Today:
Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Day of Reflection. Nobody can read everything that appears here each day, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.
/u/henry_fords_ghost makes use of his flair in How did sales happen in the early days of the automobile in the USA? Did the car company sell directly or were there dealerships? Were there lessons for 1st time drivers?
/u/farquier asks himself and answers "how did people run international and long-distance business concerns before email" in Friday Free-For-All
/u/Das_Mime answers How formative was Tolkien to the genre of high fantasy?
/u/Algernon_Asimov answers What was so significant about a two-week period that it got its own English word, "fortnight"?
As usual, I just upvote responses & forget to save the post (and then it all becomes a blur...) But, I have these:
Seconding HallenbeckJoe re /u/farquier's post in the Friday Free-for-all, and have to recommend the post just above it by /u/AsiaExpert on Did Japanese or other Asian forms of writing inhibit their progression into the "Modern Age?"
Two of our moderators went above and beyond their normal duties this week to provide fantastic contextualization to problematic responses this week:
/u/Daeres wrote up an informative set of responses regarding problematic views about viewing Celtic-speaking peoples as a monolithic culture in the ancient world.
/u/NMW had a great write-up on the problems with viewing military leadership in the First World War as incompetent.
/u/idjet had a fascinating complementary pair of posts on Medieval town formation.