The life of a sailor seemed to revolve around whistles, bells, and verbal commands but surely hearing loss would have been prevalent among the sailors below deck manning the cannons, especially for veterans of naval battles.

Do we have any records from the age of sail regarding this? Would a sailor suffering permanent hearing loss from cannon fire be discharged from duty or were there methods in place for dealing with this?

Sorry if this is the wrong spot / sub

But does anyone know a way to look up family history / service in the USA armed forces during WWII ?

I'm interested to learn where they trained, where they stationed, what battles they may have been involved with, what their roles were, etc.

I asked this question here about 10 days ago and didn't get a response so hopefully this time lucky :)

I've been reading about Victorian flower language and have seen the dictionaries but I was curious as to how used this actually was. Did people really communicate via flowers? If someone gave me a bouquet of Jacob's Ladder (meaning come down) would I actually interpret it as such?

Say, the same national news outlet is operating in different cites... However, the telegraph can only convey simple messages, which is hardly enough to draft out a proper story. Did people ride the rails with copies in hand?

There must have been thousands of printers (and paper makers, and typesetters, letter casters, printing press repair people, page cutters, sorters, book binders, etc., and so on...), if there were 200 million copies of books being produced in the 16th century alone.

That seems rather crazy to me, given that typesetting by hand is pretty labour intensive.

Anyway, the main question is about woodblock printing and how it apparently didn't cause a book revolution. I'm interested to know why?

I've been looking over Wikipedia and some other websites for information about it, but it doesn't seem to be very deep. I'm looking for books, webpages, posts here on Reddit, whatever that helps me to get information about the Empire, military, administration and society, everything I can get. Thanks.

I know that the first mention of the word arab was in the ninth century BCE by the Assyrians who fought them but they say arab back then "arab" just meant nomad. What I want to know is where did the specific arab identity that eventually created one of the largest empires in history originate from. I know it is in Arabia but does anyone know where in arabia? Arabs say it is yemen but it could be just a myth. Not sure if the Himyarites were arabs or not. Nor am I sure if the Nabataens where arabs or not. I mean they didn't speak arabic did they? I know the Ghassanids did. So maybe the answer is to the north. I heard the arabic language originate from the An Nafud desert but I am not sure. Or could it simply be Hejaz were Islam came from? Or could they have occupied more then one area?

I wanted to check truth behind some claims of a French gay imam back when I had a chat with him, and perhaps learn some more.

He told me that in the MENA region (male?) homosexuality was actually rather accepted for its time. It was formally forbidden of course, but people often closed eyes on it and there are several letters and poems to be found from that period with hidden but clear references to homosexual intercourse. The "Arabs" he said were also seen as very feminine in those times by Europeans (which had a negative connotation). He claimed that it changed because of wanting to copy the European ways after their recent Industrial Revolution successes, particularly the Ottoman Empire. One of the imitated aspects were the European take on medicine and science of the human body, where negative views of homosexuality was led to it having been "medicalized" as a disease, something lasting for more than a century (Alan Turing came up).

Is it true that homosexuality knew some tolerance back then? And that the European views on homosexuality may have been taken over in these regions together with their take on medicinal sciences? It's a big region so I assume there were regional differences? And what about female homosexuality?

I heard from my Portuguese teacher that the Americans during WWII were planning on invading the Azores. Is this true? And did Portugal have any significant role in the war?

What kind of ships did they use? How big were the ships? How long did the journey take? How did they sustain the horses? How many did they bring in total? Is there an established estimate?

So many questions! Does anyone have any knowledge on this subject? Thanks

When you read about Russian and then Soviet history between 1900 and 1945 you hear about so many deaths from war, famine, and political oppression, you have to wonder how anyone was even left in the country. How was Russia not a barren wasteland completely devoid of human life by 1945?

The title says it all. Pretty much the only other cultures as primitive as theirs were(are?) Inuit cultures. If it just because they had to put so much time and effort into not dying because of the harsh dangerous landscape? I wouldn't think that's the case because not all of Australia is a desert. Even on Papua New Guinea, just of the cost, people there had large impressive structures. Surely after inhabiting the continent for 50,000 years an advance urban civilization could have developed.

If cigarettes were still part of the regular soldier's rations, where did Germany find a large and stable supply of tobacco from? It couldn't have come from the Americas, or Asia, or Africa.

i think the account i read was written by a Palestinian, but their thesis was that only Palestine invited jews to create a nation during ww2, and actually gave them territory to do so. is that true?

Before someone asks, yes, I did read the wiki article on it, but I didn't really understand it. Why were two Caliphs killed? Who were the Kajirites? What happened to them?

Once upon a time, there was a civilization that had a prophecy that it would continue to grow and prosper so long as it kept conquering its neighbors. There was a catch, the civilization could never lose a battle or the civilization would fall.

The civilization conquered, grew, and prospered until it lost a battle and then it simply collapsed. It's as if the citizens lost all hope in the face of their own fulfilled prophecy.

What civilization am I thinking of?

I've been trying to relearn the name of this civilization for years. Thanks.

I am Korean, and always wondered why. I know that they have different purposes for counting certain things, but this question came to mind when I heard how the Japanese language sounded, and how awfully similar they were.

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