If this isn’t the right sub, sorry, wasn’t sure where else to ask.

My grandfather faught in WW2 and was one of the platoons to land in Germany and topple the Nazis near the end, overtaking a the last line and storming many officer head quarters. As a trophy they took a banner from one of the main head quarters and they all signed it, in my eyes signifying a great feat in toppling Hitler. My grandfather and dad were really proud of this feat and has been in my family since.

However, we have no idea what to do with it now. It’s in an Acid free box in a storage unit in pretty good condition. We don’t want to throw it away since it’s apart of my families history and those who signed it’s efforts to stopping the Germans.

Any idea on where or who I should reach out to? Maybe a museum or VFW museum so they can get the names and keep it safe?

Thanks everyone

I was looking around for accounts of First Nation (I'm USA but really like this Canadian term) peoples childbirth practices and didn't come up with anything of substance. It was mainly diary entries from early European male settlers who wouldn't have access to these types of events so their accounts are inaccurate or lacking at best. Is there any recorded accounts of what kind of care was administered? Is there anything of substance recorded?

I've heard mixed things about their views and opinions of both, such as hitler considering the japanese to be honorary arians, but also that they were only in a enemy of my enemy situation, like with italy. For the united states I've heard that they thought well of the united states because of their large german population, but also that they considered them a weak nation of mongrels. So did they believe in one of these opinions, or were their views more mixed?

I'm watching the Apollo 11 footage on Youtube and thinking this event was an immense engineering and physics achievement.

A related thought came to me years ago after reading Landau and Lifshitz's physics books from the 1960s and comparing them with contemporary works. The Soviet physicists' descriptions of natural phenomena and the challenging and technical mathematics they use in these works struck me with the possibility that Cold War Soviet physicists may have generally exceeded contemporary physicsts in capability.

But these are just my feelings and impressions as a relatively well read physics graduate student watching Apollo 11 footage on youtube, and they're not backed up by fact.

Is there any historical merit to this perspective that some types of knowledge peaked with the Cold War? Have historians of science and engineering noted any type of decline in our technical scientific knowledge since the Cold War? I'd like to get some perspective on this issue. It's clear we have not gone to the moon again, at the very least.

i know not alot of people could read back then so did they ever read the bible? (im talking about lower class crusaders)

What did the 24-hours after the abolishment of slavery look like? Did slaves just walk off farms in a single day? Was it a gradual transition? Where did they go and what did they do, seeing as they had nothing?

For our history class, we have to have a 5 minute presentation on a certain work of art. As my assignment I received "Pity the Sorrows of a Poor Old Man" by Théodore Géricault. Come to find there's almost no information on it, not even a Wikipedia page. Does anyone have any sources of information I can use?

Could Germany really have beaten Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union all in a war at the same time?

I was wondering if they were celebrities for posing for a famous artist or were they slut shamed for being nude.

I was surprised to hear it because it was said by a friend who is generally very level headed and logical about things. He said that the Rape of Nanking was basically more of a failure to keep soldiers in discipline, rather than a coordinated effort by the Japanese High Command to commit genocide of the city. Basically that the individual soldiers just ran around doing whatever they wanted like the sack of a medieval city, while their commanders were never told about these incidents and weren't even able to keep their men in line if they wanted to.

What is the historical evaluation of this?

I'm debating between doing it on either

the Japanese Communist Party during the Cold War

or

Japan's relationship with sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st century.

Any good sites that you might recommend? The paper isn't due for 3.5 months but of course I'll be working on it starting this weekend to assemble sources.

I informed my professor the difficulty would be finding those sources in English and having enough for the paper.

any suggestions or recommendations are welcome?

Heck, if you know of a more interesting and easier topic to write on, def please pass it on. I always try to aim for something unique that causes me to learn something new.

One guy in my class was choosing to write on Godzilla's appeal globally but I felt that was too simplistic

My understanding is that just before the Romans annexed them, the gallic tribes were turning into a society that was ruled by nobles with a relatively weak monarch to lead them. That sounds somewhat like the early middle ages to me, although I don’t know about the rest of Europe. I know a king from 100 BC ruling over a huge kingdom like that of the visigoths or Vandals from 500 AD would be unthinkable, but it seems Ariovistus was on that track. How was the political system and power structure different? Were they very different at all?

European diplomacy since the start of the high middle ages has been defined by the idea of ‘balance of power’. No one state should ever grow powerful enough that it could take over everything. For example, almost all of Europe was united time and again against France under Napoleon not because he posed an immediate threat to all of Europe at once, but because with each conquest of a single small country the next one fell easier, until by the time he attacked the big countries like the UK it would be too late. People had that foresight to band together once it became clear their common foe could grow out of hand. Yet when Carthage fell to Rome, the Hellenistic Kingdoms barely complained. When Alexander conquered Persia, no one thought they could be next. When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, it’s like the Germans and Britons never even considered that they could be next on the chopping block. Rome fought and crushed each of her foes one by one, they never united in the face of terminal danger. There was no ‘containment war’. There was no ‘anti-roman coalition’. No Hellenistic Kingdom contacted the barbarians of the west to help them. Why did that all change after the fall of rome?

How did the Ottomans respond to the age of exploration? Was there any attempt to make a voyage to the new world by any Ottoman explorers?

Edit: Kinda screwed up the title, my bad.

I am aware the Norsemen had their own caste structure, with slaves at the bottom and the jarls at the top. In the aftermath of battles between warring factions, would this be switched around, or were slaves mostly reserved to freemen who could not pay dues and forced into slavery?

In certain series (such as Vinland Saga), the author portrays a daughter of a Norse jarl from Hordaland being enslaved by a Danish jarl after her father's forces lose in battle. In another, the Last Kingdom, a son of one of the Northumberland lords is also similarly enslaved by the Danes, although he was Anglo-Saxon and not Norse.

Would either of this have been possible, and was it commonplace for Norsemen to enslave noblemen among their own peoples and others?

I was hoping to ask the experts about Pre-Abolitionist gun control in the United States, which is basically where my knowledge of any sort of gun control begins.

So my question is, was there ever a civilian arms control movement in the US before racially motivated Abolitioniat laws popped up in the South? Societies were still very agrarian even away from growing centers, but I'm just curious just how far gun control actually ever started in my country. Thanks!

In the book "Returning to Silence" by Dainin Katagiri, a poem is presented written by a Japanese surgeon Senri Ueno one week before being executed for war crimes. What is known about Senri Ueno? It is explained in the book that he attempted to save the life of an American pilot, only to find the pilot stabbed to death when he left the patient unattended, and was executed for the murder.

When reading the history of political movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, I have often come across reference to underground newspapers. While I understand what they are, I am curious as to the practice of these illegal materials - the history I read often gives very generic descriptions of how these papers were made, transported and kept hidden, if at all. So I am curious for askhistorians to tell me how underground newspapers, in your period of study, were:

• actually made
• who they were made by
• how successful they were,
• how they were kept secret,
• how you would acquire them
• what would happen if you were caught with them
• And any other information you have about underground newspapers.

Thank you in advance for answering my question!

Not that they were necessarily the same, but it seems from what I can tell people had allegiance to and considered themselves to be from a specific state rather than being an American. For example Robert E. Lee's statements and reasoning for choosing Virginia over the country. In this context the ideas of federalism and the autonomy of individual states makes more sense to me than it does today when we're more interconnected than then.