Hi historians of Reddit, I have started to explore the history of the KKK for a project I'm making and why the suit looks like the Spanish festival processions.

Vacines were not a thing at the time. Why Europeans didn't die from native american ilnesses?

I was listening to NPR and they interviewed an American History professor from American University and he mentioned how the Republican party was going down the path or early 19th century Democrats. Saying that Democrats at the time believed black people were lesser and they were the ones who wanted segregation and Jim Crow laws. He made it seem like they were the only ones that wanted it, though I was always thought that was a value that was held not based on party ties.

I'm from the south. Just seemed like we were mainly red states. And I know we had a history from segregation so what he said seems contrary to what I know of local history. Granted, I know very little.

I've encountered this quote a number of times in various books and articles avout history, and while it's certainly very vivid, I never really get what it's supposed to mean: "A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

Can anyone shed light on what Benjamin is trying to say here, or why so many writers feel compelled to reproduce it?

I hope this question doesn't break any rules, sorry if it's too meta.

I read that knights were beholden to their overlord only for 40 days a year, isn't that extremely insufficient for any military campaign?

I have no doubts that the French were a key necessity in the American Revolution, but a friend of mine likes to insinuate that they practically won the Revolution for the Americans and likes to cite that there were more French troops at the Battle of Yorktown than Americans. How much truth is there to that?

Were people or at least governments in the UK / US awware at least of the widespread persecution of jews in nazi germany?

My understanding is this, and the Latin version, medieval, is a term coined in the renaissance era meaning the period in the 'middle' of themselves and the classical period of antiquity.

But in middle ages did they have a term for their own era?

Hi so I may be biased because I sleep in a hammock in my house but I'm still curious as to why it isn't more common

Because they're pretty easy to set up for colder climates and they can be put into any house with framing

I've got a few theories

1. It's not traditional/ doesn't allow multiple people to sleep comfortably, which people through history have liked to sleep in large groups touching each other .

2. While being cheap to do today, it was just easier for common people to throw together straw mattress and the using so much strong rope and canvas just wasn't practical for the time

3. People just saw it as a navel thing and mattresses worked just fine so why try to re-invent the wheel ?

I’m sure battles during war time weren’t fought EXCLUSIVELY with samurai, but was this a case of “hey give that guy a spear” or were there other standing forces?

It's 22 years later, and it's come up again because of various reasons beyond the scope of this question. What I'm wondering is, if this event had happened in some other country, this event seems it would be described as a political coup. But, it doesn't seem really talked about in the US, and I'm curious about why, and what lead up to it. The whole thing was just, swept under the rug really, and I'm baffled and curious about it.

English spelling before modern dictionaries was a notoriously idiosyncratic affair. Was Latin, also a pre-dictionary language, similar? Or did the Romans have some other force making them converge on particular spellings of words?

I have seen maps and descriptions of the old heptarchy kingdom borders, but each one seems to say something slightly different to the other. For example, I have seen some maps that include the southern part of modern-day Gloucestershire into Wessex, some that have the Mercian border all the way down to present-day Bristol, and some maps show a rough line between Mercia and Northumbria with no real land feature to mark it.

So my question is - do we actually know where the old borders of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria etc were, or is it a bit 'fuzzy'?

My understanding is that, while peat-smoked barley whiskey was invented in Scotland, it was not aged in oak barrels until a wine-grape blight struck France and, facing a serious alcohol shortage, the king sent empty wine barrels up to Scotland with the request that the be filled with whiskey and shipped back. Meaning that the original whiskey would have been white whiskey for 2-3 hundred years until this event.

This story always stuck me as a bit apocryphal but at the same time my limited knowledge of the fauna of the British Isles fits the idea that suitable aging woods were unavailable. And given that modern scotch additionally is often aged in used French wine barrels it makes sense to me.

Is there any truth to this?

In general do we have a good idea of the prevalence of aging distilled spirits on woof in the Western world? I own a small distillery that focuses on historical spirits, and try to read as much as I can and it seems that, despite the degree to which aged spirits is the norm now it wasn't done at all until the 15th or 16th century in Europe, and was abjectly avoided in the Americas until the mid 19th century.

The logistics of picking up Parma's army with the Armada seemed incredibly difficult for a number of reasons. Wouldn't it have been easier to bring the men to the army and then invade England from Spain?

I've always wondered about this - even though I was educated about the male gaze in a very liberal/progressive university art program, the concept has always seemed to appeal more to ideas about modesty and gender roles that are more prevalent in traditional Christian world views than a more liberal view of women and sexuality.