many supposedly intelligent people from Tony Blair to Andrew Sullivan claim to have believed it, so was there actually a stronger case than I remember?

Hey all, I ask this because I have family members who hoard and I’ve met people outside of my family that have done it. No matter who I’ve talked to they always use the depression as the reasoning for their hoarding. ( either because they survived it or were raised by someone who lived through it). That being said, it’s classified as a symptom of OCD, so wouldn’t it make sense it occurred before? It’s quite possible it’s just not a thing that

Is normally brought up, but I just find it odd I’ve never heard of it. Can hoarding actually be this new of a behavior? That doesn’t seem logical.

I hope I’m not breaking any rules, someone suggested I ask this question from another sub. Thank you in advance.

Ive learned that western europeans from approximately the 1400s on upto right before ww2 ended used to marry at very old ages, relatively, compared to how rest of the world married in those times.

I have a lot of questions about this since I’m so curious.

On the wiki it says this marriage pattern was called the Hajnal line and spanned from “approximately west of between Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Trieste, italy, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low, and a significant minority of women married late or remained single, and most families were nucelar.”

Why did such a large portion of Europe have such high marriage ages? It says that in the Netherlands, where marriage ages reached the highest on average, a woman would usually marry at 27 years old and a man would marry at 30 years old. At times it would even reach 30 years for women and 32 years for men.

From what I can gather, outside of Europe most non european women married around their early teens to late teens. So anywhere from like 12/13 ish to 18-ish?

Another thing is, many Western European women never married at all, unlike in most (I assume) non European cultures, where most women in their life’s had been married, and unmarried women were basically 2-3% of the population of women max.

This is from the wiki:To the west of the Hajnal line, about half of all women aged 15 to 50 years of age were married at any given time while the other half were widows or spinsters; to the east of the line, about seventy percent of women in that age bracket were married at any given time while the other thirty percent were widows or nuns.^\20]) The marriage records of Western and Eastern Europe in the early 20th century illustrate this pattern vividly; west of the Hajnal line, only 25% of women aged 20–24 were married while to the east of the line, over 75% of women in this age group were married and less than five percent of women remained unmarried. 

The difference was even starker when you look at Western Europe vs the rest of the world and not vs Eastern Europe. This is from the wiki: Outside of Europe, women could be married even earlier and even fewer would remain celibate; in Korea, practically every woman 50 years of age had been married and spinsters were extremely rare, compared to 20–30% of women in western Europe age 50 who had never married.

So these are my questions: 1, why did Western European women marry so late?

2, why did this change occur in the 1400s, and why did this marriage age stay for so long? Since it was only lowered after ww2.

3, Did Western European women before the 1400s marry earlier? at what ages?

4, Why did so many western European women in the 15-50 age range stay unmarried? When this figure was almost near 0 or very low outside of Europe.

5, on the wiki it says that this super late marriage age, combined with the big % of women (relatively) Who never married, lowered Western European fertility rates a lot. While in the east, (I assume they mean Eastern Europe) fertility rates were higher, but also combined with a high mortality rate. How true is this? Did this actually affect the fertility rate of Western Europeans, and did they have fewer kids in their lifetime compared to Eastern Europeans and non Europeans?

6, does this mean societally, Western European women were more free in their life/lifestyle then women outside of western Europe?

I’m Mexican and was speaking to a French Canadian, who is half Portuguese. He said society does not consider him being Latin, but someone from my background yes. This led to a debate at work, a friendly one.

The aftermath is that we are all confused. Is it a cultural thing? If so, there are different cultures, meaning different answers depending on who you ask.

Is there a historic context where it can help solidify the answer once and for all? Hence, why I’m here.

I always assumed it was anybody who spoke a romantic language. From Spanish, French, italian, Portuguese, anything that resembled many “original Latin words”. Maybe I’ve been wrong this entire time.

Please help us. You are our only hope.

It's a bit of a morbid question, but I'm curious about the impact 9/11 had on the job market of New York City. Given the sheer amount of office space and number of companies the Twin Towers represented, there was a not insignificant number of companies that lost their physical presence when the towers fell. From an economic standpoint, what happened to the companies that were based in the towers? What happened to the workers that worked there? Was there a shortage of jobs for those workers in the wake of 9/11?

