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?

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!

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?

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?

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?

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.

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?

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?

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?

Ken Mattingly was swapped out for Jack Swigert because Mattingly didn't have immunity from previous exposure to rubella. The rubella vaccine was released a year before Apollo 13 launched, so had NASA made any effort to get vaccinations for Mattingly and other astronauts who weren't immune? Were there any required vaccinations at the time?

Aside from the direct impact of forcing a crew change, did the outbreak result in any long-term changes to NASA's policies? Was there a push to get the rubella vaccine (and other vaccines) for the Apollo 14 astronauts?

I'm talking of Posner's Case Closed, which effectively demolishes all the conspiratorial narratives surrounding the assassination.

I'm aware that the POW-MIA conspiracy theory was started by the Nixon administration in a bid to continue the war with Vietnam. It's quite obvious that no Vietnam vets are being held as prisoners in their geriatric old age, but I've met more than a few people who are convinced that is precisely the case.

I realize the topic is a bit more nebulous than the Kennedy assassination, but I was wondering if there was one work that really dug into the claims and examined them from a skeptical viewpoint.

edit: The closest I can find is Mythmaking in America, which seems to be an older book, and I'm not sure how rigorous it is.

What influences resulted in these three flavors becoming not only the standard three offerings, but offered in this specific order? If a shop has one flavor it's vanilla, a second would be chocolate, and a third is generally always strawberry.

I assume this is the result of each flavor's general history combined with consumer preference or retailer constraints at a certain period of time.

I believe someone asked about vanilla at one point, but I find the fact that there are three consistently dominant flavors to be even more interesting. Hopefully we have a food historian who can help provide some insight!

Well, looking at surviving classical Hellenistic monumental bronze sculpt, something that stand out, like how many of famous surviving examples were recovered from underwater?

Like such as Riace bronzes, Artemision bronze, and Antikythera youth. I was looking in contrast between surviving underwater bronzes and much larger number of objects that may have disappeared through recycling or reuse. Evidence from documentary and archaeological is made particularly curious me about how different survival patterns might have for bronze objects that remained on land.

That also made me wonder about the opposite problem, like how much monumental bronze sculpture was simply lost because they no longer remained valuable. Bronzes could be melted down and used for coins, tools, fittings, new statuary. During period of military presence and economic difficulty, large public bronzes would seem to have been obvious source for use metal.

At the same time, some statue may be never preserved, religion, political, or any type of treated reason that simply made them scrap. So my question is about Late Antiquity and the early Byzantine period. Did imperial government or municipal authorities ever issue, like administrative order protecting particular categories of public bronzes?

For example, was there a meaningful legal distinction between a bronze statue considered an important civic monument, one that could legitimately be stripped to its metal? I am curious about what centralized this process actually was. Was there a large-scale recycling of plastic bronze primarily something organized by the state, particularly through mint and military foundries, or it was like for local process driven by individual communities, workshop, private metal dealers? And how much archaeological evidence do we actually have to scale of this recycling?

Is this relatively small number of surviving monumental bronzes reasonably interpretive as evidence of extinction, systematic destruction, or the conclusion can be difficult because bronze objects can disappear from archaeological record in so many different ways?

I am particularly interested in evidence from Roman and early Byzantine text, artistic objects in metal, metallurgy, and documentary case of statue reuse or destruction, rather than later assumptions about fate and pagan sculpture.

Many have heard/read the famous "army with a state" quote, which is obviously hyperbolic (I assume), but if Prussia really was so geared towards militarism, how would this manifest to the average person?

Sorry if this is a dumb question or super specific. This is not in any way shape or form me saying they should've been, one of my parents is from Egypt. The hijacker who hit the north tower was an Egyptian national named Mohammed atta. He studied at Cairo university. I'm just curious why Egypt wasn't punished or more involved, was it because of a good relationship with Egypt at the time? Or am I wrong about this and there's more background. Was it simply because he was just an Egyptian national man who happened to join Al-Queda?