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.
Receiving a series of questions tailored to his flair, Mongols in Iran, /u/rakony delivers in spades
agentdcf gives a detailed list of what a British man might have in his pantry circa 1890
Reedstilt wrote a bona fide essay on the differences between Mesoamerican and Eastern Woodlands cultures
American_Graffiti gives a great response to the question of when marriage became about love and
CrossyNZ explains in detail how Catherine the Great used her gender to her advantage
Honestly, this is a random sampling of the excellent posts I've seen this week. There are more on the Twitter feed and even that isn't the end of the wonderful comments we've seen (but I'll leave some for others to love). So a big thank you to everyone who has taken the time out of their lives to share their knowledge here.
My highlights this week (I finally found some time for reading /r/AskHistorians/new again...):
/u/American_Graffiti in How did the phrase "the birds and the bees" come to mean sex? and in What did boys play with before the invention of railways and automobiles?
/u/agentdcf in What did people think scurvy was before they learned it was a nutritional deficiency?
Any thoughts on working with ‘original’ vs. digitised historical documents?
/u/Daeres in How to Historians evaluate the value of information (truthfulness) in historical sources/documents?
/u/mormengil in How do you build a castle?
/u/suggestshistorybooks in What are the best books about important historical events aimed specifically towards middle/high school his5ory enthusiasts?
Edit: Removed links /u/lngwstksgk already posted.
/u/AnOldHope gets "a tad crass" in a very AOH fashion and identifies holes in Mormon historiography that an aspirant grad student should consider filling
/u/farquier identifies the start date of building fancy mosques
/u/LordKettering tells you how religion helped form colonial America, and then, so you don't get the wrong impression, replies to himself and tells you how it didn't.
/u/CrossyNZ breaks out the military science and defines "war"
/u/Daeres on democracy (and the lack thereof) in Ancient Greece
/u/vertexoflife gets VERY excited about pornography
/u/KerasTasi on Western influences in the Caribbean
/u/buddythebear on why organs were so popular as background music in old timey radio shows
Unanswered Question of the Week