I would just like to say thank you to all history nerds out there! I've always been interested in history and love reading through this sub filled with questions I would never think of and even more fantastic answers! I'm a shameless lurker and you have really opened up my interest for things in history I've never even knew existed!

Sources: Leijonborg, U/ (2015) Man this sub is great , Sydney, NSW: My head

I'm a real lurker on this sub. I've only posted once, but I read daily. I appreciate the quality content and strict moderation of this sub. A+!

I finished Pakenham's The Scramble For Africa last night and man the final ~100 pages of that book are grim. They're just unrelentingly grim. Colonialism is pretty horrifying stuff, like holocaust levels horrifying.

I'm not sure what I'm going to go on to read next. I keep meaning to read Peter Frankopan's First Crusade: Call from the East so I might do that. I've been meaning to read it for a while now and Extra History is doing a First Crusade series so it couldn't hurt to brush up on that subject in case we see an influx of questions about it once the series ends.

I'm nearly finished my thesis as well, which is exciting. I'm hoping to finish writing on my last chapter today. Then I have to go over the footnotes this weekend and send it off to my supervisor for notes. Once that's done all I'll really have left to do is write the conclusion, make the changes to a few chapters based on my supervisor's notes, and go through the painfully frustrating process of compiling it all into one file without the dozens of images and graphs just ruining everything. Still, I'm so close I can nearly taste it even if I feel kind of like a walking (or sitting if we're accurate) corpse on most days.

When did we begin differentiating 'aether' from air?

In other words, at what point in time did ancient/medieval scientists realize our planet had its own atmosphere, and that this atmosphere didn't continue on throughout space?

^(This one might be more for /r/askscience, but I think it's more of a historic question than scientific.)

I'm interested in quality of life, especially if it can be quantified. Here is a quick multiple choice question I like to ask people. Which of these would you prefer?

1. Your life now (assumed a thousandaire)
2. Being a millionaire in 1950
3. Being a billionaire in 1901

The bigger monetary numbers initially seem appealing, until you realise that everything else is "worse". For example dentistry and health care are so much better now (they only figured out yellow fever ~100 years ago, MRI is recent). The time to travel anywhere was longer. Entertainment options were more limited. Communication was slow. Things were inherently more dangerous (vehicles more likely to cause injuries, asbestos everywhere, engineering less robust). While you could use the larger monetary sums to purchase things, you would never approach getting an iPhone no matter how much you had.

Virtually everyone asked this question picks now, essentially saying a thousandaire now is better than millionaire a few decades back and a billionaire a century back.

I am curious what your thoughts are going back further in history. Is this an industrial revolution thing? Would 1ad and 1000ad have an equal price tag?

If I have unanswered question, whose answer I find on my own, can I post the answer here?

Hi everyone I hope you're all enjoying your Friday's :) I was reading up on the history of Cars, as I sent off for my provisional license recently & I came across the Benz Patent-Motorwagen" first built by Karl Benz in 1886. I also read that apparently it first ran on Hydrogen which is interesting since car manufacturers these days are trying to put as many if not more Hybrid, Electric & Hydrogen powered cars than Petrol or Diesel.

So this got me thinking why did Benz opt to fuel his car off of non-renewable sources like Petrol & Diesel instead of carrying on using the renewable Hydrogen gas?

Also a few weeks ago I was reading a thread that mentioned the Marxist conception of "Dialectal Materialism" Which apparently is the belief that events (whether political or historical) are the result of conflicting social forces, so apparently the Soviets (or at the very least Marxists) thought that if these social forces could be manipulated you could influenced time. Is this at all correct? What did the Soviets &/or Marxists think of time travel?

Does anyone know how the Danish (and to a lesser extent German) public reacted to the first sexually reassigned Danish patient "Lili Elbe"? (formally "Einar Mogens Wegener"). Thank you to anyone that can answer my queries & have a good weekend :)

I greatly adore /r/AskHistorians and the mods that maintain its amazingly high levels of quality.

Keep up the good work!

2 Questions:

1. What inspired you to read (i.e.: study) history

2. What are your favourite book(s) on politics/philosophy/economy and why?

What are some historical time periods or events that you would like to be more depicted in mainstream media?

I am really enjoying the French TV show A French Village . It is set during WW2 and tells the life in a fictional small town. You have a good cast of different characters, sometimes a bit stereotypical ( but well written nonetheless ), from the communist resistant to the collaborationist cop.

It was shown in several countries like Canada or South Korea so it should exists with subtitles. I recommend it for people interested in the period and location. Surely it has some historical flaws due to the fact that it is for TV but it has a great historian working for the show ( Jean-Pierre Azema ).

Recently we got copies of official documents belonging to my great-grandfather. He was a Wehrmacht soldier and died during the war so nobody in my family knew much about him as my great-grandmother didn't talk to much about him. Most of the things we read were pretty clear. We know in which battles he fought, we know his rank and we know what medals he received. We know what job he had before the war and we know where his grave is/was. And we know about his political attitude (before you ask, yes, that's why my great-grandmother didn't like to talk about him). But the police report about him wasn't very clear.

The report stated he was arrested for a "Passvergehen" in 1931 which means he comitted a crime concerning identity cards or comparable documents (from my understanding). We couldn't find any information about him being convicted.

And now we're sitting here asking ourselves what exactly he could've done. As far as I know there wasn't an obligation to carry an identity card in '31 (which was the first thing we thought about). The report stated this happened in Wickrath, which means he didn't cross a border. And as we can't find information about him being convicted it seems very unlikely that he has done something worse like forging documents.

It may seem trivial, but does anyone have an idea what he could have done?

What has been used more throughout history, swords or spears?

Does anyone have any book recommendations along the lines of the AskHistorians podcast #27: Language Policy in East Asia? (that episode is my jam) I'm looking more towards Chinese/Taiwanese language policy.

Edit: Also any book recommendations about the history of tea? Can be any specific time period or just a general overview.

Anyone else here really get into history because of games like Civilization and Age of Empires or am I the weirdo here? Like I always had a fascination with historical battles but those games made me interested in the how and the why those battles happened. I may even wind up going back to school to study history because of it.