I'm brand new to this site so I'm not real sure how it works. I am looking for someone who knows the history of Nauplion, Greece, and who I can create a running communication with. Am I on the right site?

Durling and Martinez cite several opposing theories in their notes to Inferno 11, such as speaking a foreign language over one's mother tongue or opposing the Holy Roman Empire, but ultimately choose the traditional approach that the Sodomites being punished in the Seventh Circle are homosexual. This is reinforced by the Terrace of Lust in Purgatorio, where unambiguously gay people ("Those who are coming with us committed the offense for which Caesar, in his triumph, once heard himself reproached as 'Queen,'" Purgatorio 26.76-79) shout "Sodom and Gomorrah" (26.40).

In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas states that "the sexual intercourse of males, which we specifically call the sin contrary to nature, is contrary to the sexual union of male and female" (Q. 94, Art. 3, ad. 2). Dante borrows a lot from Aquinas in the Divine Comedy, yet he considers homosexual lust equivalent to heterosexual. Are there any precedents to this in medieval Italy or the rest of Europe, or is this a case of Dante being unusually tolerant for his time?

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I remember hearing that rouge used to be associated with harlotry and prostitution. Nowadays, rogue is a very popular beauty product, and many of my friends have collections of rogue/blush. What changed?

Everytime I google it it shows how many Crusades were there, not Crusaders.

Researching a slave right now whose duties included taking care of the livestock on a farm, and it occurred to me that I haven't read much about horses in sub-Saharan Africa. And while East Africa has cows, they don't seem to figure prominently to the west. I know guineafowl were domesticated, but otherwise, what kind of livestock would a sub-Sarahan West African of the mid-18th century be familiar with before coming to America?

My wife and I recently had our first baby, and the topic of breastfeeding in public has come up a lot. I am curious how women in the 18th and 19th century U.S. dealt with breastfeeding when in public places, especially church. Did they breastfeed openly, or take measures to hide their breasts or otherwise seek privacy?

EDIT: Fixed typo

Is this a relatively new thing or have they been doing it for centuries (or even longee)? If it's not a new phenomenon, what did they use before nail polish existed?

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Historically a lot of mines in Britain had a colliery band that was usually funded by contributions from their fellow miners. Many of these bands still exist today even though the mines have closed down.

Why did these bands form across different mines across the country and why brass bands in particular?

Currently it is quite common for women (at least in Western countries) to shave their legs. When was this fashion trend introduced and was there ever any other reason to do this?

When looking into the history of the man on the $20 I've seen conflicting numbers over things like how many duels he had, if his parrot actually used profanity regularly, and lots of the craziness soroundinfg him. So, I'm wondering, what crazy portions of his story are factual?

I've come across some claims that there was a kind of ritualized public rape of male slaves used as punishment, referred to as "breaking the buck," but I don't know whether the sources I've come across are reliable.

Would a slave owner in the antebellum southern US who preferred men be regarded as particularly scandalous, if his activities became known to the local (free/white) community? Or would it be more like a slave owner and slave women -- i.e. it's not something you would publicly brag about, exactly, but if people found out you had such proclivities, it's not a big deal?

I know that the US traded immunity from prosecution for the data which is why there weren't any neremberg trial style proceedings for the Japanese War crimes. Did the US actually learn anything of value? Were lives saved by the data not being destroyed?

Some argue that Germany invaded the USSR to keep its war machine going, that it was going to run out of oil in August 1941. But the Germans found oil fields that were only destroyed, and didn't get a small one pumping (Maikop) until 1943.

So how were they making up the deficit? Especially since Barbarossa would surely increase the demand for oil and even bring the deadline forward?

Hus's teachings spread through Bohemia and lead to a popular uprising with far reaching consequences such as crusades and even Joan of Arc threatened to sort hussites out, yet Luther who was inspired by Hus gets all the credit.

Is it the fact that the movement got eventually defeated or is it just the accessibility of sources (language barrier etc.)?

I wonder what IVs used to be like - I know glass bottles were used. Now IVs sit in the vein with that flexible tubing. When I'm in the hospital for a long-term stay, the plastic pieces nurses use or even leave behind after medication administration are scattered all around me. I can't even imagine living with an IV that weren't a flexible cannula so easily placed anywhere and lived with for so long. Even beyond just IV technology, I'm wondering what it was like in a hospital before the convenience, disposability, and sterile nature of plastics and modern plastic-like materials.

I’m a recent subscriber, and actually came here as a result of the Slate article.

My grandmother and her 2 sisters came to the US in between WW1 and WW2. As a result of the post-war economic difficulties in Germany, their father sent them to the US to get jobs and send money back to the family in Germany. Their family was a very large farming family in northern Germany. The girls went to the US and the boys stayed to work on the farm.

My grandmother died when I was very young and I never really spent much time with her sisters before they also passed away. The connection to my family in Germany basically died with them.

However, I recently learned of a cousin who still lives in the old farming town that my grandmother grew up in. I recently went to Germany for work and took some time to drive up to introduce myself.

The visit was pretty mind blowing, actually. My cousin actually lives in the farm that my grandmother grew up on. Also, he had a pile of old photo albums that included pictures of my mother, my sister, and even me. My grandmother apparently used to send photos to her family.

Anyway, while we were going over photos and talking, I saw a couple of pictures of men in Nazi uniforms. I knew from my grandmother that she had a brother who was a pilot in WW2, but I was so incredibly young that I had no concept of the Holocaust or any of that at the time.

I didn’t ask my cousin who the people in those pictures were and he was very quick to skip those pages.

So here’s my question: how many Germans (prior to the end of WW2) had no idea what was going on?

Follow-up: how likely is it that those people in those military uniforms in my cousin’s photo album knew about what was going on? I didn’t see the uniforms for very long, but they were black.

Was the title bestowed upon him retroactively? I'm assuming that, since lions are not native to England/Western Europe, it would be difficult to conceive of a lion, unless of course, a "lion" referred to some other creature.