So I’ve been watching Pride and Prejudice. And I noticed that a big critique of the 2005 film was that Mrs Bennet and Lady Catherine are wearing older fashions, because supposedly these would have been refurbished to match new fashions rather than kept the same.

This raises several questions. would a Mrs Bennet really have her dresses changed to match fashion, or would she (like many older women today) hang on to old dresses regardless of trends? if the former, how often would she have her dresses altered? and how many dresses would she have owned in the first place - all the sources I check say something different?

also, how often would younger women have their dresses altered? how often would they buy entirely new ones?

Hello,

my understanding is that the French and Russians were quite sympathethic with the Ethiopian cause, while the Italians would obviously be pretty dismayed about it. How did other western states like the UK, Prussia, Austro-Hungaria or the USA perceive the defeat of Italy by an African nation?

Y’arr. How did we come to our modern interpretations of a pirate’s accent from approximately 300 years ago. The high-pitched, growly accent with a right Scottish-sounding brogue.

Is it something early Hollywood dreamt up, or do we know how the swashbucklers of yore actually spoke?

Okay, I saw a Reddit comment the other day where someone claimed that decades ago the military had a problem where they needed to keep Christians who believed that Armageddon was a necessary part of God's plan away from jobs where they'd have any sort of access or control over the nuclear ordinance. Since they couldn't specifically say "no fundie Christian nutters allowed," they made a test that tested for essentially the same traits in a way that wasn't specifically targeted at Christians.

Obviously, I found this concept interesting. So I went online to search, but nothing came up. That leads me to believe it's just an urban legend. However, it could come from an obscure reference that isn't available online.

So is there any truth to this?

So the simplified history taught in schools is that the US scared Japan into surrender via nukes but it’s obviously more complicated than that. A historical apologist on Facebook was claiming that the US didn’t win either world war and that credit for victory in both conflicts was stolen by the US. When I pointed out how the US beat Japan fair and square they declared that the Soviet Union scared Japan more than America and its nukes. They claimed that it wasn’t Hiroshima or Nagasaki that persuaded the emperor and the high command to accept the Potsdam declaration but rather the soviets entering the war against them. How true is this? I mean I don’t deny that it played a part, that’s for sure. But I’m skeptical on that being more important than the US firebombing and nuking their cities at will and gearing up for an invasion of the home islands.

I'm mainly concerned with the 1400's. I've read that often entire families shared a single bed, which to a modern mind, feels alien. I'm sure attitudes on familial nudity were different in those times, but what about the teenagers or young adults yet to be married? I've read that it was common for the main couple of the family to have sex while the others slept beside them, so all this seems a bit squicky.

All this was gathered from separate sources, so no one has ever really painted the picture out fully. Were entire families, parents, teens, kids, grandparents, all sleeping naked together in the same big bed?

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gonna mark nsfw just in case..

If not, what other American president does his prestige resemble?

I have always wondered whether there are any cultural or political reasons for the fact that the Donald Duck cartoons depict an unmarried man (well, male duck) with three nephews. Perhaps the artists did not want Donald to have a wife, and having three sons without being married would have been considered immoral? Do we know anything about the original considerations of the artists? Are there any contemporary sources commenting on how unusual this arrangement would be?

A series of question regarding the peoples that made up the armies of the warlords of Gaul:

1.Were there Huns in Childeric/Clovis I's army ?

2.What kind of people would follow a warlord like Syagrius ? Were they Gallo Roman, or mostly Germanic ?

3.What about the Visgothic and Burgundian kingdoms ? Did their manpower come strictly from their own cultural groups ? Would they recruit the native Gallo Romans or people from other Germanic tribes ?

I'm wondering how it actually occurred in terms of arranging it, and the social response to it.

Was there just a high ranking family member who would actually order two siblings to have sex to produce a child? Or would the family get together and discuss/plan it out?

Was it something they were being obligated to do, or something they chose to do? How would they have actually felt about doing it? And was it a 'one and done' type of thing where they would have sex to produce a child, then never do it again?

I'd really love to know about the actual social dynamics of how these arrangements happened and how the participants felt. Especially since I'm not really aware of royalty or nobility doing this in my own flaired area.

Weren’t those people ultimately killed for their land?

Were there plentiful surface deposits of stuff like iron, copper, etc and only after hundreds or thousands of years of easy pickings did "mining" need to begin?

Even more confusing to me is how exactly they would have gone about creating metal weapons and tools from stone-age technology. Can softer metals just be hammered into shapes with rocks? Were there clay molds to melt and mold metal?

So I'm watching "Freud" the Netflix show (lol) and Franz Josef has all these titles (Kaiser of Austria, King of Hungary, Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Galicia, Lodomeria, and Illyria). He's also referred to as King of Jerusalem. I get the other titles as they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but I don't understand the King of Jerusalem title, since it was my understanding Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time.

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Was this practice common of European emperors/rulers to artificially beef up their resume or some hold over practice from the Crusades?

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Thanks!

Did these novels even receive much attention outside of China around the time they were written?

I was wondering where the idea that Jews want to take over the world comes from? This is something you hear crackpot conspiracy theorists say all time, and sometimes a joke made about conspiracy theorists. I know Hitler in Mein Kampf thinks the Russian Bolsheviks were a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world but did the idea start with him?

In Australia we have recently been gifted with the release of letters between Sir John Kerr and Buckingham Palace regarding the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975. Apparently Sir Kerr and Martin Charteris were quite keen on discussing the actions the Governor General should take and what exactly his role was in the constitutional crisis.

This is all rather fascinating, but do the papers present new information beyond the relevant actors involvement? Do they at all indicate opinions of the monarch? Or did the Queen never see them herself? How active was the palace in the affairs of other former British colonies in the postwar period?

In pop culture, you always see the Sphynx portrayed as some cosmic riddle-giver. Why is this?