My understanding is that slavery becomes prominent in environments where it's more cost effective to keep slaves in line than it is to simply pay them, i.e. places with natural labor shortages. Considering the degree to which conflict in Southeast Asia featured conflict over major population centers and the presence of warring hill tribes, prominent maritime trade routes and endemic piracy, it feels like a natural environment for a slave trade to thrive. However, I generally hear very little about slavery in Southeast Asia. Why is this?

Hello, I am from the Philippines and I am very concerned about historical revisionism.

Just a background, we recently held our elections and the person who won was the son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Now I am not a historian myself, but all I know is that he stole around 10 billion USD in his time as president while also killing and torturing thousands of people when he declared Martial Law. I didn’t have second thoughts about it because… why would I doubt history?

Don’t take my word for it, but I believe one of the reasons he won is disinformation. Tiktok, Facebook, and Youtube was used to give alternative views on history - such as them being framed, them being rich prior to joining politics, but most importantly the Marcos Era being referred to as a golden era in the Philippines.

Right now there are news circulating that some books pertaining to Martial Law should be banned.

I participated in fact-checking and fighting disinformation during the campaign season but it seems like the alternative history has already prevailed. It’s concerning that a lot people now refer to TikTok and other platforms for their sources of history, and banning these books will validate all of that. Not to mention, Sara Duterte, daughter of current president Rodrigo Duterte, has been appointed as the Secretary for the department of Education and they are planning to tell the “real” history.

Sorry for the long block of text but main question is

• How do we even fight this?
• How can we convince people that anecdotes from their relatives aren’t enough to invalidate the atrocities that happened to other people?
• How do you respond to people saying “history is written by the victors” as an argument that history is inaccurate?

If this is post is too political, I’m sorry. I’m just really concerned for my countrymen.

Is this because they are too associated with Christianity, and so Jews stopped using them over time? Or were they even banned from using them by Christians?

Or is it that the Anglicised versions of these names are ones popular in Britain and America, while there are non-Anglicised versions more popular in Israel and amongst the Jewish diaspora? (Like Simeon/Shimon)

Am I wrong about the Jewish nature of some of these names? The apostle Philip, for example, I've not listed as that's actually a Greek name. Same with Paul (Saul is of course a fairly common Jewish name).

I was talking with my friend about decarceration and the debate shifted to has any society ever existed without prisons. She said native Americans didn’t have them but when I pressed further it seems she was making assumptions based on the smaller societies and nomadic lifestyle of many tribes but we both agreed it seemed plausible.

So my question is did the indigenous tribes have prisons? What was the general course of dealing with someone who “broke the law” so to speak.

Why did everyone in France just stop hating them?

The common narrative is Operation Downfall was a monumental plan to invade the main islands of Japan, which the Allies expected to be fought to the death. They anticipated massive casualties and so they created a huge stockpile of purple hearts. The operation was to commence in November 1945. Instead, President Truman mercifully opted to conduct nuclear bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to Japan surrendering in August.

Yet many of the senior military leaders said the nuclear bombings were unnecessary. The Allies had complete air and naval superiority. If Japan was no longer a military threat, then how could they justify such a costly invasion? Did they prefer to blockade the islands instead? If so, did they have any idea on how long Japan would hold out?

Need to get quotations that reflect the orthodox, revisionist and post revisionist schools of thought from the cold war

Just finished a one-two book combination of Prange's At Dawn We Slept, covering Pearl Harbour, and Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword covering the The Battle of Midway. I would like to ask historians as to what books they recommend that cover the later years of the Pacific War, preferably ones that maintain the even-handed tone of these two books (which is to say they are not overflowing with what you might call American hagiography, like some excessively jingoistic books I have read).

In other words: I want to keep reading about the Pacific War with books that try and convey the motivations and doings of both sides of the conflict: what books should I look for that cover the period between Shattered Sword and John Dower's Embracing Defeat?

So we know that Nobunaga burned Mt Hiei to the ground with the children, monks, and women inside. However, my question is - was this particularly cruel of an act to do for the samurai in this time period? I'm aware that in general, to us, it seems cruel (and is), but there are also instances of other samurai, like Masamune running around and murdering people down to the dogs in castles and sending letters bragging about it, while other samurai are basically burning villages and killing peasants as they go along. So, was Nobunaga's act extremely cruel than usual for the Sengoku period?

I am writing Victorian era story and I’m really trying to be though. Does anyone know the proper etiquette expected from a late Victorian era man in daily life? Especially in terms of dating?

Good people of r/AskHistorians. I've been tasked with teaching THE KITE RUNNER next year and I am, I'm ashamed to say, a dummy about Afghan history. What dilettante-friendly resources would be good for me to read to help me understand this book as best I can before I dive into teaching it?

I recently read that pratically all the well-known Bolshevik leaders such as Stalin, Trotsky and even Lenin (and many others) were once caught and arrested by the Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) on numerous occasions. My main question is, why did the idea never dawn on the police to summarily execute them in order to remove a very dangerous threat from society and to the state? Each time these men were caught, they were 'exiled' to Siberia for a few years, and that didn't do much since they returned and continued more extreme political agitation... This is especially surprising when it comes to Stalin, because besides his troublesome political ideology, he was implicated in bank robberies and murders (1907 Tiflis bank robbery is one example) so he should have been treated as a dangerous criminal first of all. Unlike other Socialist factions, the Bolsheviks were completely un-democratic; they refused to participate in duma elections even and desired the overthrow of the monarchy. Did the Tsarist police not take them seriously as a threat? My follow-up question is, why historians tend to write how "brutal" the Okhrana was (for example that its policies directly influenced how the Soviet Cheka was run etc.), which is laughable compared to how more brutal the NKVD or Cheka were in their millions of executions of innocent people and holding millions of prisoners as forced laborers in gulag camps. It reminds me of how the SAVAK in Iran was called "brutal" when their bodycount and number of prisoners was actually very low, while their post-revolution sucessors murdered hundreds of thousands of more people.