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.
Hello there, all you wonderful readers and contributors of AskHistorians! I hope everyone is having a great weekend and to make it a bit better, here are some of the popular and/or interesting questions which did not receive an answer yet:
/u/commiespaceinvader wants to know what is the history of organized anti-fascism and anti-racism in the US
/u/KalaiProvenheim would like to know more about the possibilities to increase yield of a farm in the High Middle Ages for farmers in Egypt, Anatolia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, or Iran
/u/PCLD wonders how did Leon Trotsky, a member of a different party just months before, achieve high leadership in the Bolshevik Party in late 1917
Let’s look at the theme of the week! Also, let’s do that for the last theme as well, since I was absent from my duty in the previous Digest. So, what did we learn about disease and the 11th century?
/u/Deirdre_Rose on diseases in Ancient Warfare
/u/rocketsocks on dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks
/u/BedsideRounds (the podcast is on my next chores playlist btw) on cholera being sometimes referred to as “King”
Here we go:
/u/skiosmagus answered "Historians use facts and evidence to construct narratives, but how strong is that narrative?"
/u/commiespaceinvader on "Is it true that "75% of French Jews survived the war"? If so, was this due to the efforts of the Vichy government?" and "Did Poles killed 200 000 Jews during WWII?" and "Why did the Nazis target Jehovah's Witnesses? Are there any accounts of the concentration camps from the perspective of a Jehovah's Witness?"
I answered whether the Ptolemaic dynasty made a conscious effort to Hellenise or segregate Egypt, and responded to Tom Holland's claim in Rubicon that Alexandria constituted a separate realm from Egypt as well as talking about why the ancient Egyptians did not notice a higher rate of defects/mortality from the many sibling marriages.
/u/orwells_elephant asked if The Ten Commandments are US law because they are engraved at the National Archives.
/u/daebow asked What did US citizens generally think about Latin Americans? (1800s-1960s)
/u/PavelBertuzzi4413 asked Why was Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom during WW2 if he did not like the British?