There's a passage in the book Conquistadors by Michael Wood where he describes a meeting between Hernan Cortes and Bernal De Las Casas. Casas asks Cortes by what law he took Montezuma prisoner and he responds with "Anyone who doesn't enter by the front gate is a thief and a robber". When Casas looks to him for more info, Cortes added: "Let your ears hear what your lips say". Then the room burst out laughing. I may be dumb but could somebody explain this situation to me?

Were there any visual identifiers to tell who was a Hutu or a Tutsi? Was it all based on memory or word of mouth? What about urban areas?

Hi AskHistorians,

Thank you for being such an awesome subreddit!

From the little I've read I know that Bolsheviks basically declared undesirable everybody who wasn't a member of working class or peasantry. Many men of arts and sciences fled or died in Red Terror.

You would expect destruction or at least heavy damage to academies and art schools, left without the talent. Yet, they were able to pull off first man in space and some other very impressive scientific/engineering projects. Some art forms also flourished.

Can you please fill in the narrative? How and why did scientific and engineering schools survive? Why did intelligentsia cooperate with the regime that was openly against them?

Thank you.

Back during the days of slavery, what would have been the ideal location a slave or discriminated against human would want to be in order to be the safest?

Read about hair theft on Wiki and now I'm interested. It's quite amusing (although I doubt I'd be very amused if someone cut my ponytail off). What did they think of frizzy hair? How was hair kept after stealing it? How would they cut off people's hair? When did hair become less valuable in the West, and hair stealing therefor becoming less about selling the hair for money and more about keeping the hair for yourself (for eg sexual reasons)?

Sometimes I get the urge to do push ups or pull ups that I feel are subconscious. I realize that staying alive was enough of a work out throughout most of history, but, did a Neanderthal ever think, I'm bored I should do some pull ups or go out for a run?

I have read that cochineal (which makes a vivid red dye) whose source was jealously guarded by the Spanish was a source of great wealth, valued by weight at similar levels to silver. But I don't know what portion of the empire's wealth came from the cochineal trade. Was it moving in comparable volumes to silver or gold?

And while I'm as it, I don't really understand why cochineal was so valuable. There were other reds. Why were people willing to pay so much for this one? I've read that roman cardinals and British officers dyed their clothes in the stuff. But surely if you're the British you don't want to be financing your enemies?

How did Dostoyevsky's classic become a classic? How did its reception compare across languages and national literary audiences?

Not against captives, or thralls. If a married woman of a jarl was raped by, let's say, a family friend, of a similar standing to the woman/her husband, what could be expected to happen, if anything?

Basically I am wondering what made a person a 'saxon' rather than a person from XXXX tribe or clan? What level of difference is needed between a Saxon or an Angle? Is it similar to differentiating between Germanic peoples and other tribes? Thanks

Did they know when new offensives began? When major retreats/defeats happened?

Did they get this info through broadcasts?

How much were defeats censored? I'm aware that the British even kept the news of one of it's ships that sunk secret until after the war.

Hello everybody!

We're going to be trying something out here for the next few weeks, testing out a weekly theme. These will be varied topics, generally highlighting fields and topics which are less traveled here on /r/AskHistorians. Not that we don't enjoy answering questions about what Hitler's favorite breakfast cereal was, but we want to encourage more questions that aren't on necessarily popular topics, and get people thinking about stuff that might be a bit off-the-beaten-path.

While posting a question that fits into a week's theme is not a guarantee that it is going to be answered, those questions will be flaired to help them stand out and hopefully get a little extra attention. We'll also be collecting the best threads from each week's theme into a listing on the Wiki afterwards as well.

Flairing will be handled by Auto Mod, who is configured to recognize various keywords that correspond to that week's theme, but if you think your post should have been flaired and didn't, just hit report message us and say "Theme Flair Please!" and we'll get to it.

We're kicking off with topic of "Crime and Punishment", which while certainly not the most obscure Theme we could have gone with, we feel is a good launch-pad, as it is a topic that can be connected with almost any culture or civilization that has existed, so has plenty of breadth to draw from.

Moving forwards, you'll be able to see what a given week's theme is by looking at the top bar!

I have sleep paralysis pretty often and I see some sort of demon that I guess tries to scare my body from its paralyzed state. I'm curious as to what people thought about it before.

Three days doesn't seem like a reasonable amount of time for Japan to survey the damage of Hiroshima and discuss surrender; it took them a further six days after Nagasaki was bombed.

I've looked into this myself a bit and found a lot of conflicting information. Some things I read say that Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima, others say that they doubted the US had more than 2 or 3 additional bombs readied (they actually only had the one) and were willing to weather more attacks. Unless I'm mistaken, they made no official announcement of their intentions one way or the other.

Even if Hiroshima wasn't enough motivation, perhaps USSR declaring war (and invading on three fronts) would have tipped the scales. This happened only a day before Nagasaki was bombed.

Wouldn't it have been worth it to wait a few extra days, or maybe even a couple of weeks, before killing 39,000-80,000 civilians?

I am writing a story and my imaginary country is based off Hungary and it's set in the 1930s. After some googling, I couldn't find info on the common names in Hungary or the population, so here are my questions:

• What was the population of Hungary in the 1930s?
• What were the most common first and last names in the 1930s?
• What weapons were commonly used by the military?
• What were their uniforms like?

Thanks!