His coat and armband seem to look like pseudo-nazi garb. But he is studying at Berkley and, being with the Black Panthers, it seems he is supposed to be far left intellectual coded. So why would he be wearing neonazi-like clothing?

Several top Nzis killed themselves with cyanide capsules hidden in their teeth. According to Wiki, this is not really a very nice death. Why did they use this poison and not another one, that is more pleasant?

I'm probably being petty and I don't know why it bothers me so much it just seems overdone and unnecessary.

Harry Truman is generally ranked rather highly by historians and considered one of the better presidents, but when he left office he was very unpopular, even more unpopular than Nixon was just before he resigned. While I understand how some of the aspects in retrospect are judged, I'm a bit confused as to why Truman would have left office with such a low public opinion.

Truman saw the end of WW2 and then saw a successful repulsion of the invasion of North Korea into South Korea. When we hear about unpopular wars Vietnam is the quintessential example, but even that didn't make Johnson as unpopular as Nixon or Truman; so was Korea that unpopular?

And was inflation and the economy really that bad at that point? This is still the post-war economy which is generally considered the Golden Age of capitalism at least from the US perspective.

I am Dr. Joohee Suh. I was trained as a social historian of early modern China with a focus on the history of the body and death. My interest in this topic was originally inspired by Qing-era (1644-1911) stories of undead corpses, and from there I became interested in how dead bodies shaped social practices, interactions, and changes. What I found particularly interesting was the fear of dead bodies lingering in the world of the living to harm them in various ways, which seems to be quite universal across time and space. I hope this book can be both informative and amusing for those who share this interest in death, the body, and how they have shaped human history.

You can find my book here: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295754925/the-unburied/

Here is the Press's instruction of the book:

When coffins lingered above ground, Qing China reimagined care, kinship, and the meaning of death

In late imperial China, death did not always lead swiftly to burial. Across the Qing empire, coffins frequently remained in temple courtyards, storage houses, or shallow pits for months, years, even decades. These unburied bodies unsettled the social order: they were neither gone nor fully incorporated into ancestral lines, inhabiting a liminal space between presence and absence. The Unburied explores this unsettling phenomenon, showing how exposed remains shaped mortuary ethics and practices across families, communities, and the state.

Drawing on government decrees, criminal cases, epitaphs, charitable records, and popular stories, Joohee Suh uncovers the unexpected social roles of the dead. Families crafted ornate epitaphs to sustain ties with kin whose coffins had no resting place; magistrates and officials confronted disputes over graves and desecration; Buddhist temples and philanthropic groups organized to shelter and inter abandoned bodies. Even as Confucian orthodoxy condemned corpse exposure as ritual failure, ordinary people developed adaptive practices that wove the unburied into moral and social life.

This study reframes death in early modern China not as a stable ritual sequence but as an extended, negotiated process. By centering the precarious fates of the unburied, Suh illuminates how scarcity, migration, and filial obligation reshaped the relationship between living and dead. Original and deeply researched, The Unburied offers a powerful new history of mortality, ritual, and care in a society where the dead continued to dwell uncomfortably among the living.
This study reframes death in early modern China not as a stable ritual sequence but as an extended, negotiated process. By centering the precarious fates of the unburied, I illuminate how scarcity, migration, and filial obligation reshaped the relationship between living and dead. Original and deeply researched, The Unburied offers a powerful new history of mortality, ritual, and care in a society where the dead continued to dwell uncomfortably among the living.

The idea of the portal features very prominently in the cosmology of my five-year-old, and is common in the mass media he consumes. Its features are usually most or all of the following:

• It is a permeable, flat surface, usually suspended vertically, often circular in shape
• It often has a border of some kind around it
• It allows a person to instantly move from one (often mundane) setting to a completely different place, biome, period of time or parallel/magical world
• One has simply to walk or otherwise move through the portal to use it, sometimes after activating it in some way

Now, I know some relatively recent fiction that helped popularise the concept, like the 1994 film Stargate and the 2007 video game Portal. But how far and from where does its origins stretch before that?

Obviously there are related ideas in folklore, like fairy rings, summoning circles and various magical/underground/parallel worlds that can be travelled to and from. There are also other means of fantastical instantaneous travel in fiction from Star Trek transporters to time machines. But the specific idea and form factor of the portal, is there a more decisive origin for that?

​

Apparently DOD is pressing Congress to officially authorize their rebranding. I have seen several articles (like this one! https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6172772-pentagon-pushes-department-war-name/amp/) baldly assert that the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949.

I recognize that this is inaccurate on the face of it because the War Department was split into the Department of the Air Force and Department of the Army in 1947; but ASIDE FROM THAT:

Is it more accurate to say that the Department of Defense is descended from the War Department disestablished in 1947 or is it more accurate to say that it is descended from the "National Military Establishment" established in 1947?

I realize this is splitting hairs, but it is getting down to my true question:

Is it in any way accurate to say that renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War while a former Army officer is in charge of it represents the final victory of the Army over their ancient enemy, the Navy?

