This is the sort of question that seems too simple for this subreddit and yet too complex to get any satisfying answer from google. So, I'll try my luck here.

Basically I want to know whether or not there were "normal" (non-gulag) prisons alongside the gulags in the USSR and, if so, who went there, why they went there, what the conditions were, how many were sent to them, how long they lasted, when they were started, how they differentiated from gulags, and so on.

I appreciate any responses!

My 3x great-grandfather stowed away on a ship from Denmark to the US around 1863. I'm curious about the political, economic, religious (etc.) climate at that time that would push a teenager to leave everything behind. He was no more than 15 and it seems his only travel companion was a friend of the same age.

The Klan, from a basic overview, never appears to maintain any lasting, stable presence in the US. The First Klan lasted less than a decade before it was put down, the Second Klan only managed to cultivate a good public image for a decade before it was dragged down by scandal after scandal, and the Third Klan hasn't been able to retain members or leadership for any meaningful length of time. How then has a group which has struggled to find a stable niche for itself in American society found itself so important to our national psyche?

(1) That sounds really awful; and, (2) how the hell did it work? Was there some well-known method? Did Senators whisper to each other about the best sword-falling-on methods? Judicial scoring, 10-out-of-10 sort of thing?

After WWII, wasn’t it pretty much agreed by everyone that Poland had been a victim of Nazi aggression? How did Russia publicly justify moving its border west into Poland? I mean, I get Cold war stuff and Stalin wanted land, but that doesn’t seem like something that they would publicly say.

Hello - I'm doing research for an academic project on ancient Minoan Politics/Government. I've been hitting a roadblock since I'm not able to find very credible sources online that would provide reputable background into my topic. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thank you so much, your help is greatly appreciated!

I'm aware of the horrific fire bombing against Germany, but if they held out and posed a threat by the time nukes were ready did US plan to strike specific cities?

I understand that for the most part people drank alcoholic beverages, but nowadays, alcohol is an occasional drink. A folk history claims that this is because only alcoholic beverages were safe, but that's frequently contradicted in this subreddit. Since non-alcoholic beverages were safe, why were they not consumed? Or were they consumed and just not brought up much?

I ask about juice in particular because fruit was everywhere, but seemed to mostly get turned into wine.

I'm most interested in Western Europe but this question extends well beyond that and I'm interested in any stories; my sub-Saharan African drink thread yielded only alcoholic beverages as well.

I’ve been researching the Greek Magical Papyri, and I was surprised to learn that the PGM IV is actually a single complete papyrus codex, known as The Paris Magical Codex. But curiously I can’t find any photos of it. Was it cut up into individual folios? But even if it was, then wouldn’t there be photos or illustrations of what it originally looked like?

I see it used to mean a specific group of people for a specific period of time, yet I also see it used to refer to the descendants of groups, so people talk of Egyptian Civilization and feel fine referencing every dynasty up to the Arab invasion, and I see other ideologically motivated people talk of "western" civilization and use it to include pretty much every group that is seen to be an ancestor of a community as well, while at other times the term "previous civilization" is used to contrast a community with its own descendents, or to ascribe one set of accomplishments to one group of people without giving any sort of credit to the following generations...

How do historians deal with things like cultural continuity, or how do they talk about values that get passed on generationally that tie a people to their descendents - or do they somehow limit themselves to material culture without acknowledging philosophical continuity, or is this only really commonly acknowledged in situations like tracing the threads of "Democracy" or similar ideas?

I'm curious about the dynamics and evolution of provincial power holders and governance in Japan. Once the samurai usurped the governing power of the kuge (Shugo replacing Kokushi), didn't tax revenue get redirected to them instead? I suppose some kuge lost their income, but as a class they continued to survive through many upheaval and frankly atrocious time. Only after Hideyoshi more or less confiscated all their land, did the kuge have to take up a profession (pretty high-brow profession, but still). So did they lose their estates extensively before that time? Did all the kuge clans that survived only did because their estates concentrated around or close to Kyoto?

So I was reading about security clearances and...well...I couldn't help but wonder how classified information was handled and passed around before intelligence agencies implemented computers and started storing information in magnetic tapes/hard drives.

