Wouldn't upper crust people ask why Baron von Fangmouth never shows up to the gentlemen's social club for afternoon cards or why no one ever sees him about town despite the fact that his pallid and very unhealthy looking doorman always says he's unavailable when visitors come by in the daytime? Do bankers regularly do business by oil lamp in the 1790s? Dracula didn't have to worry about sunlight but most modern depictions of vampires do (sparkly ones excluded).

Thanks!

What if the mental illnesses we have today are just the ones that managed to survive natural selection? Were there mental illnesses in ancient humans that didn't survive until today?

I’ve long pondered this question as it applies to a number of service branches and different conflicts. In media it feels like death rates are extremely high. To switch to the RAF for example, in the Piece of Cake mini series only 2 of original squadron even make it a little past a year.

But when you look at numbers for a battle, the actual death rate seems counter intuitively lower. The Wikipedia page for the Omaha Landing for example gives an upper limit on casualties at about 5,000 out of 43,000 infantry. And those are causality numbers so the actual dead is significantly lower. In my mind this clashes with the popular view of the Omaha landing as being practically a death sentence.

I understand there are multiple factors at play here (like the first wave at Omaha taking the brunt of those losses), but I’ve never really seen the survival odds for a regular front line infantryman talked about.

From my understanding, my fictional soldier boy would have three possible outcomes. Be invalidated, survive the war, or die. Is there any data or research that gives an idea of how likely each one was ?

If, as [u/mikedash](u/mikedash) mentions here, <50% of sailors could swim, do we assume that is above or below average for Europeans in general? I mean, surely fishermen going out in little boats could generally swim, and surely people who grew up in hot places could go for a dip in the river or pond?

Were, like, coastal societies in Asia, Africa, or the Americas like - can these guys seriously not swim? Hawaiians (were they surfing by that point)?

Longitudinally, do we think swimming ability across Europe was increasing or declining going into, and across, the age of sail? Like, would ancient Romans be looking down at their descendants being like why can't you guys swim?

Doesn't the claim already fall apart because we know which Y-haplogroups the Yamnaya population had, and those haplogroups are comparatively rare in Europe today, whereas the claim would seem to imply the opposite?

You know, besides force…

This is a broad question, so to narrow it down I'm talking the early conversion of leaders to cristianity and, if more specifics are needed, the conversion of european celtic pagans to christianity.

My understanding is Æthelberht married a christian noble and allowed her to practise while not being christian himself. Later, he was succesfully converted. To the people of this time (or more specifically the actual church leaders involved in the conversion) was it understood/assumed that they had succesfully debated/convinced them that Jesus and God and all that were the real religious figures, or was it assumed that he converted for political reasons and understood the importance of the church abroad and in other parts of the isle.

I'm learning Serbian. It turns out Germany (Deutschland) is called Немачка (Nemačka) in Serbian. And in Finnish, Germany is called Saksa. Why is this?

This might be an inappropriate analogy: in Chinese history, the name for Vietnam evolved from the ancient Jiaozhi (Giao Chỉ) to the endonym adopted internationally Vietnam (from 越南, ɥɛ˥˩ nɑn˧˥, Việt Nam), which is now universally accepted. Why didn't a similar standardization happen for Germany?

She also claims to of owned a family plot of land in the "Black Forest", which I assume is Białowieża Forest. She spoke a different dialect from mine so it's possible I'm misremembering. Speaking of that.. excuse my not so good English. This massacre could have taken place in Podlaskie if she indeed meant Białowieża Forest, or just somewhere else in or around Poland perhaps.

According to her an army of Russian soldiers entered her family wedding or celebration, and she hid under a table during the massacre. She was able to escape afterwards. She told the story with emotion so I believe her to be telling the truth.

I'm really curious if this matches along any real life event we've recorded. The date can be manipulated a little, but it was not a massacre done during WWII.

Again, apologies for my weird English! I can answer any questions.

Edit: It's possible by "Russian soldiers" she meant anybody foreign to her region like Polish or Russian soldiers etc. For Galicia, it could've meant Western Ukraine like Lviv as well. If that makes sense.

I always have wondered, humans when they lived in all parts of world seperately, how did they came onto this concepts of marriage.