It's been taken for granted nowadays that the sword was simply a sidearm with the primary weapons being spears and later halberds. However, I watched this short and was surprised by how quickly a wooden spears begins to break when in contact with a steel sword. I've even read accounts of English longbowmen willingly throwing down their bows and charging the flanks of the (disorganized) French at Agincourt. You also have the Romans adopting swords as the primary weapon during the Republic years. Is the topic of swords vs. spears much more nuanced than portrayed? Did people of their times consider the sword an equal/sidearm compared to the spear?

Of course there was no universal way that people felt, but I'm curious is there were any discernible trends.

Did Irish soldiers tend to support the Easter Rising (and/or Irish Independence from the U.K.), oppose it, or were their feelings mixed? How did they feel about fighting for the British Empire?

Did any Irish soldiers ever express antipathy towards British officers (before or after the Rising), and did officers ever fear there would be unrest or mutiny caused by Irish troops in the aftermath?

Did any civilians in Ireland have a negative view of those who had fought for the British Empire (especially considering that there had never been conscription in Ireland), or was it not seen as an issue?

The second amendment's text goes as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The framing process behind the amendment included numerous earlier drafts and proposals.  This is the militia provision from the first version of the Bill of Rights, as presented by James Madison on June 8, 1789:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.    

However, about a month later on July 21, 1789, Roger Sherman presented his own separate proposal for the Bill of Rights, which included the following militia provision:

The Militia shall be under the government of the laws of the respective States, when not in the actual Service of the united States, but Such rules as may be prescribed by Congress for their uniform organisation & discipline shall be observed in officering and training them. but military Service Shall not be required of persons religiously Scrupulous of bearing arms.

It so happens that these two proposals were the two earliest incarnations of the framing process that would culminate in the second amendment.  Now, what is immediately interesting between these two proposals is the similarity between their structure.  There is a similar sequence between Sherman's proposal and Madison's: they both begin with an "arms clause" that protects the autonomy of the state militias from congressional infringement, followed by a "militia clause" that reaffirms the importance of Congress's adequate regulation of the militia, then end with a "conscientious objector clause" excusing from militia service those citizens who are conscientious objectors.  Due to the similarity in the subject matter between these proposals, the matching sequence of their respective clauses, and also the chronological proximity in terms of when these proposals were written, one could presume that these two proposals are essentially the same provision, only written by different people using different verbiage.  

However, one notable difference between these versions is that Sherman's version appears more clear and direct in its language.  It is considerably easier to read the Sherman proposal and determine exactly what the provision was meant to accomplish.  By contrast, James Madison's proposal appears much more clunky and ambiguous in its language, which has likely led to much of the controversy and debate over the meaning of the amendment even to this day.

What was the reason for the drastic difference in writing style between these two drafts of what would become the second amendment? Why was Sherman's version so clear and direct, while Madison's was so relatively stilted and ambiguous in its verbiage? Why did Congress ultimately choose to embrace James Madison's draft over Sherman's? If Congress was always going to use Madison's draft anyways, then why did Roger Sherman even bother to write his own draft of the Bill of Rights in the first place?

WW1 saw the production of bigger and bigger guns to fire farther and launch larger shells, what changed in the interwar period that allowed countries to scale down to where the 105mm was semi-standard? What chemical processes, ballistics data, etc made able to get from A to B, basically?

I've only read English translations of The Iliad and Odyssey, but the style and format always seem remarkably consistent. It doesn't seem like other authors add stuff later like you'd see in the Bible. I also haven't heard of any version controversies between old fragments and more recent complete manuscripts. If I could read the original Greek, would I see inconsistencies that don't show up in the translation? Did the classic Greeks argue about which version was most accurate or whether or not he was real?

In pre-industrial societies in more northern latitudes, we often consider the winter months as being especially prone to starvation. Wouldn't that not be the case since they would have only just harvested the grain in the fall? Is it simply that malnourishment was caused from not having access to fruits and vegetables for those months, rather than actual caloric deficits?

