I enjoyed talking about medieval road rage this week, but mostly I'm here to promote the fun we had in the Floating Feature on alternate-history TV show concepts.

And for real, if you haven't read /u/alriclofgar's beautiful answer and then the highly entertaining (and informative) follow-ups on spears and swords in the early Middle Ages, hie thee to that thread.

Another redditor: This is romantic and all, but it seems kind of unsourced and hypothetical. Are there any writings or sources about the superiority of a c.500 English spear? Have there been any modern reconstructions and experiments with examples representative of weapons around at both times?

/u/alriclofgar: I started by weighing about 150 spearheads in museum collections in the UK; you can, however, find some spearhead weights published in the ASKED database on the ADS (free to access). I then recorded the length between spearhead sockets and ferrules in every grave where the two were preserved in situ and undisturbed by later processes across 80 cemeteries; about 50 returned results, and there was a range of lengths, but 1.5m of wood was near the mean and median. I measured the diameter of 1200 spearhead sockets, and as many ferrules as I could find (about 1/10 thr number of spearheads) from which I estimated the shaft diameter and taper (about 2cm wide, usually tapering narrower toward the socket). The species of shaft timber was identified in about 400 of these spearheads, and from that it's a matter of simple math to reconstruct te weight of the weapons, and less simole math to figure out the rotational dynamics.

Don't mess with the best.

u/Mikedash on the decline of the house detective at hotels

I talked a bit about the presence of individuals we might consider black in the Roman Empire and the Twitter controversy surrounding Mary Beard's defense of a BBC video portraying dark-skinned Roman soldiers and answered whether or not that skin cream/cosmetic/facial mask you bought is actually based on what Cleopatra used.

History is much like beauty in that it is only skin deep, but although we may each behold it through our own eyes, there are some strands of objective truth to be found in the past. Or something like that, the point is I talked about makeup and racism!

This week I got to answer a question about the Shinsengumi, the very doomed maybe-not-so-noble ronin who dragged me into Japanese history in the first place.

At the time, just how famous were the Shinsengumi?. And then the replies also allowed me to geek out over the Bakumatsu in general, lots of reading suggestions in the link.

The other really neat thing that happened this past week. u/Conny_and_Theo left some really insightful follow-up questions on my Floating Feature Happiest story contribution, which developed into a discussion about historical romances/marriages between Japanese men and European/American women.

No shame, I'm gonna plug an answer I just wrote regarding the concept of sovereignty in Native American political thought.

Been a while since I've written a full answer and had things come up while I was writing the comment (hence why it took a long time for the response), but I hope others can benefit from it!

• /u/PurrPrinThom answered "The Gallic armies that Caesar faced are frequently depicted as an impetuous, shirtless mass of warriors whose immense individual fighting prowess was dragged down by their poor discipline, light armor, and poor military theory. How accurate is this image? How was a Gallic warhost organized?"

• /u/chocolatepot on "Did clothing stores exist before the Industrial Revolution?"

• /u/alkibiades415 on "How did the Roman Republican Senate get anything done?"

Better incredibly late than never is a motto I live by, someone help me. And also enjoy, ponder and maybe even decide to answer these popular and/or interesting questions, as of yet without an answer:

/u/sleepingredwood asked what were the implications of the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma on the japanese socialist movement

/u/ragnaROCKER wants to know how did the kingdom of Silla manage to unify the Korean peninsula in the 7th century

/u/WhiteOwlUp would like to know if the early Tang and Li Shimin were in particular exceptional for their acceptance of defectors

Let’s look back at the theme of the week! What did we learn about mores, customs, & folkways?

/u/ParallelPain answered how were Samurai expected to conduct themselves during the Sengoku Jidai

/u/Vespertine on historians’ use of literature

/u/Steelcan909 on how did missionaries teach Western and Central European “barbarians” to be proper Christians in 450-900AD

I talked a tiny bit about the beginnings of narcotic control in the U.S.