About 30 years my middle school social studies teacher had a section on the death penalty. I recall him saying that there would only be one live round among the whole firing squad and the rest had blanks, so that none of the members knew who actually performed the killing.

As an adult I’ve seen a number of firing squad videos on the internet and never seen one where only one bullet hits the victim. Is there any support that this was a real thing somewhere at some time, or was this simple Midwest US grade school propaganda to take the scariness out of death?

We all know that native americans quickly adopted the horse into their lifestyle once they encountered them, but did the same ever happened to cows, pigs, sheeps, goats, chickens, and other old world farm animal? Where there native americans owning a herd of cattle ot flock chickens?

Hi reddit,

Many moons ago, my big sister read guns germs and steel for AP History and thought it was an incredible historic lens. My attempts to read it went.....poorly. But now I have the power of extra audible tokens, a dog that needs to be walked a few hours a day, and a sub par base for my knowledge of world history. I'm thinking of tackling it again as an audiobook - how well did it age in the last 15 ish years and is it still relevant?

Thanks!

During the 16th century, gunners use support rods to use the gun easier, yet when introduced to japan they got rid of it. Why did they got rid of the support rods ands what is the reasoning behind it?

I understand that Juneteenth is celebrated on June 19th due to it being the anniversary of General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, but why has this specific date been widely accepted to recognize the emancipation of slaves in the United States? Yes, the Emancipation Proclamation did not immediately free all slaves in the United States, but why not celebrate emancipation on the 13th Amendment's ratification anniversary or another date associated with emancipation?

I am having trouble understanding this because, on the one hand, it seems like if they didn't want China to have control over Hong Kong, they would just not have ceded the territory in the first place. On the other hand, if they were feeling immense pressure to cede the territory, then why include this provision at all? Why not just give it to China? Did they expect China to become a democracy within those 50 years and want Hong Kong to be protected until that time?

I'm wondering if there are some testimonies of people who outlived the Soviet union and where old enough to remember life before 1918 and were alive at time of his collapse in 1991. Such individuals who have had to live at least 80 years surviving to both Word war , famines, and the other catastrophic events which hit the Soviet union during its lifespan so Imagine there were few and far between.

I remember reading, but I can't find the source for it now, that Anatolian merchants and gentlemen (what would today be the Turkish people) would protest when called "turks" by their colleagues in Europe; and that a "turk" was some hillbilly savage, while they are of course suit&cigar europeans. This must've been towards the Sick man of Europe period, when the Ottoman state was trying, and failing, to move from a traditional agrarian society towards a more dynamic industrial society.

I was very sure of this little anecdote, and mentioned it in front of people, but then couldn't find where I've seen it, and I think I might've been misinformed and just remembered something wrong. Was this really the case?

So, I'm not Jewish (or belong to any Abrahamic faith, for that matter). And this is a complicated question, that I feel the need to ask. Going by the written historical record, it's clear that the Jews were specifically targeted (from the Babylonians to the Seleucids to the Romans to the Germans). In Medivael Europe, monarchs made it state policy to expel them from their lands. When the Spanish Inquisition (the most famous one) was launched, the best friend of Queen Isabella was a Jewish-convert, her Prefect of the Palace was a Jewish-convert (the aforementioned best friend's husband) and her OB-GYN was a practicing Jew...making it clear that the animosity wasn't racial. So was it religious ? If so, why ? I know this may be a passionate topic for some, but I'm looking for the most unbiased answer possible.

(Note: Wu died by his own hand, for other redditors who did not grow up with this story. I'm not sure whether it played a role in his being thrown in the river).

What was the usual disposition for corpses in his era/place? How were survivors/heirs informed of someone's death? How did people grieve/do funerals when there was no corpse?

EDIT: Eliminated extraneous secondary question.

It’s no secret that leftist ideals were rapidly spreading around the turn of the century; but it seems as though they found a definite home amongst sailors in many European navies. Is there any particular reason for this?

Were there laws that prevented white people from being enslaved in the south?

Essentially, did the laws that permit slavery in the south, directly reference the race of those who could be enslaved, or was it at least theoretically possible to enslave a white person?