Given that The Quran prohibits the consumption of alcohol, due to its intoxicating effects, and throughout history, one of the primary reasons for the consumption of alcohol, besides getting drunk, was due to fermentation being highly effective in its killing of bacteria and diseases, did Muslims throughout Arabia, The Middle East, South East Asia, Anatolia, and The Balkans for example, suffer from significantly higher rates of illness and death from viruses, bacteria, parasites, infections, when compared to their alcohol drinking Jewish, Christian and Pagan neighbours? (Prior to the advent of modern water purification and sterilisation methods)

Side question: As alcohol was also a significant, readily available and cheap source of calories for the poor, were Muslims from the same low social-economic background and within the same localities noticeably thinner than other religious communities when given the higher cost of food?

https://news.gallup.com/poll/8074/Iraq-War-Triggers-Major-Rally-Effect.aspx?utm_source

On march 20, 2003 the gallup polling indicated 76% of Americans approved the decision to go to war in Iraq.

By the next year in spring 2004, polls still showed 60%+ support for going to war in Iraq as the right decision.

What exactly was the public thinking to support this at the start and for over a year?

When I look back in history I feel like it’s kings and queens until we get democracy somewhere in (Greece?). Did we ever see any different political structures?

I am thinking of for exemple sir François Gaston de Lévis being commander in chief at the start, instead of having to Wait till Montcalm get shot to get the position.

I’ve been reading about Portuguese exploration during the 15th century, particularly the voyages along the African coast, and something that’s been puzzling me is how little information we seem to have about some of the people and expeditions that played such an important role in history.

For example, Gil Eanes is credited with rounding Cape Bojador in 1434, which was an important milestone in Portuguese exploration. However, the main account I keep coming across is Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. There seems to be very little information about Eanes himself. We don’t really know much about his early life, his date of birth, or his personal life. How much independent evidence do we actually have that corroborates Zurara’s account, and is there anything else we know about Eanes outside of this chronicle?

Another example is Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. We don’t even know his exact date of birth, and as far as I can tell, there isn’t a detailed firsthand written account of his voyage that survives today. One piece of physical evidence associated with his expedition is a padrão (a stone pillar used by the Portuguese to mark their presence) traditionally linked to Dias and his voyage along the South African coast. But how much of what we know about the expedition comes from contemporary documentation, and how much has been reconstructed from other sources?

These are just two examples, but they’ve made me wonder how much contemporary evidence actually survives for these early Portuguese expeditions. Given how significant these voyages were, I would have expected more detailed records, such as ships’ logs, eyewitness accounts, letters, or personal accounts from the explorers themselves.

I’m curious if the admissions of both Alaska and Hawaii to the union had any influence from the country being at 48 states for almost 50 years, especially with their admissions being passed in the same year.

I’m also curious if there was any similar urge to round up after the United States started adding more states beyond 40 to reach 50? Were there pushes to add island territories to statehood to continue increasing state numbers?

I'm specifically *not* asking about the decline in men's headwear in general or the casualization of fashion over the 20th century.

I'm asking how we reached the point today where outside of particularly important meetings with higher levels or customers no one bats an eye at a baseball cap in an office while basically any other form of hat would be noteworthy and out of place. The only other hat that I've seen accepted are flat caps which are perceived as somewhat eccentric.

So I know the Hanseatic League was basically a confederation of German merchants that wielded a lot of political and economic power. And they kept the roads and seas safe from bandits and pirates. But what I don't know is what their military and navy? Did they have an organized army and fleet or did they hire out mercenaries and privateers to protect their routes and interests?

Prior to the 1998 implementation of statutory paid leave in the UK, paid holiday was determined primarily by individual contracts, trade union agreements, or specific trade board provisions (such as the 1938 Holidays with Pay Act).

​How widespread was paid annual leave for the average full-time and part-time British worker between the 1950s and the 1990s? Did certain industries lag behind, and how did the lack of a universal legal baseline affect working-class employment conditions?

This is a historical question I have been trying to answer for a long time, but I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation.

How were the Qarmatians able to conquer parts of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Oman, establish control over al-Ahsa, and capture numerous cities during their military campaigns?

They even sacked Mecca in 317 AH (930 CE) and later advanced toward Cairo, besieging the city. Yet, despite their military strength and extensive influence, they never captured Medina.

Other groups had successfully attacked the holy cities before them. For example, during the caliphate of al-Muʿtazz, Ismaʿil ibn Yusuf al-Saffak captured both Mecca and Medina with relative ease in 251 AH (862 CE).

Why, then, did the Qarmatians never attempt to attack Medina? What prevented them from doing so, despite their ability to raid or capture other major cities?

Another shower thought

I was wondering after a novel I was reading mentioned an iceman bringing around ice for the icebox: when did this profession start and how did they manage to make ice especially in summer/how did they store it? Who actually had an icebox?

The decline should obviously be tied to electric refrigirators but maybe something more can be said. Thanks!

I don't know a lot about him. What I do know: He was born around 1926 and was part of the german minority in hungary. At around 17 he allegedly got conscripted into the Waffen-SS, including getting tattooed. This was apparently in the context of the Siege of Budapest.

Is this plausible?