It seems (to me at least) as though orphans as significant or even leading characters in literature had a "heyday" from around the time of Dickens, through Twain and up to the Little Orphan Annie.

Yes, we have our share of current orphans in literature (Harry Potter, etc) but it seems less prevalent.
Possibly due to the amount of modern literature I read compared to that period I mention.
It may just be that the more "lasting" books from those times contain orphan characters.

Is this perception I have due to a higher incidence of orphans in those periods with reduced adult lifespans, or was it a response to their plight which authors of the time were drawing attention to?

Am I wrong and their prevalence has been fairly static throughout literature's history?

More specifically:

• Chinese immigrants were shown living there and owning their own businesses, had this happened already?

• Was "The Bowry" really such a large structure? Did it really have such a large population living inside of it?

• Had any Irish immigrants actually been elected into public office, as depicted in the film?

• Did the U.S. Navy really fire directly into the city during the riots?

• Were the "Dead Rabbits" a real Irish "gang"?

• I know "Bill the Butcher" was based on several different real people, but were the "Nativists" a real gang, and did they really hold sway over the Five Points?

It just seems like an unnecessary extra distance to go. Why didn't the northern/northwestern part of it (way closer to pretty much everything) become the center of colonization?

In S01E05 of the TV show MASH ("The Moose") a US GI is discovered to have purchased a young Korean woman as a personal slave/servant. They referred to here as "his moose" in the episode. Did this kind of thing actually happen?

My Chinese history is cursory at best, but I think I'm grasping onto something worth looking into. If my understanding is correct, within Chinese history becoming a scholar was awarded with much more prestige than any other job. If (this is where there is probably a hole in my question) this phenomenon continued through the 20th century, was there any interplay between the ideology of Maoist Communism? If so, how? Maybe there's an interesting monograph or someone touches on it a book.

For an even more specific question, were any in office politicians vehemently against the acquisition of Hawaii or the Philippines?

The history books in school do a good job of glossing over the subject, almost making it seem like everyone was in agreement about acquiring overseas territories. I highly doubt some of the more liberty oriented politicians would have approved such actions.

Would William the Conqueror, for instance, have identified himself as Norse/Viking in any respect? Also, why did the Vikings settlers adopt French so quickly? Were they simply outnumbered by the native population; because that would seem to have been the case after the English conquest as well, but my understanding it that French was maintained as the language of the nobility for some time after that.

The Father/Son relationship seems to be paramount in Christianity, which seems odd when taken in the context of the gods of the Roman cities, the Greek pantheon, and the influence of other pluralistic theologies.

The need for a female relationship among Christians seems to have elevated Mary to near-divine status, but the movement failed to induct her to the circle of the divine, e.g. like Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost.

Was there some kind of competition among religions to reduce the number of deity, or a political influence on Christianity that froze its fledgling pantheon at 3?

Hi askhistorians, long time lurker first time poster. i've just started an undergraduate history course and our first paper is on the empires in Africa and I'm finding it really enjoyable. My question really is did the whites who went to Africa with an empire ever rebel against the empire? we're sort of being shown that all whites were part of the empires and there was no dissent - is this true?

Any region, any time, any empire!

Thanks!

I am studying for history and I'm very curious to know how parliament violated the Magna Carta, if they even did.

I've seen references to needing some sort of certificate to enter cities or having to pay a toll to enter. What kind of transportation would be available? Specifically I'm interested in travel around the British Isles.

Obviously today our training takes around 3 months for basic then varies for your school from there. What was the training time it took to train a GI during the war? Was the training different during different times of the war?-ie 1941 vs 1944. Also while a lot of troops were being used to fill in gaps for companies that had lost men, were we still trying to build full divisions or just replace men due to attrition?

An piggy back question, for different specialties, such as engineers, tank crews, etc, how much did their training time vary?

I am interested to know how much has the language changed over the millennia. Is the relationship something like between Latin and Italian, maybe (I suspect) even further?

A hypothetical (or maybe not) situation when a speaker of Old Egyptian and one of Coptic try to speak to one another in their respective languages, without interdisciplinary training.

Would these two languages classify within the same family, if we ignore the genealogical connection?

Also, would be interesting to get answers to the same questions, but regarding all the languages of the Egyptian genealogy: Archaic <> Old <> Middle <> Late <> Demotic <> Coptic.

To be more specific, I mean north of the current day US-Mexican border. I know Mexico is part of North America. I am sure there were some agricultural communities, but I am totally ignorant about them other than names of tribes that aren't around anymore. Most of my education has more or less implied that most if not all tribes north of Mexico were hunter-gatherer type peoples. Any information about the crops these people might have grown or their cultures is welcome. Thank you:)

I was speaking with someone about when and why the pointy hat came about, and what its associations are: magic, witchcraft, wisdom, etc. Does anyone know if this hat shape had a practical purpose in its origin, and who originally wore these hats? Where did the modern associations come from?

Ca. Black Death (14th century)?

I have heard alot of people claim that Napoleon was not french but but since corsica was given to the french in 1768 does that not effectively make him a frenchman.

Hi there!

Today I watched Monuments Men and my SO said she looks forward to having kids, because helping them study history homework will teach her adequately about ww2.

As a German I learned about ww2 literally every year since 7th grade that we had history lessons. She went to a school one-tier lower (just high school, no university-entrance-level) and apparently had a super shitty teacher who would stand in front of the class and read from the book, not caring about people falling asleep.

As I find the events of both world wars quite important I'd like to teach about both world wars - what lead to it, enabled it, how things progressed and the consequences for the different countries involved.

My biggest problem is that I haven't learned about that stuff for 12 years and that I was taught history in English, so the focus has always been shifted towards topics that had English texts available, reducing the effective content.

So, dear people historians: How should I go about methodically? Can I make a game out of it somehow? What are the most important events should I not skip?

Sorry for possible english fuckups :s

What makes modern China the same country that Qin Shi Huang Founded?

I'm thinking of Islamic counterparts to works by authors like Vegetius, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Jomini, etc.

I'm going to apologise in advance if this is too generic, or too cultural studies/fashion history for Ask Historians!

By 'subculture' I mean a group of people who share the same non-conforming fashions, ideals and behaviours, who are identifiable through shared symbolism eg punks.

I recently read Dick Hebdige's Subculture:The Meaning of Style, and only post-war subcultures are mentioned, with a mention of 'zoot-suiters' being the first real subculture.

Is there any evidence of earlier subcultures ? Surely throughout history there must have been groups of alternative people, who shared symbolism to identify themselves as belonging to a non-conforming group?

If there was any early subcultures, what was the mainstream reaction to them? Was there the same 'moral panic' as seen with the mods vs rockers?