I've tried finding it through Russian history resources with no luck, and although the Eastern Roman Empire was better at record keeping I can't find it that way either. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

This is for a historical novel, if that helps.

This is a historical "fact" that teachers here in Canada love to repeat (it also comes up in casual conversation).

During the North American fur trade, Europeans would often exchange metal items for beaver furs procured by the natives, to be turned into felt hats back in Europe. Among those goods, firearms were in extremely high demand.

Supposedly, at some point, a custom was established in which a rifle would planted into the ground like a stake. The natives would then stack beaver pelts until the pile matched the height of the gun, at which point the deal would be closed. This motivated the Europeans to bring with them rifles with increasingly long barrels, to the point where this excess length made the weapons less effective or outright impractical. Furthermore it was heavily implied that the piles of fur were dramatically more valuable than the rifles, and that the entire custom consisted in yet another way in which the natives were taken advantage of.

As a child, I took it for granted that the adults would give me correct (or mostly correct) information.Thinking about it today, I find it extremely hard to believe that this actually happened at all. I can't imagine that rifles in the 16th century, which I can only assume were brought over from Europe, could be considered so much less valuable than beaver pelts by the settlers. I would also assume that the native traders would catch on to something like this pretty damn quick.

My Google-fu has utterly failed me here. I can only hope one of you can help me!

I've heard that most people historically didn't get married until their 20s. But, it was (and, in many regions, still is) legal for people under 18 to marry.

I often hear people explain stuff like Romeo & Juliet or Catherine Howard's relationship with Henry Mannox as being due to differences in age of consent. It was "normal" for 13 year olds to get married... Was it really?

I know there's dialogue in Romeo and Juliet that says the roughly 13-year old Juliet is too young to get married. Her mother was married around the same age, but Juliet should wait a few years. This seems to imply that 13 year olds could legally married but it wasn't the most acceptable thing in the world.

If a 13 year old was married or even just courted by an adult, what did others think of this? Was it inappropriate? Was the 13 year old seen as a child/adolescent who is married or are they seen more like an adult? Were they expected to get pregnant, though it might be dangerous due to their youth? Did adult women ever marry teenage boys or was it only men and girls?

Today, (in Indonesia and Malaysia) ethnic Chinese people are commonly referred to as the "Jews of the East" which Phibunsongkhram also coined (though I do acknowledge him as a fascist leader). When and how did Southeast Asia's Bamboo Network develop? Was it a colonial institution or something that's existed for far longer?

How aware of the protestant reformation were people in India or China? What did the Islamic world think of it? Obviously, it's hard to judge millions of people by a few sources but I'm more or less curious if any people were aware of it.

I am beginning to look at possible Master’s thesis topics... One of the aspects of Rome that I always found fascinating was the difference in how they viewed war compared to their contemporaries, at least in the early and mid-Republic era when they were a rising power and not the dominant one. They really did appear to view war as a life and death struggle... If they didn’t defeat their enemy early they would just keep coming until they did or were destroyed themselves. I’ve always found the Phyrric War the best example of this. However, my primary interest is Hannibal and the Second Punic War, and I’m considering trying to mold my thesis around the Roman view of war as a life and death struggle against the backdrop of this conflict. Something along the lines of... ‘Rome was ultimately successful against Hannibal due to their unconventional view of war as a struggle to the death, either they won or they were utterly decimated as a people and culture.’

However, while I have never come across any scholarly works that explicitly and centrally take this point of view, it seems such an obvious one that I think there must be. So my question is, has this frame of reference been done before and by whom?

I read that a ceorl is a free peasant, similar to a yeoman in medieval England, who owned approximately 120 acres of land as his hide. This seems to be an enourmous figure though – for just one household I would have thought 12 acres to to excessive, let alone 120. Can anyone clarify the amount of land that an Anglo-Saxon ceorl might expect to own?

Circuses in the modern sense may have started in the 1740s in Britain, but traveling fairs and carnivals may be older??

What documentation do we have for the existence of a continuous nomadic circus/carny culture? Is it largely a 19th century phenomenon, or does it have earlier roots?