How accurate discribed daylife in XVII century Japan? Especially about their hygiene rules and diet.

While I do know that rape of african/black slaves was common during those times I’m having an extremely hard time grasping how the rape of children could have been something people acknowledged and accepted as a part of American life?

I know there are cases of young girls and women being raped as children by slave masters but is there any evidence or writings to suggest that such a thing was frowned upon or looked down or even illegal?

The Americans are viewed as the winners of the space race because of the Moon landing in 1969, but did it stop there? It seems like space stations and Mars landings would have been avenues for getting the upper hand on the Americans, so why did the Space Race end in 1969?

I find it peculiar that Imperial Britain would only lease Hong Kong instead of fully taking it over

Possibly a simple question, I would assume that they wore lots of wool and thick layers and such. But even walking on the street in a modern down-filled jacket I’m still shivering in 31 degree Fahrenheit weather. I imagine it got much colder and wetter in the medieval period.

So how did they do it? How did medieval people keep themselves warm enough to function in a cold, Northern European climate without modern tech?

All of these regions had people living in them for thousands of years, yet not all of them had the widely known and advanced (for their time) civilizations. The Citadel of Aleppo in Syria was built in 5,000 years ago in Europe, and lots of castles from 1,000 C.E. are still standing. The Pyramids of Egypt were built around the same time Temple of Karnak was built about 1,000 years later.

Looking at just the past 1,000 years, there are tons of castles standing in Europe, the Forbidden City and similar in China, Machu Picchu in the 15th century, etc. These trends just do not seem to follow in regions such as Southern Africa and North America. Dont get me wrong, they all have recorded civilizations and structures that have existed just as long, but they just didnt seem to be as advanced for a very long time. Most of the oldest structures in the USA exist in southern parts are from south american civilizations, even though Native Americans lives here for over 10,000 years.

One can blame the cold in North America for slowing down advancement but Europe and northern parts of Asia had tough winters as well and were still able to advance. Then you have Egypt which has the same climate as most of Africa yet they advanced much more than most of the rest of the continent. Why?

It seems to me that suicide is prohibited or frowned upon in many of the world's religions and cultures, including the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, notwithstanding some exceptions such as martyrdom.

Do we have any evidence pointing to this belief appearing in one place and then being propagated, or did it independently appear in multiple locations? Is there a benefit in discouraging suicide that helped spread this view? What is the earliest written record condemning suicide we know of? Supposing there is an inkling of truth to stories of mass assisted suicide recounted by Josephus in the sieges of Jotapata and Masada, do we know of any stories of assisted suicides prior to these examples?

There's a lot of information and opinions about when the Cold War started but when did it start to be referred to as such?

The game "Europa Universalis 4" begins in 1444. It depicts Genoa, a playable nation at that date, holding a small island or group of Islands off the western coast of Anatolia (the game calls the province Scio under Italian ownership, Chios if a Greek nation takes it -there's a Turkish toponym as well, but I don't know what it is because playing as the Ottomans from the 1444 start is easy mode) as well as a small amount of territory in the eastern part of Crimea, and on the mainland across the narrows. Did the Genoese maintain an extraterritorial empire, in those places or elsewhere? How long did they have it? Was it profitable for them? How and when did they lose it? How did they treat the locals, and how did the locals respond?

I cannot speak for the English but I know the French wanted a strong Polish ally as a replacement for Russia (given the revolution) as an eastern deterrent against Germany. However one of the most contentious portions of Versailles was the Polish Corridor, whose main purpose was to give the new Polish state access to the sea. What I am wondering, is couldn't the French have killed two birds with one stone by advocating both for a united Polish-Lithuanian State whose port would be the Lithuanian coastline?

Let me know if this is better suited for r/HistoryWhatIf, but I am genuinely curious why the Allies didn't take the opportunity to make such a large state in Eastern Europe as a bulwark both against the rise of communism in the area as well as to keep tabs on German eastern-ambition.

I'm wondering if people in the past kissed and did tongue, and how they had sex considering the hygiene was different back then. Nowadays we've convenient things like a tooth brush, tooth paste and good medical or dentist technology to fight bad breath and teeth. We also have electricity, plumbing, hot showers, sinks and tampons.

I'm wondering how people in the past dealt with the stench from their teeth and bodies. Warming water on the fireplace was expensive and time consuming because of wood, water could be polluted, they didn't have the same rinsing technology as us and owned fewer clothes. In addition they lived in different houses and worked much outside meaning sweat, dirt etc. There's many people nowadays with bad breath and body odor despite the good technology we had and that they're using them, so I'm wondering if it was worse back then.

I also wonder if they enjoyed sex, or just did it to have children regardless of how disgusting and stinky it was. This is a serious question asked out of pure curiosity.

I'm trying to set up a table top game that is inspired by my rather limited understanding of that time in history (the players basically got a jump on colonization before any of the power players).

I want to know about major themes and events in that part of history, as well as anything about the cultures of the natives. My own education in the subject is from a middle school class almost a decade ago and I'm struggling to find resources online, although that is mostly due to the fact that I'm not sure how to search for things like that. Any recommendations for resources to pick through would also be helpful.

Thanks in advance.

I'm looking mainly for pictures (preferably the more unknown ones), poems written in memory of soldiers, letters written to such soldiers and every other material than can transform the "cold distant past" into a more "warm and humane" one. This is for a personnel project, and while not directly about history it is related enough that asking a historian would make sense.

While watching the Netflix movie The King, in which the prince who would become Henry V engages in single combat wearing a full set of body armour, I began to wonder when a knight dressed as such would've been a thing of the past on the battlefield. I'm assuming it closely followed gun powder and subsequently muskets and the like becoming wide-spread but I'd imagine it took a lot of nations time to adjust to the warfare altering effects of such an invention, much like the way we're taught the tactics of World War One lagged behind the speedy growth of humans abilities to kill one another.

I couldn’t find any information online.

In Walden, Thoreau mentions Congressmen giving away seeds. In a footnote it is said that this was a traditional practice. Is this true? If so, how did it start? How long did it last?