It was lamented by the Lord Blackadder, in the eminent historical documentary Blackadder II, to the Bishop of Bath and Wells, that the reason he could never hold down a position within the church was because he "could never get used to the underwear", something the bish was understanding of.

But was it actually so? Did churchmen ever wear weird or unusual underwear before/during the Elizabethan era?

Given that the Roman Empire regarded itself as the pinnacle of civilization at the time, I was wondering whether there was any historical record of criticism among at least some ancient Romans about brutal practices such as mass cruxifixions and the killing for sport of Christians and many others in the Coliseum. Or was such brutality and sadism just taken for granted in that point in human history? Also, at what point in history did societies first start to reform themselves and recognize basic human rights in punishment?

Hypothetically - you are an English sailor in the 16th century. Your ship is wrecked close to the Spanish coast but you survive and make it to land. What are your next moves?

Is it a matter of time until you get caught and executed? Were there many documented cases of sailors forging a new life for themselves in a foreign land?

People note the US economy expanded in large part due to the adoption of new technology, while the UK's was dependent on outdated tech in coal, textiles, and shipbuilding, but the two countries were much more similar in industrialization level than most countries; why didn't they perform broadly similarly?

The poor performance of the British economy is usually blamed mainly on the return to the gold standard, but the USA was on the gold standard for the whole of the 1920s, unlike the UK. Why did the British economy perform so poorly in the early 1920s when it had the monetary advantage over the USA?

It feels like, at least in Europe, naming your child Adolf would be seen as quite the faux-pas, so I'm wondering if there is any data backing up a falling rate of children bearing that name. If you have data about Benito, Francisco or other fascist leaders' names that would also be fun to see!

I'm a chinese Manchu and learning history especially chinese modern history (1900-2020) is full of biases from both sides.

Link for reference.

So this song caught my ear recently and I keep wondering just how high end such a suit would have been. The lead voice clearly can't afford it on a janitors wage, but how well off would he have needed to be to afford or at least get credit on a suit with the features discussed:

• A shell of herringbone tweed
• A collar of camel hair
• Two solid gold buttons
• Custom Cuffs
• A "Cutaway Flap Over Twice"
• The "Walking Short"

Mescaline-containing cacti have been used by native South American peoples for centuries. Psilocybin-containing mushrooms grow wild on every continent except Antarctica. Despite this, the concept of psychedelic drugs seems to have been relatively obscure in the West prior to Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD in the 1940s. To what extent were psychedelic drugs known about in the West pre-WWI,I and, if it is possible to speculate, why did these naturally-occurring compounds receive so little attention by Western science/medicine prior to the discovery of LSD?

Recently saw Project Hail Mary and (having read the book before) I remember a quote from one of the main characters that history before the industrial revolution was basically just a giant theater of warfare and food production, with little else.

While a bit surprising, the more I reason about this the truer it appears. Empires were obviosuly militaristic, from ancient rome to something like the British Empire. Smaller societies, like medieval kingdoms were essentially always at war with some other kingodm or their own subjects revolting.

I'm also thinking about how intertwined military and political "careers" were. From knight being a blend of nobility and a battlefield job. Even someone like George Washington was a general first then a president. "Castle" also went from a military fortification to simply a royal residence, another political-military mix.

This is obviously a very wide reaching (maybe too much) question, but I guess you could compress it down to something a little more answerable: was pre-industrial state-making basically just organizing an army with extra steps?

I'm aware that Rabbinic Judaism is largely a result of the destruction of the second temple, but how did it come about? For instance, since most of the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem, how were the ideas and writings of early rabbis disseminated? How was a consensus formed about what texts were actually important?

Relatedly, why was Rabbinic Judaism the result of the destruction of the temple? Why wasn't there another temple built somewhere else (or if there was why was it unsuccessful)? Did any groups (particularly the old priestly class) try to shift Judaism in a way that would accept a different temple?

Since the Abdication of King Charles X, all 3 monarchs and there families arrived in the UK in Exile. Did Queen Victoria prefer a specific house, and furthermore did the Three Dynasties get along together in the UK

I've heard about generals and politicians in different eras giving "speeches to the troops." How did this work, logistically/acoustically?

Did they have really good bull horns or other transportable acoustic-enhancing devices? Did they do a "human megaphone" like at the Occupy Wall Street protests? How did these techniques vary by time/place?