In terms of rigurosity, exhaustivity, and literary quality. I would prefer it to be an essay or a non-fiction book of course. I don't have any kind of problem with big length.

I was listening to Paul Kennedy's interview with Anne Applebaum where she claimed that the famine ended with the harvest of 1933, proof that it was an artificial creation.

But they were planting grain in Ukraine, and it seemed like they would have been reliant on the USSR to ship them grain seed. What would stop the hungry peasantry from eating the seeds that were delivered right to their door (or even covertly grinding them into flour)?

And at a time when people were resorting to cannibalism, why were they not be eating germinating wheat sprouts?

So in essence my question is, if the famine only ended in the harvest, how were the Ukranian peasants made to wait so long?

I can understand why, because it is so large but if that’s it again why is Brazil a thing and not a pan Spanish speaking South American nation a thing?

In the 50s and 60s, the CIA funded experimentation with LSD in a number of American universities, where students like Ken Kesey were paid to take LSD under observation. That much I've been able to verify with reliable sources.

I remember hearing a story that during an LSD experiment, the experimenters were fascinated by Kesey's ability to accurately estimate how much time had passed--most subjects experienced wild time distortion under LSD. They didn't realize that Kesey was counting his breaths in a deliberate attempt to screw with them.

Is there any truth to this story? It's very difficult to google.

I've been looking at a lot of photographs from 1918 recently and in the course of that I've been struck by how quickly female fashions in particular changed after World War One. Granted they changed for men too, but not so dramatically.

Any thoughts on what caused this and how quickly it occurred? Just based on what I'm seeing, it seems to have gotten rolling quickly in the 1920s and changed even into the 1930s.

So most of the Roman's enemies were not exactly as civilized as they were. They did not have that extensive structure of law, philosophy, architecture and so on and most of these enemies were either raider like the Vikings, people who were not as advanced in terms of technology like the Celts, or because they simply had a different culture like the Carthaginians.

But in actuality, they were not exactly as barbaric as one might think so why was this the case?

I'm looking for sources/books on the reactions/experiences of Asian peoples during the 14th century (or later) specifically relating to plague. I know that the plague helped to destabilise the Yuan dynasty (along with a host of other factors) and the Mongolian empire as a whole, but have yet to find any decent accounts or research into contemporary reactions and experiences during the period.

I have in mind something along the lines of Michael W. Dols': "Comparative Communal Responses to the Black Death In Muslim and Christian Societies", especially if it has evidence of non-Islamic/Christian responses to the plague, although any contemporary Asian evidence would be extremely helpful.

Thank you

Every now and then we like to run Floating Features--periodic threads intended to allow for more open discussion that allows a multitude of possible answers from people of all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise. We expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith, but there is far more scope for speculation and general chat than there would be in a usual thread.

Happy Pride Month, /r/AskHistorians!

One of the most strongly-entrenched historiographical ideas has become the idea that "homosexuality" as an identity did not exist before the late 19th/early 20th century. Not, obviously, that men never had sex with men and women never had sex with women, but that, for example, (in early modern terminology) "sodomy" was something men did, or (in medieval clerics' minds) "the sin against nature" was something women had absolutely no idea about unless men told them so shhhh.

So historians often adopt a more restricted, LGBT-focused version of literary studies' queer theory to peer into the past. We look for non-normative patterns of gender partnerships or signs of attraction, and non-Western-normative expressions of gender.

So today, tell us about some of your favorite LGBT+ people or moments of homoeroticism, genderbending, and love between people of the same gender in history, before and after the 1900 divide!

I've been doing research on West African people in the Medieval Age (specifically the Empire of Ghana), and I'm hoping some kind folks here might be able to fill me in on some details I can't seem to find. While I'm told a lot about the nature of their King (the Ghana) and their views on gold, I'm finding very little on the livelihoods of the common citizens.

1. What did they eat? What sorts of edible plants and animals were available?

2. What jobs were common? Was everyone either a herdsman or merchant?

3. What sorts of clothing was worn?

4. What sorts of artistic endeavors were taken by the citizens? Art, dance, songs, etc.

5. Were they a communal people who lived closely together or were they more spread out?

While I'm looking specifically for answers about the Empire of Ghana, I'm more than happy to take any insight from the Mali and Songhai empires as well, since I would assume that they'd be similar. I'm also looking for any interesting facts about the region at that time, even if it's not about the lifestyles of the people.

I see this quoted several places online but I cannot find an original source.

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I mean obviously, if your wife/husband was being taken by the SS or Gestapo you would've done something right?