[deleted]

Hey all,

I resolve to keep asking this until I get an answer... I've asked this question in various forms before, but never received much interest (and no answers), so I'm tossing it out into the mysterious reddit void again to see if the winds have shifted. Perhaps the happy occasion of the sub birthday will generate good fortune, and an answer!

Here are some examples of sub-questions which spring to mind (but this is by no means an exhaustive list of discussion possibilities):

• How am I getting fed?

• When someone comes to visit me, what is that like?

• Am I chained up in a dungeon? Can I pay to upgrade my physical conditions of confinement?

• Is there any such thing as bond?

Visiting someone in a contemporary American prison is a very different experience than it might have been in other time periods, obviously. I remember reading that in some periods of history-- English debtor prisons, if I remember correctly?-- being imprisoned did not imply that you would be fed by your captors, so you had to hope visitors would show up and feed you. So in that sense, 'visiting someone in prison' would have a whole different meaning that what it means now, which is more about the (not unimportant) providing of human contact to the 'outside' world, etc.

I'm sure it's obvious that I'm thinking of a particular Christian scriptural passage when this question comes to mind, but of course, this is AskHistorians and I expect only purely historical responses. (Well, actually, given the historical trend of this question, I don't expect any responses, but hey, why not try?) Thanks in advance!

EDIT: Egads!!! Upvotes! Thanks for the interest, friends. Perhaps there will be an answer!!!

EDIT 2: I can't believe this has 500 upvotes and no answers... but I appreciate people giving this visibility. And I wait patiently. Surely someone has something to share on this point!

Says it all in the title, were there ever Medieval Kings who were bastard children who through solid governance, stellar reputation or skill on the battlefield succeeded as monarchs despite their humble background? If so, how common was it for said monarchs to have all three qualities (like Snow in GOT)?

I've heard that because rap in its earliest days was really improvisational, some early rappers explicitly didn't want their music getting recorded. To what extent is that true, and do we know about any early rappers and who were popular on the improv scene in their time but we don't have many recordings of?

So is there anything known on where the Allies planend to drop the bomb in WW2 ?

I'm watching the Doklam standoff (as of today, stand down) with a pretty keen eye, and am curious how we got to where we are today. I think we need to pull this discussion as far back as the seventeenth century and the Kingdom of Sikkim. I've tried the Wikipedia approach, but I was hoping I could get something a little more well-connected on here.

Bonus questions that may be a little out of the purview of historical analysis: how does India/Bhutan/China view the history individually? Can historical analysis help us make a claim for the region today? One last sub-question: where has Bhutan stood historically (i.e. the 1960's) and recently with respect to India's support - was it welcomed or reluctantly accepted?

Thanks for your time!

In Germany he is known as Karl der Große, while the rest of the world knows him as Charlemagne or Charles the Great. I read that his actual birth name might have been Karolus, so I was wondering how and when 'Charlemagne' came to be the dominating name for him to the rest of the world.

The Romans and Greeks did not have legalised polygamy. I wondered why. As I understand it, the evidence is that polygamy was common in the distant past, and in the Middle East there are references to it (for example, in the Bible, Solomon had like 200 wives and 800 concubines or something like that). So I wondered why not with them.

I'm curious because there is an obvious disdain from many of the characters for people involved in ‘the trades’, yet Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley are constantly called away 'on business'. So I'm wondering what lines of business they might have been involved in and/or what was 'respectable' back then?

Details / Examples:

1. The Bingley sisters have an obvious contempt towards Elizebeth Bennett’s Uncle Mr. Gardiner (who had “a very respectable line of trade” and had a warehouse).
2. Before Sir William Lucas was knighted he made a modest fortune in a market town. After being knighted he gained a "disgust" to his business and moved to their new estate.
3. Mr. Darcy has a large estate (estates?) and income of £10,000 a year.
4. Mr. Bingley inherited £100,000 when his father passed away and has an income of £5,000 a year.
5. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley were (fictional) gentleman in the late 1790s.

The latent period is a pretty long time...when did we make this connection?

Hi, firsttime here.

Let me just add some context to my question. My great-grandfather was a career soldier up untill he retired. He started his career by volunteering as one of the 10000 Dutch marines for the first political actions in 1947 and 1948 in Dutch Indonesia. Still today very little in my country is being taught about this war as it's kind of a black page in our history.

My great grandfather would never speak about what he had done in Indonesia but it is a well known fact that most soldiers there, especially the marines, were ordered to perform warcrimes. Now the current information I do have of him was that he was part of the motorised armor division of the marines. On one of the pictures that I own of his, that he took in his time in Indonesia, he is in some kind of scout car and on the other he photographed a tank called 'Harssens', a 105mm howitzer tank of the marbrig (marine brigade in Dutch)

I thought I'd add some more specific details near the end there. The tanks can easily be traced since there were very few of them that we received as surplus right after the war so maybe the information will help. I know that this tank is now in the armor museum in Overloon in a restored state.

I am currently in the process of getting my great grandfathers military records from the ministry of defence. I'm submitting a few pieces of information so that I'll be allowed to access his records.

Back to the point; I'm trying to find out what warcrimes were committed by the Dutch, if I can be specific, the marines. Because he never told us anything, which is understandable, I'd like to connect the dots as some kind of closure.

I've already reviewed a couple of pictures online and seeing similarities in pictures, he may or may not have been a part of the rawagede massacre.

Hope someone can help me out more and shed some light on the topic, thanks in advance.

Yesterday I visited Mt. Vernon and saw an ice house. Was there a way for them to have ice year round? If so, how did they do it?

When I was about twelve I was really into Egyptology, and the Amarna period in particular. Akhenaten's reign and its fallout are at the same time highly iconic (King Tut's Mask and Nefertiti's bust) and very different from the rest of Ancient Egypt. I decided to read up on it again (mostly Wikipedia), and apparently there have been a few major discoveries in recent years. Obviously after Akhenaten's dead odd things happened (Tut had to change his name for religuous-political reasons, he died young and was succeeded by his advisor Ay) but apparently a lot more happened as well.
A female pharaoh named Neferneferuaten reigned between the two, and she was apparently both Nefertiti, the Dakhamunzu of the Zannanza affair, and the original owner of Tut's golden mask. And it seems like another pharaoh named Smenkhkare reigned somewhere during this period, too.
Who was this Smenkhkare? What does the latest research on the topic say about the period between Akhenaten's death and Tutankhamun taking over?

So I've been re-reading some military history lately and I can't help but notice that the distinction between "total war" as we know it and earlier "scorched earth" warfare seems rather thin. For example, just as the World Wars and Cold War preparations for WWIII emphasized total economic mobilization, warfare against the whole enemy society and economy, and massive mobilization of manpower - (as far as I can tell) so do wars in much earlier times. Rome in the Second Punic War, both sides in various wars between nomadic tribes and frontiersmen worldwide, and both sides of the last Roman-Sassanian war seem to exhibit these traits. Is it micromanagement of the industrial economy which sets them apart?