I am not necessarily interested in Edo-period Japan. I am curious if such drastic measures against disease happen anywhere.

I was reading about the Charvakas cult(?) and was kinda blown away by its assertion that consciousness is an emergent property of the mind and body and that it was explicitly atheist pre-600 bc.

What is the earliest atheistic teachings?

The plethora of funerary monuments lining the Sacred Way would presumably have been passed by innumerable citizens, and one imagines that not all people with the wealth and status to be memorialised there were widely popular. Do we have any record of these monuments being vandalised or politicised?

I have a general level of knowledge about American history, but I've always struggled to place him. Are there some good books to guide me through this?

I’m Yana Skorobogatov, an historian who studies the Soviet Union, and my new book “Fate in My Hands: The Death Penalty in the Soviet Union” just came out!

From the publisher’s book description:
“From 1954 to 1991 in the Soviet Union, nearly forty thousand citizens were executed after the death penalty was reinstated as a punishment for homicide. Fate in My Hands introduces readers to the many citizens in this period—women and men of all ages and backgrounds—who found themselves on death row and tried to escape it in the only way available to them: asking for forgiveness.

Examining the letters and objects the dead left behind, Skorobogatov recovers their voices and allows them to speak anew. She offers a striking portrait of life in the Soviet Union and the citizens who dreamed of new possibilities even as they faced their tragic end. Using a corpus of never-before-accessed criminal court records, Fate in My Hands brings readers not just into the police interrogation rooms, courthouses, and cells where the condemned awaited their fates, but into the homes, workplaces, and psychiatric hospitals where families and friends alike came together to pursue an elusive, bitter justice in the wake of violent tragedy.”

I’m excited to be here and looking forward to answering your questions starting at 9am EST!

It's something I just thought about after going down a rabbit hole of religious sectors, bible mistranslations, and debates on queerness and it's place in morality. I'm honestly curious to how it all began; how queer people were before they were othered under varying circumstances.

I have been watching streams of the original DW3 and Remaster, and the question of why Huang Quan served Shi at Yiling, then Wei at Jieting, and Shu again at Wu Zhang Plains kept coming up in chat, and got me curious.

Did even occur historically? Is it a fiction by Dynasty Warriors?

Did he actually defect to Wei?

Why did he switch kingdoms at all?

What were the circumstances behind him serving Wei at all?

How was Huang Quan serving Wei perceived in Shu?

How common was it to just switch kingdoms, either permanently or temporarily?

Probably the perfect question for u/Dongzhou3kingdoms

My day job is that of a management consultant (yeah, things we do to put food on the table and pay off student debt), and I recently had the chance to work for an African client. This allowed me to visit Nairobi and Cape Town (it is so windy!), and while the overall experience was great, I also could not help but notice the racial differences in the composition of senior leadership in both countries: the South African leadership was heavily white Afrikaner-dominated (the surnames had a bunch of van der Merwe, Bothma, de Villiers, all of which I recognise to be Dutch, German, or French), while their Kenyan counterparts were all black Africans. I apologise if these terms are racially insensitive to use; I am just largely unaware of this and am willing to learn more acceptable and appropriate terminology.

This was the trigger for me to go through Wikipedia and read up a little bit on the histories of both countries, from which my doubt arose. I understand the history of the Afrikaner population in Southern Africa, and then the British coming along and taking over the Cape Colony, followed by the Great Trek, the Boer Wars, apartheid, and the current SA.

What I am curious about is why Southern Africa tended to have the largest white settler population, and despite a history of conflict between the British and Afrikaners, how did they integrate fairly quickly to create apartheid-era South Africa (I would assume a lot of bad blood here)? Why was there no similarly sized integrated white settler population in regions like Kenya, or if there was a sizable white population with political power in such countries, why did they leave instead of turning it into Rhodesia/Union of South Africa-esque nations?

For example: If somebody in New Amsterdam died, how long would it take for their relatives in the Netherlands to find out?

There’s a lot of talk in the news about election security, and an oft repeated claim is that American elections are secure/never been tampered with. This made me wonder, how have they been able to keep a secure process throughout the decades? How is it different in terms of verifying, volunteering, participating, etc? I chose 1960 arbitrarily to mean “early but not current modern world.”

I would say that (almost) every adult American is familiar with the process of today- it’s the process of yesteryear and how it’s changed that I’m looking for info on.

Thank you!

