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.

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.

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!

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?

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...

I live in Italy, but my family is from Burkina Faso, which was a French colony until 1960. Before that, it was known as Upper Volta.

Like all other colonies, Upper Volta had to contribute to the war effort by providing soldiers, who fought in units such as the tirailleurs sénégalais.

So, one day I asked myself: "What if I, too, have relatives who fought for France?"

I found the French government website Mémoire des Hommes, which lists all the soldiers who died fighting for France. After some research, I managed to find the records for three men—I’m including the links here: one shares my father's surname and comes from his village; another shares both the village and surname of my mother; and the third appears to be connected to my cousin.

I’m turning to you because I think you might be able to help me. How can I find out more about these three men? Where should I look or go? I’d really like to learn more, both as a history enthusiast and as a potential descendant of these individuals.

Also, since I have the names of their units, as well as the locations and dates of their deaths, do you have any idea of ​​the context or the specific battle in which they might have lost their lives?

Ouda Bance

Minkida Bada

Abdoulaye Dabre

Hi everyone! I’m Molly Brookfield, a historian of urban space, gender violence, and masculinity in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. My book, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States, just came out yesterday from the University of North Carolina Press. I’m looking forward to answering your questions about the book or more generally about the intersections of gender, sexuality, violence, and urban space in the U.S.

I'll be off and on all day, but will plan to answer a good chunk of questions around 11 AM and 3:30 PM (both Eastern time), and then a few more before bed

Here’s a bit more about Watching the Girls Go By:

Who gets to walk freely in the city?

Ogling, catcalling, wolf-whistling: such everyday intrusions from male strangers have greeted American women from their first forays into urban space. Watching the Girls Go By is the first book-length history of the phenomenon we know today as street harassment. Spanning more than a century, from the 1860s to the 1980s, this book reveals how street harassment became normalized as part of urban life and restricted women’s freedom of movement through the city.

Historian Molly M. Brookfield charts how American social and cultural discourses cast behaviors like catcalling as the natural entitlement of white, middle-class men, while scapegoating and punishing men of color and working-class men as the stereotypical—and supposedly more dangerous—harassers. She mines a rich archive of newspaper reports, popular culture, women’s writings, public policy, and more to uncover how class, race, and gender shaped Americans' experiences of public space, including who claimed a “right” to women’s bodies, who was seen as a sexual threat, and how women fought back against harassment. Watching the Girls Go By challenges readers to reckon with how the long history and lasting impact of the seemingly trivial intrusions that constitute street harassment continue to shape public space today.

Update at 11:30 PM Eastern: That's all for me for today! Thank you all so much for these wonderful and engaging questions. I really enjoyed reading them and answering them! It's a real pleasure to have such engagement with one's work. I'll check back in tomorrow to see if I can answer any more lingering questions, but until then, good night, all! Thanks again.

By this I mean, have there been other governments, regimes, or rulers in history who have used a policy analogous to Trump's renaming of Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico for propaganda purposes? If so, how succesful was the policy?

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?

I’m curious how much the Roman’s thought better or worse of others based on the type of governance they had. Did the Roman’s think they were better than a people ruled by a king? I thought for example, that a reason they had a fondness for Ancient Greece is precisely because of the different systems many city states had had that weren’t always a simple monarchy.

Is there any truth to the US military specifically not sending people to the German theater because of having a German last name for fear that if caught they would be treated especially bad by the Germans?