In "Helmet for my Pillow", Robert Leckie notes that he had had tried to join up right after Pearl Harbor, but they required him to have the operation done which delayed his enlistment until early 1942.

Given the rapid expansion required of the military at that time, it seems like an awfully silly thing to bother with. Was the reason hygienic? I can see the Marines feeling it might serve the general interest of Marines serving in the Pacific.

When did they start requiring it? Was this policy maintained through the war? Afterwards? When was it abandoned?

How important was Tallinn as a port on the Baltic during its tenure as part of the Swedish Empire, then the Russian Empire, and then as a republic prior to WWII? What about after WWII during the occupation by the USSR?

What was its military significance, if any, during the same periods?

I've heard people talk about Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, and other New World civilizations using "magic mushrooms" in religious rituals. But I don't know how true that is. So first, do we know for sure that any of them used mushrooms containing psilocybin for any religious use? And if they did, do we know anything about their use, and religious significance to them?

Would poor eyesight keep you from a lot of things? Seems like even 20/100 would make a lot of day to day things difficult. Did they just have to deal with vision issues? What about work? What about if they had trouble with both near and far sight?

And how did a southern accent develop?

I recently watched a documentary on Nixon and how he kept an automatic taping system in the Oval Office.

He routinely discussed things that posterity views as abhorrent. Why would he record all this?

Has drinking Alcohol always been seen as an "adults only" hobby, or have there been societies in history that would allow children into pubs/establishments and serve them, or which normalized giving alcohol to children in familial and social settings?

To be clear, I'm not talking about weak beer or slightly alcoholic drinks where fermentation occurred to kill off bacteria and to improve water quality. I'm specifically curious if it was ever considered OK to provide alcohol to children for the purpose of them getting drunk, to the point where it was a common occurrence?

Where do they come from? When did they separate from libraries?

I asked a Russian friend about this and he raised examples of some military bases that could be considered the "Russian Area 51". I'm curious about how prevalent UFO sightings were relative to the West and what kind of theories were widespread.

I was reading the Constitution of the CSA a bit ago, and I noticed something odd: of the signatories, there are several from every Southern state except Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina, from which there are none. Why is that? Their absence, most especially that of Virginia, seems very odd.

I'm up to the last book in Robert Caro's biography of LBJ and he devotes many pages to JFK's long history of strange health problems and how nobody seems to have figured out what was wrong with him. Do we know now? Any good guesses?

what did Christianity have that the pagan religions didn't/ how does what was originally an obscure sect of Judaism become the official religion of the Roman empire..

I'm curious to know if Indiana Jones style traps or dark dungeons were ever a thing and if anyone prior to modern archeologists explored ruins in search of treasure.

I am talking about using techniques for dealing with choking, cleaning and wrapping cuts and burns, using the recovery position for unconsciousness, and using CPR in those rare cases where it is used to restart someones breathing (as opposed to just keeping them alive until the professionals arrive.) Please interpret the question how you like in terms of other first aid techniques I may have missed, I am aware that the middle ages/ medieval period spans a large amount of time and cultures, but please just choose the aspects of it that you can give a cool answer for.

While I am far from an expert on classical music, I do enjoy it and it strikes me that I don't know of a single American composer before Copland. So, what is the history of classical music in the first century or so of the United States? Was there anything unique about it? Did the Romantic and Nationalist musical movements extend influence across the ocean in any way? Were there any early American operas? Or was the Unied States a classical backwater with little of it's own music to speak of?

What is it's relationship to the skinbyrd "Chelsea" style?