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.
These aren't from this week, but I have a bunch from the two months or so that I've never had time on a Sunday to post:
/u/Rosemary85 gives a devastating review/summary of Science and Technology in Homeric Epics
/u/Shin85 answers When did Latin become incomprehensible to the average person in Constantinople?
/u/rosemary85 gives a fascinating explanation of numbers in Ancient Greece.
/u/kielowskifan gives an explanation of how much vodka sales and taxes added to the Russian treasury
There were several great answers to People say "history is written by the winners" and imply it's biased. Was there ever a time when people thought history was biased because it was written by the literate? but I think /u/hatespugs detailed answer about Subaltern studies put its particularly well.
/u/gingerkid1234's boss depiction of Elliot Oring's Israeli Humor: The Content & Structure of the Chizbat of the Palmach, which actually made me pick up the book in the library and read a few chapters of it (the Palmach was the main pre-Independence Jewish military organization in Mandatory Palestine; click through for an explanation of Chizbat).
/u/flubb, always a favorite user of mine, has a little discussion of the historicity of the Biblical Queen of Sheba.
Probably two months ago I went through some of /u/esterke's then recent posts because they're phenomenal. Here are a few I saved: the profitability of the Holocaust, how could local people not have known about the Holocaust, why did Hitler so hate the Jews.
/u/intangible-tangerine answers Today my friend told me that King John considered converting England to Islam to win support of Arabs against the threat of France. How true is this story?
/u/kielowskifan (again) talks about homosexuality in the Eastern Bloc
/u/rittermeister and /u/tinyshaddow give great answers to How much power did a Confederate Governer have in the American Civil war?.
/u/elos_ has a sweet, very long discussion of whether WWI was inevitable
/u/reedstilt answers Wikipedia claims Tenskwatawa called white Americans "the children of the devil". Did he say this? What did he mean by "the devil"?
/u/whoosier (yet another old favorite of mine) answers Everybody knows the Renaissance meant a return to classical Greek and Latin texts. But where did these texts come from? How did they get to e.g. Padua, Paris or Cambridge? And was the language they were written in the only reason to suppose they were more authentic than the Arabic translations?
As a reminder for anyone who has gold: it's really easy to create a "day of" category in your saved comments. That's what I do, and then when I have a stress free Sunday, I just can really easily lay them all out.
The big standout of the week for me was our own /u/tiako giving an AMA on The Economy of the Ancient Roman Empire.
I was mildly disappointed that some child's question about why Americans use "cheap" building materials (compared to European timber framing) was deleted. I found a quick summary of American innovations in wooden construction, and I'm digging up some vaguely remembered reads.
If anyone's interested, here they are:
Advanced Framing uses a diagram of the Illinois Cottage at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 as an example of early efficient stick framing. However I can't find that image in the book cited. Edit: While scrolling through an image search, I have randomly run across it in the Chicago Public Library Blog; it's from a book from 1857.
A historical survey of wall framing by the same author.
I was unable to find any other images of the Illinois Cottage except this one; its exterior looks a bit more elaborate than the simple framing suggests.
Also, this paper that I'm too cheap to pay for, but it gives some background on how basic rural dwellings were thought to be better in America than in Europe at the time, to the point of being worth exhibiting.
I'm going to breach the unspoken taboo by putting a question forward which I thoroughly enjoyed answering. There are just so many fantastically problematic concepts in the linked article because it is drawn from the polemical and teleological concepts of turn of the (twentieth) century 'historiography'. Anyway I offer it here in the hope that others might also wonder upon the sheer audacity of the attempted hatchet-job by Irene Beaudry in LaRouche's expensive tinfoil rag the Executive Intelligence (oxymoronic) Review.