I hope it's not too late to add this thread where over several comments u/commiespaceinvader pulls back the camera on a series of photographs depicting sex shows for soliders to talk with great empathy, understanding and knowledge about their context, specifically the power differential between occupying forces and the local populations and what that might mean for those performing and those watching, covering issues of consent and coercion.

The fantastic flairs (and non flairs) here have given me a lot of awesome answers but a few of the ones that stuck with me most were

/u/bigfridge224 on I hear a lot about the everyday use of "curses", charms and other magic in ancient Rome and Greece, some is superficially similar to Voodoo, but I still wonder how the occult was seen in these societies. In the spirit of Halloween can someone tell me?

/u/mikedash on Why did Coca Cola make a clear version of their product that Georgy Zhukov could disguise as vodka?

/u/Lilac1399 on Eleanor of Aquitane had to avoid noble suitors who tried to kidnap and force her into marriage. Was this common in Medieval Europe?

Continued below cuz pings only work 3 times ;)

Because I'm out in the country with no wifi, what about that one where someone asked about how many chickens it would take to feed Gaston's 4 dozen a day egg eating habit?

I enjoyed talking about the history of gender and sexuality with you all this year:

Did the contemporaries of Ancient Greeks share their views of sex and sexuality?

How common was homosexuality (or what we'd now see as homosexuality) in Ancient Greece?

Cleopatra is pretty (in)famous for her sexual exploits at this point. Is this based in ancient accounts or is it a modern invention?

There was also a lot of amazing posts on the subject this year like

What role did women play in the golden age of Islam? and Why did the mafia turn the Stonewall Inn into a gay bar? /u/sunagainstgold

Did Thutmosis III try to erase Queen Hatshepsut from the record books because she was a successful ruler or because she was a woman (whom depicted herself as male)? and I am a young woman from Hindustan that has been adopted into a British naval officer's family in 1812 and brought to English soil. What sort of social and religious obstacles would I face in my day to day life? by /u/mikedash

How did gender and sexuality shape the Holocaust -- for both the perpetrators and the victims? by /u/commiespaceinvader

I've only been on Reddit for 4 or 5 months so a lot of these are recent posts, but I still couldn't possibly credit all the incredibly informative posts here that I've learned a lot from. These are a few:

The effectiveness of hand to hand combat" or "how willing are humans to stab and be stabbed"? This entire thread by r/hergrim and r/hborrgg

Why is Francis Tumblety not universally acknowledged as the prime Jack the Ripper suspect? by r/Klesk_vs_Xaero

What is the consensus among historians about the Sacred Band of Thebes? Were they really 150 pairs of lovers? Or is that just a legend? by r/Iphikrates

I'm a male peasant in 13th century England, and another villager catches me and my male friend having "relations". How likely is it we'll be executed for sodomy (or anything else)? by r/sunagainstgold

Did the Red Army really rely on 'Swarm Tactics' during WWII? by r/Georgy_K_Zhukov

How do we estimate the number of Jewish deaths in the Holocaust? by r/commiespaceinvader

How was homosexuality generally viewed by native Americans, pre-colonization until American revolution? by r/400-Rabbits

What was Montezuma II of the Aztecs actually thinking when he trusted Cortes and let the conquistadores stay as guests in his palace until he ended up their prisoner? by r/Ahhuatl

r/faceintheblue on historical sources for the Spanish conquest of Peru

Did something like the Hunger Games take place in the Easter Islands? by r/mikedash

Are any actual songs from the Golden Age of Piracy known today? is one of my favorite posts from myself, yet hardly anyone saw it because I posted it a couple days late as a followup to another post of mine that became very popular. Did pirates really make people walk the plank or leave them on deserted islands? and Are there any Golden Age of Piracy accounts centered around the U.S. Pacific Northwest coast and west coast? and I am a sailor on a british trading ship in the golden age of piracy. I get attacked by pirate. What do I do? are other posts of mine that I thought were good.

As one of the mods who does the tweeting for the AskHistorians twitter, and who therefore reads a lot of AH answers, there's an embarrassment of riches - there's simply more great in-depth writing on AskHistorians than anywhere else on Reddit, as the front page of /r/depthhub at any point this year demonstrates. See my replies to this post for a bunch of posts we tweeted that I thought were exceptional.

(N.B., I'm not going to link to the posts by /u/Cleopatra_Philopater or /u/mikedash because they've already linked to them in their own posts in this thread - but both of them really did write some incredible stuff for AskHistorians that was just a pleasure to read!)

As to my favourites amongst my own posts, these were my favourite things I wrote about music this year:

• Someone asked the question 'Where did "Cotton Eye Joe" come from, and who or what is he?'...probably as a joke. I answered it, seriously, and it was awesome.

• I went on a deep dive about people playing with their organs in rock/pop music, taking a little time to talk about my experience playing with organs belonging to myself and others...

• I answered a question about the death of disco, and hopefully maybe changed some people's minds about the music

• I explained a bit about the early history of hip-hop, and how different it was to what we consider hip-hop to be today

In terms of things I wrote on psychology and such things:

• The original publishing of the American Psychological Association's first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and whether PTSD being recognised officially as a disorder in the DSM-III was controversial

and

• What behavior prompted psychologists across the country to say Barry Goldwater was unfit to be president?

This year I also left my music and psychology comfort zone and ventured out into answering questions on science and Australia:

• What was the evidence that the British considered Australia to be Terra Nullius?

