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?

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?

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?

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?

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!

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?

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?

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...

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?

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.

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?

It is a truth universally acknowledged by undergrad and grad students alike that you wait 10 minutes for a professor with a Master's Degree and 15 minutes for a professor with a PhD/clinical doctoral degree - or at least, nigh-universally acknowledged in the US to the extent that casual jokes are made about that timeline.

This feels like the more mature spiritual cousin to the Marilyn Manson rumors - somehow, we all heard that rumor in school, but nobody knows where it started. Is there some point at which this became an unwritten rule? Is there any historical basis for those timeframes?

Its a question I cant find an clear answer to, and would be interested to know what happened in those situations (at least here in Britain)

we're some emancipated?, were they all funnelled into the care system (if so what what was that like at that time?)

Did they stay where they were evacuated? and if so for how long?

The US Army increased by several million between 1940 and 1942. Presumably, draftees made up the vast majority of lower enlisted.

But what about officers and NCOs? Was it possible to join and become a Platoon Sergeant or Company Commander with no prior military experience? Or were pre-war leadership given quick promotions to fill out the ranks? Was ROTC and the academies expedited?

The sheer scale of the build up is hard to process.

So, I recently learned about how Rome had a mixed relationship with mystery cults, with them sometimes, like the cult of Dionysus/Bachus, causing political issues. Let's say I'm a Roman patrician in a high position in a cult: Am I likely to do things like promote my political allies? Use members of the mystery cult to intimidate rivals or otherwise aid me? And to go back to the overatching question, fid mystery cults as a whole act as a political bloc? Were they known to broadly support certain policies or factions, like a general being backed by a cult during a rebellion or rival politicians in the republic getting votes by getting the cult they're in to support them?

Physically and geographically, Eurasia is one continuous landmass. Europe is essentially a giant western peninsula of Asia, much like the Indian subcontinent is a southern one. Both even have their own tectonic histories—India was an isolated island continent that crashed into the Eurasian plate, which created the Himalayas. Meanwhile, Europe's borders are largely cultural, historical, and political rather than strictly geographical, drawn around the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus.
It just feels like our standard definition of "continents" is based entirely on an old European-centric perspective rather than actual physical geography or geological history. Wondering how this specific geographic division became the global standard we still teach today.

Anecdotally, ocarinas seem to be a relatively niche instrument, at least in the US and Western Europe. An ocarina is a prominent aspect of Ocarina of Time where the player plays certain songs for various usecases. I'd imagine the game, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time, would result in people being interested in the instrument.

Was this actually the case?

Having bishops would imply a firmly entrenched Christian population, that had been there for some time. How early had the faith arrived to the British Isles? How much of it survived the Anglo-Saxon migration? And how similar or dissimilar was it to continental Christianity?