Nowadays you have different auth schemes (RBAC, APAC, etc) and you need an admin to put your user into a specific group in order to have permissions to do certain actions, there are logs and you can be notified if someone opened a file.

But, say, its 1952. I am an American intelligence analyst and I just finished writing a report on Soviet nuclear capabilities.

-Who is in charge of classifying this information? Wouldn't this person be a potential source for leaks?

-After classifying this info...who is responsible for handling the papers and storing them?

-If someone wants to access this information, how do they do it? They need to walk up to the front desk, show credentials and they are given the info?

-How does the person giving the info know that my creds are legit? Do they call someone?

-After giving the information...the fact that information was handed out, is recorded somewhere?

The only other state I can think of which has adopted similar policies is modern-day North Korea, which is also in East Asia

I saw a historian tweet something along these lines and it made me wonder! Does it come down to how people’s living situations have evolved over time, with more young single people living on their own rather than with family?

From what I have read, the Baedeker raids focused on attacking towns & cities of the UK based on cultural importance as retaliation for bombings of locations such as Rostock. How were these targets identified given culture is harder to quantify than something such as industrial capacity, and what led to the inclusion/exclusion of sites?

Have noted Stratford due to the obvious cultural link, and that not all targets seemed to be especially large (notably seems Kings Lynn was hit)

I'm writing a Western, and in it, someone kills an entire table with a poison. I'm thinking arsenic, but I'm not sure if that was a very available poison back then. I'm not even sure how they were able to procure arsenic in the middle ages, when it was very much used (The King of Poisons, apparently). I know it can be found in minerals, but how it is isolated from those minerals, I don't know. Perhaps they didn't get their arsenic from the minerals?

Arsenic was used to treat syphilis. Now, penicillin came to replace it after the Wild West era. However, did doctors in the West have on them arsenic? And if so, would they have enough quantities of it to kill an entire table of people (30 people, big table). Lethal dose of arsenic is 2 to 20 mg/kg.

Recently, I began delving into ancient history with the goal of having a clearer understanding of our history, so far, I've studied the ancient Near East's history and the one thing that gets me scratching my head the most is the identity of the Sea Peoples who caused the Late Bronze Age collapse. There are several theories on who they were and linking some of their tribes to certain regions, for example, the Sherden being linked to Sardinia and the Shekelesh being linked to Sicily.

But I want to know the truth, were they ethnically Greek or a loose confederation of tribes coming from the Mediterranean, as hypothetised by John Chadwick?

Thanks for answering :)

The lyrics come across as startlingly single-entendre in the context of Broadway or Hollywood musical of the era. Was “dick” not in common usage at the time?

I’m a maid who would marry / And will take with no qualm / Any Tom, Dick or Harry, Any Harry, Dick or Tom, I'm a maid mad to marry / And will take double-quick / Any Tom, Dick or Harry, Any Tom, Harry or Dick.

Especially, I notice she seems to disappear from the record. What happened to her?

I've been doing a lot of reading(Neptunes Inferno, Shattered Sword, Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors) and it seems that very often, after a loss the Japanese response would be to ignore it, proclaim a victory, and not do anything about their mistakes(obviously not all the times, but too often still). The US Military, on the other hand, would write massive reports on what could be done better-such as the Enterprises gunnery officera report that can be summed up as "All empty spaces should be filled with 20mm and 40mms". Is this correct? Or am i misunderstanding things?

(As a sidenote, any recommendations for further reading on the Pacific war would be greatly appreciated!)

I was recently talking to some neopagan friends and they told me that when Christianity started becoming widespread in Europe and the Roman Empire that the church spearheaded several mass genocides against pagans that ranged from Greece to the British Isles to Scandinavia that including mass forced conversions and executions as well as the burning of pagan texts and when I tried doing some research it seems that this believe is widespread amongst the neopagan community today but when I tried doing historical research I found cases of what seemed to be isolated incidents such as Charlemagne's forced conversion of some Saxons but I couldn't find anything for a mass continent wide event and even found that Christian monks preserved several important texts written by pagans, so was their really a mass anti pagan genocide in late antiquity and during the middle ages in Europe?