Hello.

We have portraits/statues of most influential people throughout history, we even have portraits (shitty ones) that date back to old egypt. But we don't have portraits of the most influential people of all. Why is that? And while we are at it, where did the blonde jesus depiction originate from?

I recently decided to pick up Jared Diamond's excellent novel, Guns, Germs, and Steel (basically an account of the rise of human civilization) and I'm particularly interested in the influence of these eras on later societies, and how starkly different it is for both. I'm asking because despite it being a good novel, Diamond actually never goes out to explain the rigid difference between these two eras, but instead goes to explain the implications of a change from Paleolithic ways to Neolithic ways. Simply put, I'm curious on how both these ways of living have influenced us today, in ways we might not even be aware of.

I've read Vera Brittain on mustard gas, but what about the earlier gases - chlorine and phosgene? Could anyone point me to contemporary descriptions of what it was like to suffer a gas attack and survive - what sort of long-term effects might you have and how would you recover?

Or was everybody all but covered in so many bug bites that people stopped noticing the itching, similarly to how people could ignore the smell in medieval cities?

Caps for emphasis.

More broadly, did Germany treat POWs differently based on ethnicity and nationality? I know that Slavic civilians were horribly brutalized in eastern Europe and Russia. Did captured Slavic soldiers fare any better? How was the situation of French POWs complicated by the existence of the Vichy government? Did captured Anglo British soldiers receive different treatment than soldiers from Britain's overseas colonies? How effective was the Red Cross at monitoring and preventing unequal treatment of POWs? Was racially motivated POW abuse a matter of official policy or grassroots racism?

I'm not an expert in horse biology but I'd assume they are like most other mammals and the males of the species are stronger and faster. So this being the case would particular sexes of horses be preferable for certain activities? Would people consider the sex of the horse they were buying as a factor? In middles ages Europe would war horses be exclusively male like the soldiers? Did they sell for different amounts? How old were horses when they were sold typically?

Surely there were some diseases native to the Americas that could have been introduced to European settlers. Why weren't Europeans wiped out like the Native Americans were?

Hello. I just saw in an AskReddit thread that American "Indians" didn't always live in tents, but had huge cities and other traits of developed civilizations. I've heard a lot about civilizations like Incans and Mayans, but never the people native to what we now know as the USA. The post also said that a huge percentage of them were wiped out by disease that spread from Central/South America and spread north, which I'd also never heard. Regardless of how accurate this is, I now realize I've never heard of (or even wondered about) anything regarding the culture of North American natives prior to Jamestown. What are some good sources to begin learning about them?

I was wondering what years drinking on the job occured. I'm talking more about the business people drinking in their offices etc.

What year did it begin, and end.

Where did it originate?

When and why did it stop?

Do many jobs still do it, if not in the US, maybe somewhere else.

If so, what country(s) used it?

I've read his music was sponsored by the Tsars, was sometimes very patriotic, and incorporated Ukrainian elements. It was sometimes seen as too Western, but also was criticized for being too native.

I'm just curious as to how often it was performed under communism and how it was received.

"For instance, consider the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. He was the leader of the Palestinians in the ’30s and ’40s, prior to most of the history we’re talking about that has so enraged the Palestinians. Nevertheless, the man visited Auschwitz in the company of Himmler and aspired to have his own death camps created in Palestine to exterminate the Jews. He was a full-blown Nazi collaborator, and the head of the Palestinians. As late as 2002, eight years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Arafat praised al-Husseini as “a hero.” This is the kind of thing Israel has had to deal with continuously."

I'm heading to King Richard's faire in a couple months, and I wanted to dress up as an Irish-Gaelic king appropriate to the era. The time period is the 16th century, so r/askhistorians what would a Gaelic King wear in the 16th century?

In addition, is there any truth to the anecdotal claim that many Koreans transferred fairly smoothly from senior positions in the colonial administration to senior positions in post independence South Korea?