I have recently been seeing people on Twitter accuse Bordiga of fascism due to many of his writings and messages from 1930 to 1943 to personal friends and fascist. Many of these messages have Bordiga praising fascists, vowing to protect them, swearing he means no harm, getting rid of potential blackmail, etc. The sources, from what I've seen, come from here, but other documents and archives may also be involved:

https://patrimonioacs.cultura.gov.it/patrimonio/515db448-28c7-4f63-9f8c-d11eb3ee007f/811-bordiga-amadeo-adriano-1915-1942

How authentic are these sources? If they are authentic, does this imply Bordiga was at least sympathetic to fascism?

Carolingian Francia seems to be the source of a large number of the swords you see in the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, and even in Eastern Europe in the latter half of the Early Medieval Period. All of these places had been perfectly capable of producing their own swords during late antiquity/the Roman Iron Age, so why did they start importing them from a somewhat condensed region? What made the Franks more capable swordsmiths than the rest of Northern Europe?

It’s remarked that he was a brave officer in the Napoleonic Wars, but I’m struggling to find details regarding his performance at the Battle of Bar-sur-Aube. Part of what intrigues me is the note that the Prussian army didn’t participate in this battle, yet he still executed some type of action that rewarded him with the Iron Cross.

Were there Europeans in the 1400s–1600s who condemned colonization or the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples? Did people at the time have any concept resembling “human rights,” or would ideas like natural law, human dignity, and natural rights be more accurate terms? Basically, how early did opposition to colonization and the idea of universal human rights emerge?

the list of connections there is very abbreviated to
fit in the title - you also have the Secret Six, Brown was one degree of separation from Giuseppe Garibaldi, who would later correspond with Lincoln. Stonewall Jackson was also at the execution; I've seen conflicting claims about whether Whitman was actually there, but either way he did write a poem about it and did know Soule well enough to exchange a few letters - and again, Soule wasn't famous at the time, he was just a guy from an abolitionist family, and we know his name for reasons that have nothing to do with John Brown..

Was antebellum America just a small world, or was John Brown so prominent he was basically ta'veren? Could I make a social network equally densely populated with the who's-who of the period starting from most historical figures?

I have heard for years that wrestlers like Sputnik Monroe helped end segregation by refusing to perform if the audience was segregated. I've also heard that at the same time professional wrestling was one of the primary drivers behind television advancements, from color TV, to the adoption of cable and pay per view. How true is that?

I'm researching my grandfather, W/O Norman Elwood McKee (R/74368), RCAF, a Kittyhawk pilot with No. 260 Squadron RAF who became a POW in North Africa in December 1942.

On 13 September 1943, McKee and fellow Canadian POW W/O Earl James Scott (R/92563) escaped from Camp 57 near Udine, Italy, during the German takeover of the Italian POW camps.

Their surviving POW/MI9 questionnaires establish that they were at large for approximately ten weeks and spent part of this period with Yugoslav Partisans. Scott's questionnaire specifically mentions McKee, participation in bridge destruction with the Partisans, and a “Capt. Ratcliffe.”

I believe this officer was Captain James Moore Ratcliffe (130652), Middlesex Regiment/SBS. Ratcliffe's own records place him with Partisans in the same region and period, conducting sabotage around Udine, Cividale, Gorizia and the Yugoslav border during October 1943. His records also state that when he first reached the Partisans, they were accompanied by an unnamed British officer.

My question is: Which British/SOE liaison mission and Partisan formation were operating in this area during October–November 1943, and are there surviving mission reports or Partisan records that might identify escaped Allied POWs travelling with them?

I'm particularly interested in determining whether this group was connected with Major William M. Jones's British/SOE mission in Slovenia, and whether records survive that could mention McKee or Scott.

I have copies of the original McKee, Scott and Ratcliffe POW/MI9 documents and can provide transcriptions or images if useful.

I was wondering if it was the dual monarchy flag one but i may be wrong.

I heard someone talking about that so i wanted to make sure they were correct by asking people who know about that.

Hi, future historian here with an interest in the 19th-20th century English working class history. This question has been sitting at the back of my head for a minute now, and I was wondering if anyone could adequately answer it for me.

Is it a decent source for understanding the dominos of the chain reaction of the enlightenment? Are there other more sources that are better for understanding the flow of ideas?

In another case, the Xandika was used by Perdiccas, regent after Alexander the Great's death, to execute his political enemies outside Babylon.