As an example, was it possible to take a transatlantic voyage from New York City to Hamburg in on May 1 1915? Would the British have tried to stop you in some way?

I've read a lot of different accounts of how they contended with corrosive ammo, but nothing consistent on the process they actually used in the field. Also, how often were they expected, or were able to clean them in a combat zone?

Know *

Hello everyone,

For the next month, we are going to be running a test of a Provisional Rule which is currently being referred to as the "Basic Facts Rule".

As will be laid out below, we believe that this is a rule which has great potential to improve the /r/AskHistorians experience for Users, Flairs, and Mods, but we also realize it will be the most significant rules change implemented in several years. As such it has been something the Mod team has discussed and hashed over for quite some time, and we have discussed this change with our esteemed Flairs as well (with generally positive responses). Rather than simply imposing the rule, we want to carefully discern the reception and impact of it, and are provisionally implementing it for the month of March. After this month we will discuss whether to continue as is, modify it, or simply scrap it altogether, a decision for which we welcome input on from the user base throughout the test period.

Now, to cut to the chase, for the next month, the following rule is in effect:

Questions looking for specific, basic facts - for the purpose of this rule, seeking a name, a date or time, a location, or the origin of a word - are not allowed as standalone threads. AskHistorians is intended to be a space for in-depth and comprehensive answers, and as such, those questions which do not require an in-depth answer are not always suited to the format. We welcome these types of questions in the 'Short Answers to Simple Questions' thread which runs every Wednesday, and does not have the same in-depth requirement of the sub as a whole.

In addition to the parameters listed above, Moderators may also use their discretion to remove and redirect further questions they deem to fall under the 'Basic Facts' umbrella, when appropriate.

With that dispensed with, let's discuss the reasoning and desired impact of this rule. People come here to ask questions which aren’t always well suited to /r/AskHistorians, for any number of reasons. In some cases they might realize the question is basic, but they are distrustful of the first results they find on Google and are hopeful of getting an answer with the accuracy attached to our reputation. In others it might be a lack of knowing other options exist, and still others might simply lack the access to the kind of sources that they suspect could provide them with assistance. Whatever the reason, the questions targeted with this rule are those which can be sufficiently and satisfactorily answered with, at most, a few sentences based on tertiary reference material such as an Encyclopaedia or Almanac.

With our current rules and approach, questions simply asking for basic facts can often get very problematic for people answering them, and consequently those asking as well. OP might be effectively asking a question which has a one word answer on a subreddit which requires that answers give context and background. And in our experience, this just means they generally go unanswered - not always of course, but often. For many potential respondents, it isn't worth putting in the effort for a deep answer when it seems like the OP doesn't really want or need that. In either case though, often this leads to frustration all around, with the technically correct response not comporting with the motto here that 'an answer is good because it explains, not because it is correct'.

In short, the intent of the rule is, in our mind, to help users get the answers that they want. Users ask questions because they hope for answers. If those questions are easier to answer within our rules if they are redirected to the "Short Answers To Simple Questions" thread, users are simply more likely to get an appropriate answer.

An important part of the implementation of the policy is our removal Macro, which we hope will enforce the rule in a way which is useful and non-judgemental (and which we will continue to tweak based on feedback). Instead, the removal macro will hopefully help provide useful direction for users in getting an answer, by not only directing them to the "Short Answers to Simple Questions" thread, where we of course welcome them, but also with links to our guide on asking better questions, and suggesting other subreddits like /r/AskHistory where these types of questions are less in conflict with the rules as a standalone thread.

We realize that this rule might, in the end, not work out, hence our method of implementation, and we're striving to be conscious of that fact in enforcement. Our policy has always been that there is no such thing as a 'Stupid Question', and ensuring that this doesn't become the 'Stupid Question' rule is important to us.

Finally, a few notes on the actual nuts and bolts of the rule. We discussed a lot of variations of questions which might or might not fit, and in the end, we felt that keeping the rule narrow and well defined was an important component of its success. The more objective a criteria we can sketch out, the the more effective the rule can be. As such, we are only considering four basic categories of questions (see below). By far the most glaring omission that will be noticed is the "Yes"/"No"-type question. To be sure, these often might fit under this rule, but we felt that there are just too many examples where the answer is less than clear, and any real answer requires a fair bit of elucidation for why the answer is "Maybe". As such, in some situations these may fall under the "Moderator Discretion" clause, but will not be automatically covered under the rule at this time.

Now as for the categories we did choose to include, here they are below with a few examples of the type of questions considered:

1. NAMES: This is for questions which are essentially looking to find the name of a person, thing, concept, etc. Some examples of this would include:

• What was the name of that big tank battle fought during the First Gulf War?
• Who was the youngest defendant executed following the Nuremberg Trials?
• What country or group does the flag in this painting represent?

2. DATE or TIME: These are questions which are looking to know when something happened, essentially asking for the date of an event, or the time period in which it occurred. Some examples of this would include:

• Was there ever a point when more former US Presidents were alive than today?
• Why are the 1800s referred to as the "19th Century"?
• When was the last time a US state voted for both their Senators in the same election?

3. LOCATION: These are questions which are looking to know where something happened, or asking a question about a physical location. Some examples of this would include:

• After the White House was burned, where did the President live while it was rebuilt?
• What was the first landing spot of the Allied forces on D-Day?
• Where did the Battle of Bull Run take place?

4. ETYMOLOGY: Etymology is the study of the origin and history of words. We will not be removing all questions which relate to Etymology, if they are posed specifically in a way seeking depth of analysis, but we notice many questions asked which likely represent the fact that the user simply lacks access to the OED or similar. Whether to include these questions under the rule was problematic enough that we held a secondary vote specifically for it. This is a subcategory we will be paying especially close attention to in order to get the balance right.

