When you see someone draw a crown they usually draw something like this. However, when you look at results for real-life crowns, you see something very different. Almost all of them have some sort of domed cage on top. I understand that drawings and depictions in media will often involve simplification, but the difference seems to be more than just simplification. The spiked ring shape seems to come from something else entirely.

I’m citing the top answer on this quora question (which itself cites sources), https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-cold-war-spies-would-marry-and-even-have-children-with-their-targets-as-part-of-their-cover, which paints a picture of a U.S. government riddled by Soviet spies. So much so, that Soviet spies successfully infiltrated the Manhattan Project and helped advance the Soviet project by years.

Were the OSS and CIA just novices at human intelligence? Why were the Soviets so able to fill the American government with spies, while American spies in the Soviet Union & Russia can practically be counted on one hand?

The share of USA (British North America) in the horrible atlantic slave trade was around 4%.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States (Refer the table)

Why is that when the word "slavery" is mentioned, only the images of horrific slave struggles of southern USA appears prominent? Does this mean that the slaves in the southern USA were treated compartively better than the rest of americas, so that they could learn, read and write memoirs? Does it also mean the abolistionist movement is much more prominent in USA so that events and people assosiated with slavery are recorded relatively in mugh higher proportion? Or does it simply mean the USA has come to terms with it's history and started making conscious effort about the history of slavery and encouraged depiction of it in the medium(books, TV, movies) and thus, it appears that deplication of slavery is skewed towards USA?

In short, I don't hear much about the struggles of slavery in Carribean, Brazil etc. Is it a language issue (i.e I don't have access to portrayal of slavery in these countries) or it that the people of USA has made more effort to depict the portrayal of slavery in their media? Or any other reasons?

Thank you

Previous

Today:

Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Sunday Digest (formerly the Day of Reflection). Nobody can read all the questions and answers that are posted here, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.

One of the hallmarks of /r/AskHistorians is the high rate at which comments are removed, and subsequently, the 'seas of [removed]' that some popular threads turn into at times. For most regulars, this is something they don't only expect, but appreciate! But for newer users, and those who might not understand the underlying intentions of large scale removal, it can be confusing and frustrating, despite our best efforts to make clear what is going on with the stickied Automod comment.

So Just What Is Going On?

The most important thing to understand is that /r/AskHistorians is a space created with a specific purpose, namely to provide a place where users can, quite literally, Ask Historians their questions, and complementary, provide a place where knowledgeable users want to contribute by writing answers to the questions in their spare time. Because popular doesn't equal correct, and because being first doesn't equal being good, the Moderation Team curates the subreddit to ensure that the only content left standing is the content that deserves to be.

A joke can be written in seconds, and get 1000 upvotes in a few hours; likewise some muddled facts which are kind of right about some things can be posted nearly as fast to the same result. But a good answer can take hours of work, and if it is forced to compete with those low effort comments posted hour before, it will often languish unseen by most. That defeats the very heart of what the subreddit intends to be, and thus we remove comments which quality answers shouldn't have to compete against.

We won't dwell too much on what deserving means, as the previous Roundtables engage with that idea plenty, but the key point is that removal is a important part of ensuring that this subreddit lives up to what it is intended to be. In an ideal world, of course, no comments would be removed, but that is outside of our control, as it requires the users to demonstrate self-control and awareness, which we accept is impossible in an online space of our size, which long ago reached its Eternal September.

What is Getting Removed Then?

Some users, based on replies we get and META threads we see, are apparently convinced that the Mod team removes good answers. For what possible reason, I can't be sure, although we have been accused of political biases, as one might expect, but also more bizarre conspiracies such as gaining sexual satisfaction from removals. The simple fact of the matter is though that our rules are well publicized, and we expect users to read them before posting, and the only comments we are removing are the ones that break them! Nine times out of ten, they aren't even reasonable attempts at answers. People crack jokes, people post links to a barely related Wiki page, people make death threats and call us Nazis, or people post startlingly wrong information. And then of course there is the snowball effect of users who don't read the rules or the Automod comment, and start asking "Where are all the comments!?" We occasionally shares views of this, such as here or here.

A small minority of removed comments are good faith efforts at answering, which while showing some understanding of the rules, fall short for various reasons. These too, are removed of course, as we can't simply bend the rules willy-nilly, but in these cases, even if we don't post a public removal notice, we often reach out to users if we believe it likely that with a little nudge and a bit of coaching, they can get their answer up to what we expect.

But Have You Tried Doing [X]?

