That feeling when someone asks a really excellent and thought-provoking question, and even after putting in a bunch of research you don't feel qualified to provide an AH-quality answer. :(

But I did learn a most wonderful Victorian euphemism for feminists: "the Wollstonecraft order who do mischief."

And that other feeling when you know your brain is not going to let you let this one go.

That Bill Clinton popularity thread is giving me sympathetic pains for the mods. Your labours are much appreciated here, btw.

Well—I've read Weigall's Wanderings in Roman Britain at last, and parts of it were a real eye-opener. He has done a tremendous lot of original research—both historical and archaeological—and has shed any amount of light on that melancholy period so fascinating to me ... ... the end of the Roman civilisation in the Imperial province of Britannia. To anyone who conventionally assumed (as I did—in my recent letter on the Arthur problem) that the Saxon conquest was virtually complete by 400 A.D., and that Arthur was a Cymric-speaking tribal chieftain, this new body of information (well-authenticated, and scarcely subject to dispute) is a knockout punch—something necessitating a complete revaluation of previously acquired ideas. So many of my earlier concepts—on which my recent letter to you was based—are shewn to be outmoded, that I was on the point of writing you to cancel much that I said before. For one thing, get this: Arthur was a Britanno-Roman who spoke Latin, wore the Roman helmet and armour, and fought the Saxons in order to save Britain for the Roman Empire, whose authority was never repudiated despite the withdrawal of the legions and the collapse of the Western Emperor in 476. Our idea of Arthur as a shaggy Welsh tribal chief was just as cockeyed as the conventional idea of him as a silken-tabarded Norman gallant. He was a Celtic-ROman whose name was Artorius, and whose idea of a fatherland was not that of a Brythonic-speaking wilderness of camps and thatched villages, but that of an orderly Roman countryside of villas and estates, and of settled towns and great cities with baths, amphitheatres, crowded streets, sewer-systems, central heating, works of art, and a Latin-speaking population. It was for a Roman world that Arthur fought—his role being like that of Syargrius, last of the Roman governors in Gaul, of whom I wrote some weeks ago.

• H. P. Lovecraft to Bernard Austin Dwyer, Nov 1933, Selected Letters 4.292-293

HPL didn't write much about Arthur, but he did really like Roman Britain, so Weigall's book was right up HPL's alley - and probably says something about our biases; I won't get into the Merlin angle.

I'm at Kzoo 2017! Its awesome!

So minor matter of interest, at least to me (and maybe /u/Necroqubus), I've been working on more stats stuff. Getting things back to the full 2016, and also working on macro stuff concerning popularity of topics and the like. Not totally done with either, certainly, but using extrapolation off the data I have for 2016, I projected 40,619 questions to have been posted that year. I just finished collecting an actual list of all the threads from that year, and the actual number was 40,579, after removing all the non-question threads. Projection was only off by 40.

So I've been sitting on a question that may not quite rise to the distinction of it's very own post:

What is the history of adding fluoride to water in the former Soviet Union? I grew up in Ukraine and now suffer life-long effects of copious cavities. Some of it was poor oral hygiene as a kid, but I hear fluoride wasn't added to water in the US on large scale till the late 40s? Very curious to find out. Thanks in advance :)

The buzz word for the past week re: the Trump Administration is "Nixonian." But how closely do Trump and Nixon resemble each other? If Nixon had been President with today's media and technology (and if Nixon had access to Twitter), would Watergate have played out similar to the Russia scandal we're witnessing now?

With the present being the history of the future, how do historians interact with current events related to their area of expertise? I don't mean a specific topic, but for example is a historian focussed on politics excited when an event happens that will surely be an area of interest to future historians? Or, How does a military historian look at current conflicts? Or, [insert your area of study here]?

While waiting to see if anyone can pin down that story about Gauls and bears that /u/Xenjael asked about, I wondered if it's physically possible to kill a bear by sticking your arm down its throat, and I found an anecdote: the only evidence of which seems to be a mysterious plaque with no provenance from somewhere in Jackson Hole.

https://huckberry.com/journal/posts/man-kills-grizzly-with-hands-and-teeth

"Petersen, having his right hand and arm wedged in the bear's throat, actually used his own teeth and jaws to pinch off the bear's jugular vein. When the bear passed-out from the lack of blood flow to the brain, Petersen beat the bear in the head with a stick."

Well, then . . . that's a thing someone says happened.

So... any of you guys feel up to deconstructing /pol/-derived "historical" factoids?

Why are those Russian military hats so much larger and more upright that other countries circular military hats? I mean they look badass, don't get me wrong. But is there a historical reason they evolved differently?

There were comments previously regarding academic historians suing each other in Germany, it happened in France too. In short, an academic has been arguing that the French government has been covering up a massacre in Sénégal in 1944, and another academic published a letter in the press criticizing her methodolgy and conclusions.

She sued him for libel, and just lost. The reasoning of the tribunal was that the critics are about her work and not her honour and therefore do not constitute libel under the law.

Maybe I'm the last person to notice this, but it seems like reddit really digs communism. Is that the case? I noticed it earlier this week in some comments in the Castro thread before the mods nuked them from orbit (for proving terrible answers, not being communist), but I've seen it a bunch all over the place on reddit.

Is it Hot Topic types with Che t-shirts? Are Che t-shirts still a thing? Is Hot Topic still a thing? Should I spend more time outside my apartment?

Tangentially, there's a bar in NYC called Proletariat, which is ironic because it's expensive as fuck for no reason and the people who frequent it are anything but the proletariat.

Anyway, if you're a commie, keep on keeping on. Just wondering.

Was D-Day or Dunkirk the more impressive operation?