Hi All,

Inspired by RWN's series on Joan d'Arc and the Hundred Years War, I picked up a copy of Tuchman's 'A Distant Mirror' to learn more about the Late Middle Ages, an era of which I know almost nothing. Upon opening the front cover, and realizing that Tuchman was also the author of 'The Guns of August', I suddenly knew I was holding the wrong book. Looking back through a previous r/AskHistorians thread about the book in 2017, I noticed a general lament about the dearth of accessible modern texts that cover this period.

Have there been any publications in the field since then that are worth pursuing, or should I go pick up a copy of Huizinga?

I’m trying to research the history of wartime sex-slaves, particularly by the Japanese military during WWII, but obviously records are somewhat murky. I’m trying to understand how many common soldiers(not high ranking military personnel) were aware of the sexual slavery and to what extent. My main questions are How many soldiers participated in the rape? How many soldiers were aware of the comfort women but did not participate? How many soldiers were unaware or at least unsure about the practice?

I’m trying to get a better understanding of systemic exploitation and how accountable low-ranking soldiers are for the crimes compared to leaders. Thank you in advance for your time.

This is a trivial question but I've always been curious about it and thought maybe there's some historians of language here. For any movie or television show I can think of that represents and "older" era, the dialogue is always the same -

"Mother, will Father be home soon?"

"Father's home! Father! What did you bring us, Father?"

"You're not supposed to be out this late by yourself, I'm telling Mother."

If those same lines came from a modern movie, of course, that'd be all variants of "Dad" and "Mom". I'm curious if there's an obvious point where the transition began? 1950s? 20s? Can we point to a movie (or a press release or written interview or something) that shows early use of those words?

It feels very Hollywood for the heroes to be fighting overwhelming odds and timely reinforcements to save the day. Did this ever happen in history?

I’m looking at a 1940 US Census entry taken in Philadelphia, in which a woman born before the Irish Free State existed listed it as her birthplace. The Irish Free State was dissolved before the census, in 1937, so her choice to use that name seems like a testament to potential pro-Treaty political beliefs? In the 1950 US Census she lists her birthplace as ‘Ireland.’

Thank you!

Edit: The census taker wrote down “Northern Ireland” or “Ireland” in other close by entries, so “Irish Free State” seems a deliberate choice by the person in question.

I read from another post that Stalin’s method was more “extreme” but it didn’t go into details of how it was different. Could Trotsky’s version could have worked better?

Why are the Brit’s called Anglo saxons…as opposed to Normans weren’t they conquered by the Norman’s

As someone who's studying Ayutthaya, one common theme seems to be that a majority of surviving contemporary sources written about the Ayutthaya Kingdom come from non-native sources (i.e. European travelers, Chinese imperial court records). As someone who looks at the long historical records of civilizations like the Egyptians or the Mesopotamians, I was wondering why did states in the Middle East/West seem to develop writing much earlier than in Indian, SE Asian, or general Asian civilizations and how do they compare with the Middle East/European civilizations in this regard? Am I looking at this issue primary from a standpoint of not knowing the languages of these countries and how under-researched the histories of some of these Asian civilizations are (at least in the Western world)?

How common was identity theft in the past ,since no photographs of people existed or other identification papers?

I recently learned about the fable of the Queen of Sheba’s hairy legs and Solomon’s reaction to them, which surprised me.

The luxury of hair removal seems like too much of a time wasting privilege for pre-modern times when everything took a lot more work and time, before modern technology innovations that can shift priorities to such a superficial standard like hairless legs for women.

Before this story, I thought that hair removal was mostly limited and for parasite prevention.

So it makes me curious, how common was hair removal for ancient women?

I am pretty ignorant of what entity owned the entire World Trade Center complex before they were attacked. What, if any, insurance policy did they have for the buildings?

Perhaps the idea of them being destroyed was such a farfetched idea that nothing similar to a small business insurance plan was even proposed or considered, but condominiums on the Gulf of Mexico near where I live must have insurance policies or else they're up to face massive losses whenever a significant hurricane hits. Obviously there was a massive loss in property assets taken on that day.

Were any owners of the original complex able to claim anything at all after the attacks?

Moby-Dick is, well, an odd book, and Wikipedia tells me it sold a mere 3,215 copies before going out of print in 1887. Yet Captain Ahab and the titular whale are now ubiquitous pop culture references, more recognizable than most any other bits of 19th-century American literature.

How did this shift happen? What led to the "re-discovery" of the novel and its enormous popularization?

I want to learn about the history of anarchism in Romania. I landed on Wikipedia, which says the above thing (the title), without citations. Is it true? If so, why? In a lot of other countries the first world war (at least by the end of it) has seen an increase in socialist movements. Thank you!

Reading about the rise of the east India company, I realized one of the main reasons for their growth was their army. It seems strange that a private company was allowed to have a private army in the 1600s. I'm not sure if this was common back then. Though I understand that they had it to protect their trade routes, I cannot accept the fact that the British government permitted them only to have it for that purpose. There must be another reason for this.