We've been doing this for years, and have heard plenty of suggestions on what we should be doing instead, or simple claims that our philosophy is in error. Telling us, though, that "a bad answer is better than no answer" not only misses the point of this subreddit, but certainly says something odd about the writer, who essentially admits to us that they would rather learn incorrect information as long as it means they have something to read! No one should be surprised that "No answer is better than a bad answer" is a fairly core value for us, and one which we seek to attain here, but anyways, to run through a few of the most common things that we hear!

"Why Don't You Let the Upvotes Decide?"/"Why Can't I Decide What is a Good Answer Myself?"

Upvotes have some uses. Nothing warms our hearts more than to see a rules-breaker ruthlessly downvoted in the few short minutes before the Mod Team manages to remove it, but their utility only goes so far. In History, being correct isn't something that is determined by popular consensus. It is something which is determined by good historical practices! While even the Moderation team isn't infallible, we review answers against an involved and carefully developed set of criteria, and we have a damn good track record while doing so! But we have seen plenty of comments getting quickly upvoted, despite being very wrong, in the span between posting and review by a moderator, so we know very well that the consensus of laypersons can be far from correct in many cases.

For those who remember when the Colbert Show debuted, "The Wørd" of the first episode was Truthiness, which is:

The quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.

In a nutshell, that is what Upvotes determine. Not the correctness of the comment, but its Truthiness, its comportment with what the user thinks is true - or at least sounds it - but they often might be quite wrong about. An example I use is this thread, which saw innumerable comments about the Transatlantic Accent, the one fact about mid-century accents everyone seems to know. That isn't the answer, but it doesn't matter, without removal the upvotes certainly would have determined it was hours before anyone wrote something to the contrary.

The Moderation Team isn't claiming infallibility, but we are claiming that we have the tools and experience to do a pretty good job at this. Certainly a much better one than the average user is capable of, and that of course is why so many users come here!

"Why Don't You Flair Answers as 'Questionable' or 'Not to Standard' or 'High Quality'"

In the first, we wouldn't want to do this. Removal is a metaphorical stick that might not work against users who don't yet know the rules, but at least keeps most of those who do at bay. Take that away, and the floodgates are unleashed, as this simply incentivizes users to post poor quality answers, not to mention increases our workload considerably.

More importantly though, we literally can't. Reddit doesn't have that functionality! Only threads can be Flaired, not Comments! Please, at least suggest things which are technically possible, even if we won't like it...

Why Not Leave the First Response Approved Until a Good One and Then Remove It

That is kind of like the worst of both worlds, isn't it? Why would we allow wrong information to stick around even for a little bit? Why would we implement something that still disincentivizes higher quality contributions like that would? Of all the suggestions we get regularly, this one baffles the most. I don't understand the people who explicitly state that they would be happy to read bad information as long as they have something to read... Very odd suggestions.

"Other Subs Have an 'Chatter Goes Here', Comment. Why Don't You for Lesser Responses?"

A few reasons! While we have an Automod comment with the Rules and a 'Remind Me' link, we lock it to prevent replies as we don't want that to happen! First off, one of the most frustrating things that users bring up - and which we agree! - is that the comment count reflects all comments, whether removed or not. The higher the comment count, the more likely it is people assume there is an answer. Allowing something like that will only mean the comment count rises even quicker, but still without an answer to the question.

Additionally though, that increase in comments still would need to be moderated. It wouldn't be a true free-for-all space, and whatever limits were relaxed there, we'd still need to enforce the ones that exist. This is potentially a massive increase in moderator workload, not just in volume, but also in the kinds of interactions we would have to deal with. None of us signed up to moderate a discussion subreddit, and few of us want to. It takes a whole different kind of moderation to deal with, and it is one that, as a team, we are not interested in handling.

Finally, more philosophically, it doesn't suit the nature of the subreddit. College classes don't have a back-row set aside for students who want to crack jokes and yell out their half-brained opinions, and while we aren't the academy itself, we do aim to provide a more academic atmosphere than the rest of reddit. It just isn't conducive to our aims here. If we allow users to post their guesses there, other people are still reading them, and perhaps they never come back so it is the only thing they read, despite it being incorrect! Why would we want to allow that to happen, and to undercut the aims we have here?

"BUT THIS IS CENSORSHIP!!!!11"

What we do here isn't censorship, it is curation. If the rules were secret, or if we moderated in a wildly different manner than the rules stated, it most certainly might be so, but all we do is remove comments which break the clearly stated rules of the subreddit in an effort to create a certain kind of space to be enjoyed by people who want that experience. Just like you would get kicked out of the silent reading room at the library for blasting death metal on your BT speaker, you'll get kicked out of here for breaking our rules. Not enjoying something that other people do enjoy doesn't make you somehow right for fighting against it and trying to ruin it for others. It makes you an asshole.

You can find the rest of this Rules Roundtable series here