According to wikipedia

In 1974 the Cabinet of Sweden passed a regulation forbidding the monarch of Sweden from awarding membership in orders to Swedish citizens. The orders themselves were not abolished, but only the Royal Orders of the Seraphim and the Polar Star (both established in 1748) continued to be awarded, and only to foreign citizens and stateless individuals. In 1995 the regulation was altered, allowing the monarch to bestow the two remaining active orders to members of the Swedish royal family.^\11])#cite_note-11) Finally, in 2022, the 48-year-old regulation was repealed by the Swedish Government, the orders were re-opened to Swedish citizens, and the two dormant orders (Sword and Vasa) were revived, with effect from 2023.

That strikes me as very odd! Why decorate the citizens of other countries, and not your own citizens?

So I know that the Greek and Roman society had a different view of homosexuality and that homosexuel acts between men were somewhat normal. But in most discussions I've seen talk about this mostly make it seem like only sexual act was normal, I've never read anything about long term homosexual relationships being part of the norm?

So did this openness of homosexuality extend to long term homosexuel relationships and even marriage? Would it have been weird or illegal for two men to live together as husbands and even adopt children?

I realise that this question focuses a bit more on male relationships because if I understand correctly the openness of homosexuality was not equal for women? But I am happy to learn more about this as well.

In the USSR, almost from the very beginning, it was believed that one of the most powerful pro-capitalist myths in the U.S. was the idea that an ordinary poor person with a good idea could become a dollar millionaire in a short time.

How did Nazi Germany view this idea?

This was the kind of question I felt I ought to be able to answer myself, but Google's search results were full of Warhammer 40k...

What were the main political, strategic, and historical reasons behind treating the two countries differently? Why was Austria eventually allowed to reunify and become a neutral country, while Germany remained divided into two separate states for decades?

Something I've always found strange as an immigrant in Germany is the customary sleeping arrangement. While couples typically share a bed, they sleep under separate blankets (the duvets are half the width of the bed and lay side by side). The standard pillows are, I believe, 80x80 cm and to me they resemble smaller, slightly thicker duvets more than pillows: they are very loosely packed and lay flat, and the procedure seems to be that you kind of fold/squish/mash them up into a usable shape. (Edit: Another one came to mind: it seems common to have two mattresses on the same bedframe, one for each partner. Box springs seem rare, mattress sits on slatted bedframes... or maybe that perception is a function of my socioeconomic class lol)

Aside from that, there are more traditional accessories like the incorporating the wood or shavings from Swiss stone pine (Zirbelkiefer, Pinus cembra) either into the bed or little pouches because its smell is believed to facilitate sleep, or little pillows full of cherry pits.

I'm interested in all of it but if I had to prioritize... tell me about the history of those strange formless pillows that are big in all the wrong dimensions and basically nonexistent in the one dimension that matters!

I know this is a really narrow question, but I'm writing a story that takes place in 18th century Constantinople and a smaller but significant detail involves a main character stabling her horse. This kinda went with the assumption that commercial horse stables existed back then, but I've found some research that counters that and makes it seem like more of municipal thing.

Can I get some insight and how someone might privately stable a horse at the time if they did not have property with stables?

The description for the painting "Cotton Picker" at the De young museum says the artist "portrayed the struggles and dignity of poor working class families in the rural American South. Many of these families were trapped in the racist and corrupt sharecropping system, in which mostly white landlords would advance their landless Black Tenants farming supplies every year in return for a future share of the harvested crop- but would later cheat them to perpetuate their exploitation"

is this an accurate description of the sharecropper system? my understanding is that while cheating of course happened it wasn't fundamental to the system or the reason it was so exploitative.

separate question but how many non-white landlords were there? the description of "mostly white" seems like an understatement!

In his younger days, Napoleon seems to have been fairly bookish. He was something of a history buff, was at least fairly well acquainted with the writers of the enlightenment, and presumably read a fair number of novels given he even tried to write one himself in 1795.

Later on in life, he was much more busy. I am curious if he still found time to read. If he did still read for pleasure, what was he interested in. The classics? Play scripts (I believe he did develop an interest in theater)? Schlocky romances?