Today:
Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Sunday Digest (formerly the Day of Reflection). Nobody can read all the questions and answers that are posted here, 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.
Some weeks life gives you lemons. In other weeks it gives you a surprising amount of information on WWII semi-automatic rifles. This week was one of the latter.
/u/vonadler and /u/Reddit4Play delved into doctrine to discuss whether the semi-automatic M1 Garand give the Americans a significant advantage against the bolt-action rifles the Germans and Japanese used?
While /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov dealt with the question of why was it so hard for everyone to make a working semi-automatic rifle in WW2?
And, moving away from rifles but sticking with the WWII theme, /u/Elm11 explored why the winter war (Finnish-Russian war) is so important.
This weeks rundown:
/u/vonadler on "Did the semi-automatic M1 Garand give the Americans a significant advantage against the bolt-action rifles the Germans and Japanese used?".
/u/dubstripsquads answered "How were non-black minorities treated in the Jim Crow South?".
/u/AtillaThePun on "Why wasn't there a 'scramble for Australia'?".
/u/frrmack summarise the views on Julius Caesar by various people, and why they held that view towards Caesar.
One of my favorites (not mentioned by GKZ) was /u/The_Alaskan on Why wasn't there a stronger attempt to connect Alaska to the continental US?