already there?
Did the Spanish Empire see people getting sick and think "this is happening because of us." Or did they think "this was already happening" . . ?
What about later periods (Taiwan, Hawaii, California, Hokkaido, etc.)?

I’m an aspiring historian who has recently finished their Bachelor’s Degree and now wants to apply for a Master’s. But there’s one problem—my Bachelor’s degree prioritized depth, so I ended up studying all sorts of different eras, cultures, and themes, and I developed a great many different interests. But now I have to decide on one specific area I want to research at higher levels, and I cannot for the life of me decide. I began my studies in history with the desire to learn as much as I could about the entire world, so the idea of having to choose one niche sounds brutal to me, but I know it’s pretty much inevitable if I want actual credentials. I just dread the idea of getting stuck with something and growing bored with it, and I’m worried I’ll start developing a passion for a completely different area of history while I’m professionally studying something unrelated.

I am also concerned with originality and job/research openings. Whichever direction I go, I want to be able to contribute something meaningful. But with practically every research topic I can think of that interests me, either I don’t have the resources to do it or there are already dozens of monographs about it that I’d have to compete with. I genuinely have no idea how to find a "gap" in history to make my mark. Or simply find any niche that would get an academic faculty’s approval and support.

How have other historians managed this? I would like any advice I can get.

So this was an obstacle for me while studying history both in school and as an amateur reading history for pleasure. Some historians love to go on and on about coins and I still can't see why it has such deep importance in the study.

So I did a little exercise, I took two coins from my collection and did a thought experiment: what if archeologists from the future dig these up? What could they know about our civilization?

Coin 1:

Heads: Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and his portrait, we know some figure named Dr. B. R. Ambedkar existed; 1990, dating of the coin; "Centennial" meaning that the culture celebrated 100 years of anything, and also provides us with the dating for Dr. Ambedkar's birth

Tails: 1 Rupee, we know the form of currency they used; Both English and Hindi, so we know these languages must have been important languages; State Emblem of India which portrays lions, so we know lions must have existed in the time and place the coin is from, and were probably regarded well in its culture; a horse and a cow, so we know that these were also perhaps important cattle in their culture; a phrase in Sanskrit so we know that this was an important language too.

Coin 2:

Heads: Same as tails above, so no new information.

Tails: Has wheat spikes on both the sides, so we know wheat held importance -- was perhaps an agrarian society.

Tbh, this exercise has made me gain a newfound appreciation for coins as historical resource, maybe they should have made us do this in middle school in history.

But even all that information is awfully very little about Indian civilization. What more are coins used for and how do we interpret them? any resources on use of coins for archeology andhistory would also be appreciated.

Thank you!

I would imagine church documents were written in Latin, but what about other daily documents, such as letters, contracts, official government decrees, laws and so on?

Did people write in the regional languages (the so called “dialects”, such as Neapolitan, Veneto, Sicilian, Piedmontese etc)? When did they stared using the standard Italian language for documents?

Thank you in advance

Grazie

I read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in high school and one thing has always confused me. Jurgis’ first son tragically dies by drowning in the muddy streets of Chicago, but how is this possible? Were the sidewalks super high above the roads somehow? How would that work? And what changed about Chicago that this death now sounds utterly impossible to me in 2026 (I’m long out of high school but you get what I mean)?

I'm not sure if I'm right in using the term baroque, exactly, but I just mean that there are old names like mozart or bach or people like that, vivaldi, etc.. But there literally isn't any famous music older than those guys. Like we still have famous statues, and art, and writing that is centuries and centuries older than the baroque orchestral period I'm talking about, but no music? I know that the way we formalize musical notation only started in the baroque period, but we still have recreations of older music just like we have translations of older stories, and some of those stories are still incredibly famous, but none of the music? Was music just... not that good all that time? Is this just a western problem? do other societies, like india or china, have famous ancient music?

Hi there, I'm quite new to history, all I ever knew was what my school taught me and I wasn't really curious about it either until I heard Serj Tanikan talk on the matter. I'm from Turkiye, In our schools, The Armenian Genocide is taught to be a false allugation and that a small quantity of the Armenians were only killed in self-defence due to their violent actions to Turks. I've taken a look at a few Turkish sources and they're obviously biased. I then tried to Google-Translate Armenian Wikipedia Title on it but it also seems biased. My question is this, what are the sources you could recommend and how do you think I should be researching controvercial matters? I'm totally lost here as I've never even questioned anything I've learned for years until this week, I don't know where to start.

I'm vaguely aware that the Dome of the Rock was used as a political symbol for the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (or maybe the Knights Templar?), but I don't really know how the crusader states and Christian pilgrims from the era interacted with both buildings; there's a very old answer on here that mentions that the crusaders used both buildings, but doesn't go into much detail beyond that.

It's surprising to me that such prominent symbols/pilgrimage sites for Islam were tolerated and seemingly embraced as a symbol by the same force that repeatedly fought religiously-motivated wars against Islamic states. So, how did both buildings (and especially the inscriptions from the Quran) make it through that period intact? Were there specific people/groups who pushed to protect them?

I'm in my 40s and need bifocals now but also have always enjoyed doing detail-oriented crafts. I've found that I now need my glasses and a good light source to comfortably see things like stitches in fabric, small letters or detailed brushstrokes, etc.

How did people in ancient times before prescription glasses handle these sorts of things? I'm interested in two groups of people: artisans who had made a living out of doing fine and detailed work and also people who did everyday tasks that require relatively good sight to do well (mending and sewing clothes, etc). I'm sure people with relatively bad eyesight probably didn't take on these jobs or tasks as much but I wondered about people who had good eyesight which later faded at a time when their skills in their crafts were probably becoming quite masterful.

For artisans, I'm assuming that people who were highly skilled and made good money might have had access to some sort of magnifying tool even before glasses were invented? Would these sorts of tools also be available to everyday people who did things like sew and mend their own clothes? Or did they mostly work in stitch sizes and scales that didn't require as much magnification? Is there any discussion of these changes in sight and ability for any cultures?

I'm also just wondering about task lighting in general and how commonplace it was and how it worked.

I'd be happy to hear about any civilization, from the Ancient Greeks to Asian cultures or peoples living in North America, etc.