So please, we hope you will bear with us over the next month as we work on fine-tuning this rule, and we also welcome your thoughts and feedback, both now and throughout the test period, to help us better weigh the final decision when we come to it.

Michael Douglas' character, the US President, says this in Aaron Sorkin's film, 'The American President' (1995).

Is it true?

According to the general worldwide* concensus the current year is 2018 or to put it another way two thousand one hundred and eighteen years have passed since a particular event** happened but how sure are we that the year count since that event is accurate?

I'm gussing that the Roman Catholic church has a near continuous record along the lines of Pope ABC was annoited in the year X and ruled for Y years and that their records start towards the end of the Roman era which would have had a similar count based on the various Emperor's time in power but are there any gaps in the records where a year or two could've slipped through the cracks, are there any instances where someone came to power who thought it was a different year and therefore imposed their new count on the populace?

I know the was a change in the year count when the Gregorian calendar supplanted the Julian one, I'm more interested in minor slips up in the count here and there

*Yes, I know that culturally some places make use of a different year count such as Buddists saying it's year 5,000 or something and Islam saying it's year 1,400ish and Kurzgesagt saying it should be the year 12,018 but for the most part 2018 is the accepted year

**I'm ingoring that the event in question may or may not have actually happened and if it did it may or may not have happened on what would now be considered to be year one

I'm guessing that due to the nomadic nature of the American Indians, diseases wouldn't have so easily proliferated like they did in Europe, but the Aztecs were known to have cities. Did any illnesses or disease that European immune systems weren't prepared for make it back to Europe?

Was there an "ideological" selection process?

Or something that the first years or so you would only be allowed on domestic flights (e.g. Moscow-Kiev), and maybe later on flights to other "socialist fraternal countries" (Moscow-Berlin), and if you were lucky, then on flights to the West, like Moscow-Paris?

Would it have been possible to defect on an "international" flight? When there was the old trick of "holding your family hostage in USSR", could you have gotten the job in the first place if you were single?

I was inquiring whether the Japanese government in post WW2 ever regarded the war as a war of colonialism or liberation?

Thanks.

From what research I have done on my own, I have found no sources that indicated Hitler truly wanted Jews in particular to be exterminated. The wording from the speeches that have been transcribed explicitly mention expulsion from Germany (which of course they did) and all evidence of the extermination of Jews prior to the Final Solution in 1942 seem to be political in nature (given the resistance historically received from the Poles not a century prior) and that the Final Solution itself was the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler.

To be clear, I am not asking if Hitler was an anti-Semite. He most certainly was. What I am asking is, seeing how the madman Heinrich Himmler himself was in direct control of a paramilitary force whose training and equipment rivaled (or even eclipsed) that of the national force is apparently the mastermind and executioner of the Holocaust, is there any evidence that this extermination of the Jewish people was actually desired by Hitler himself?

From the transcripts I've read, it seems that Hitler's goal wasn't the extermination of Jews so much as it was of "Jewish Bolshevism".

The way I currently understand things is that Himmler was a psychopath who was very powerful in the NSDAP due to his Schutzstaffel assassinating the Sturmabteilung leadership securing power under Hitler. As Hitler's most loyal and arguably most powerful underling, he leveraged his power to convince the rest of the leadership to allow him to undertake his genocidal plan of Jewish extermination as the martial situation looked bleaker once the US entered the war and the significant Soviet resistance encountered on the Eastern front.

Is there any hard evidence to indicate that Hitler supported genocide and didn't just agree to Himmler's proposition in order not to disrupt the military chain of command until the war was over? I just find it very unlikely that he did support actual genocide when I can find no documented evidence of him stating this while we can find an actual audio recording of Himmler stating his plans for Jewish genocide.

It seems to me like it would be an enormous task to maintain a castle warm, especially large rooms for feasts and such. How was this accomplished?

I'd really love some visibility on this question; I've seen similar questions on this subreddit but they all have low visibility and answers without satisfying depth.

I saw it proposed in some reddit comment elsewhere that two things are needed for advancement in a region: that the land must be defend-able, and it must be fertile. The commentor suggested that Africa's struggle to keep up with the rest of the world is due to all regions except the Nile lacking either defensability, or fertility. Is this a valid reason from a historical perspective?

Sorry for the double question, there just seems to be so little un-politicized discussion on the subject, and I'm starved for credible insight.

Hi! I was wondering if there was any form of public schooling – not like full-fledged universities, more like something akin to modern-day elementary/middle/high schools. Or was it all private? Overall, how was the schooling system in the early Imperial period structured?

I've done reading that suggested drinking 8-12 cups of water a day is necessary to remain properly hydrated. But all I see cowboys drinking is whiskey. What did people in the old west do to stay hydrated?

[deleted]

Specifically in 50s ,60s ,and 70s America.

Did a person who said they could hear angels or see monsters get believed? Have there been any documented examples of decisions made because someone was having a schizophrenic episode. Like sending an army because an angel told him to, but at closer look said person more then likely suffered from something.

I am obviously an amateur, so I clicked on the Wikipedia footnote that accompanied the article's claim that the term "socialism" was in use as early as 1822. The footnote states:

1822 E.Cowper Let. to Robert Owen 2 Nov. in Revue d'Histoire Economique & Sociale (1957) 35 80 [She] seems well adapted to become what my friend Jo. Applegath calls a Socialist".

Who was E. Cowper in relation to Robert Owen? And more importantly, who was Cowper's friend Jo. Applegath?

If there were any biographical information whatsoever on this Applegath person, It would be super significant.