Welcome to another floating feature! This is a repeat of a question asked almost a year ago, but there’s more of us now, and those of us who are still around have had 11 months to sponge up new historical information, possibly without any chance to spill it all over someone, so we thought this would be a nice one to revisit.
So, what are you just dying to tell someone all about? It can be a question you’ve been tapping your toes waiting for here on the subreddit, or something you’d secretly love to yammer on about in real life. Whatever you’d like!
This thread is not the usual AskHistorians style. This is more of a discussion, and moderation will be gently relaxed for some well-mannered frivolity.
What is this “Floating feature” thing?
Readers here tend to like the open discussion threads and questions that allow a multitude of possible answers from people of all sorts of backgrounds and levels of expertise. The most popular thread in this subreddit's history, for example, was about questions you dread being asked at parties -- over 2000 comments, and most of them were very interesting!
So, we do want to make questions like this a more regular feature, but we also don't want to make them TOO common -- /r/AskHistorians is, and will remain, a subreddit dedicated to educated experts answering specific user-submitted questions. General discussion is good, but it isn't the primary point of the place.
With this in mind, from time to time, one of the moderators will post an open-ended question of this sort. It will be distinguished by the "Feature" flair to set it off from regular submissions, and the same relaxed moderation rules that prevail in the daily project posts will apply. We expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith, but there is far more scope for general chat than there would be in a usual thread.
One thing I wish people would ask more often is why atrocities in war occurs and what led to them in the first place. Users always ask if and how atrocities occurred but never why, a question that is equally important in understanding what truly happened. This is an issue I face quite often when it comes to the Vietnam War and thanks to people like Nick Turse, I've had to constantly explain that US soldiers were not brainwashed zombies who kill because they were ordered/told so by the 'criminal government' of the United States.
Another thing I'd like people to ask about is the Army of the Republic of Vietnam which is so commonly looked down upon by both contemporary and current veterans of the Vietnam War. They played a big part in the war and were so unfairly treated and overlooked.
Now these aren’t exactly earth-shattering history questions here, but they are some things I know that no one has asked about:
Why is the tomato the vegetable of choice to throw at bad performances, and when did it come about?
Records of throwing tomatoes at performances show up around the early 19th century in Italy. Prior to start of the 19th century tomatoes had a very minor role in Italian culinary culture, they were primarily an ornamental garden plant consumed by a few people in a limited condiment fashion, mostly by the upper class, and influenced heavily by Spanish cuisine. By the 1800s tomatoes had entered the middle and low classes as a food staple along with other vegetables. They were cheap as well, a report on the state of food access for the poor in Naples by Napoleon's government in the 1800s gives the price of tomatoes at 3 soldi for 2 pounds. Vegetables ranged in price from 2-8 soldi per 2 pounds, putting tomatoes on the cheap side. (A family size pizza in Napoli, for comparison, was 2 soldi, and also a key food of the poor.) They also go “squish” unlike say a cabbage, making them the stage bomb of choice.
From Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, 2010.
Why are CDs able to hold 74 minutes of sound?
CDs were in competition with cassettes as a small portable sound medium, so they needed to be around the same size. The diameter of a CD is about the same (12 cm) as the diagonal width of a mini cassette (11.5 cm). The thing about being designed to play the entirety of one conductor’s version of Beethoven's 9th at 74 minutes is just a myth, according to their inventor. Total crap covering up some corporate manoverings with encoding formats. Or, alternately, a cunning marketing ploy to make people think CDs were invented for Serious Music to be Enjoyed by Serious People.
Why are most MP3s (which are now twenty years old!) encoded at 128kbps?
Because of phone lines:
Attention to the mediatic dimension of formats also helps to explain why 128 kbps (kilobits per second) has until very recently been the default bitrate for MP3s made in popular programs like iTunes (though this number is now starting to creep upward). In the 1980s, it was thought that one important means of transmitting digital data would be over phone lines via a protocol named isdn (isdn stood for Integriertes Sprachund Datennetz, though the initials in English generally refer to Integrated Services Digital Network or Isolated Subscriber Digital Network). The isdn ’s lines in the 1980s had a capacity of 128 kbps, with an extra 16 kbps for error checking and other network matters. Experiments on digital audio compression in the 1980s were undertaken with the goal of transmitting a continuous, intelligible audio stream within the available bandwidth. Today, even the cheapest dsl connection is wider than 128 kbps for downloads, yet the 128k specification remains a default setting in many programs.
From Sterne, Jonathan. Mp3 : The Meaning of a Format. 2012
And if you’re ripping your CD collection, go ahead and stick with 128, you probably can’t hear the difference between it and higher quality things. Mp3s are unsuitable for sound preservation, so you might as well save space. (If you want “archival quality” rips don’t use mp3, try FLAC to save space.)
There's a whole multitude of them. But really anything that will make me think. A question that will get me searching through my sources to check my facts. Something that will challenge me. Sometimes I just get the urge to write and write about something that I'm passionate about and that's why I love /r/askhistorians, but I'm tired of the same repeated questions that fall within my range; "Why did 18th Century Armies stand in lines and shoot at each other, were they stupid?" and so on.
I'm not a historian, but what I would really like to see is some historical context for current events. "Those who forget history..."
Well, what? What has happened in the past when whole societies were survieled? Is it always like east germany? What historically follows growing wealth disparity? The french revolution, every time? Imprisonment of large parts of the population? Is the gulag system typical? In the UK we're seeing a popular disdain for the disabled - can we expect gas chambers?
I'm sure that many issues facing us today have historical precedents, but most people have no idea of their past outcomes. I think that historians have a unique and important role in contextualizing current events and informing us of possible outcomes. This is especially true when those outcomes are counterintuitive.
Edit: In question form: How have current events played out in the past?
Anything to do with the unification of the Viet Minh. It's a really neat story, in around 10 years various communist sects that had violently opposed each other's ideologies decided to work together. Given, a lot of it was due to the re-occupation of the French after Japan was defeated in WWII, but the changes in diction and ideology in the leader's writings are still thought-invoking.
Who came up with the Ice cream truck song? (i am listening to it as i type this)
edit* popular American song
Anything to do with southern labor history, or southern social history; basically, anything other than slavery or the War.
Not sure if this is the right thread for this, but here goes anyway. I've always been curious about counterfactual history. I wonder how serious an approach to the past it is, how it is viewed in the academic world and what (if any) is its greatest use. Oh and what are the flaws of it as a method of looking at the past?
Anything about Israel's history would be great. I've only ever answered USS Liberty and 1900-1948 stuff, and there's so much more to talk about!
What happened to the Nazi 'human skin' lampshade reportedly discovered at Buchenwald concentration camp and was it ever tested for DNA?
I heard the story of it when I was 13 and 35 years later its still vivid in my imagination.