• How much of a surprise was it to contemporary people that the great auk went extinct ca. 1850? Was it even conceivable back in the late 1700s that a species could be hunted down to extinction?

• How did modern evidence-based medicine develop?

• In 1967, 90% of Australia voted "yes" in a referendum to recognise Aboriginals as Australian citizens. With such overwhelming public support, what did the "no" campaign look like?

This was very early in the year so I'm not surprised it was missed so far, but u/PangeranDipanagara broke down how Indonesia and Malaysia became majority-Muslim when they were once dominated by Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms in the most amazing detail possible.

I'll be quacking my own horn here, I admit, but a while back I found a redditor's Grandfather... in a Japanese prison camp, where he quite possibly witnessed the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

I've got to admit, I had a warm and fuzzy feeling when I was done with that one. Except for the whole "being in a Japanese prison camp" thing, of course.

A couple of the ones I really enjoyed here at the end of the year that I think could see more mention are:

/u/hillsonghoods on Is Eminem's charge that white artists used black music to get wealthy in the early days of rock and roll fair?

/u/400-Rabbits on Did the Spanish see the Aztecs as racially inferior or merely religiously and culturally inferior?

For a bit older stuff, I appreciated /u/commiespaceinvader's reply to another user here in response to some challenges made to one of my arguments.

(Continued in next comment for pings.)

I'm clearly biased since I asked the question, but I loved /u/mrhumphries75's answer to What was the border of the Muslim and Christian states in Iberia like?

I swear I don't like to toot my own horn too much, but...

There are a plethora of excellent writers on this sub, and sometimes the sheer breadth of knowledge the average contributor has is rather intimidating. This is almost always the first place I come if I need some relevant context or an overarching perspective on a historical issue. It's always a pleasant surprise when I get to bring my own expertise to bear: my background is not in history but in population genetics. Just as human history is preserved in written records, human genetic history is preserved in the records of our DNA, and to some extent these records can reinforce each other: likewise, they can be ambiguous and our interpretation of them can be colored by biases, so some skill and nuance are required to tease out the underlying history. If genetics-related questions popped up just a little more often, I'd apply for flair.

On several occasions in the last few years, I've had the chance to do some digging on genetics related topics for this sub, and I usually end up learning a lot in the process. This answer of mine about the fate of the Habsburg jaw took me down an interesting rabbit hole, but I think it led to a satisfactory conclusion. The jaw survives in Habsburg-descended lineages today, but to nowhere near the same extent as Charles II of Spain: the Spanish line was more inbred than the Austrian line, Charles had no issue, and around the 19th century, rulers started to notice the deleterious effects of inbreeding. It appears to be a trait controlled by contributions from many loci, and if some of the alleles contributing to the phenotype are recessive (not all of them are!), outcrossing will have a strong effect in suppressing it.

I've learned a huge amount this year from reading posts on AskHistorians. Among the answers that stick out most for me - usually because they educated me about some topic I'd never been aware of previously, I'd shortlist

• u/Georgy_K_Zhukov on When perusing Wikipedia's list of Confederate monuments, I notice that an overwhelming number were constructed in the period of 1900-1920. Why is this?

• u/hillsonghoods explains what matters most about an old favourite listen: Abbey Road initially received mixed reviews from critics, but today almost everyone agrees that it's one of the Beatles' greatest albums. What changed everyone's minds? Can Abbey Road's retrospective reviews be linked to some greater cultural phenomenon or shift in thought?

• u/Rfasbr on a truly fascinating bit of "hidden history": Were Africans generally aware of where slave ships were taking people? Was there any mythology surrounding this?

• and someone called u/sunagainstgold, discussing Where are we on "No Irish Need Apply", historically/historiographically speaking?, which is an answer that opens up windows on all sorts of histories from below in ways I find incredibly stimulating.

Among the answers that I wrote myself, there were three standouts that hopefully will continue to be useful to readers of this sub for a while:

u/Tminozaj asked: Why did Poland have lower rates of the Black Death than other European countries during the 1300s?, and I tried to take a (much) more detailed look at a question that has been posed repeatedly here over the years without ever attracting a definitive answer, deploying original research to show how very flawed the idea that Poland was somehow immune to the plague actually is. BONUS: I've updated my original post in the last couple of days to incorporate the details of some further research, so hopefully it now stands as a complete answer to the OP's question.

u/swegen9 asked: I am a hot-blooded young British woman in the Victorian era hitting the streets of Manchester for a night out with my fellow ladies and I've got a shilling burning a hole in my purse. What kind of vice and wanton pleasures are available to me? I wrote this one specifically to offer an alternative look at the year's most annoying/interesting meme (depending on your point of view), since the vast majority of the questions posed dealt with young men in various places and their access to vice. Hopefully it provided a useful corrective to the assumption that vice and wanton pleasure was an almost exclusively male preserve, historically speaking, while also questioning what "vice and wanton pleasure" actually was, for the majority of people.

u/Ydrahs asked: What were 'Sin-Eaters'? And when did the tradition die out? Diving down this particular rabbit hole involved me in more - and more fascinating - original research than any other question did this year. It turns out to be a problem that has never been properly addressed by historians, and though the answer I gave at the time now seems fairly callow, in light of what I've been able to uncover since, it's still an interesting introduction to a neglected topic that has, nevertheless, become the basis of a widely accepted bit of modern pop culture.

Shameless self-promotion time, because I'm at home with the toddler today and snatching time when I can:

I wrote about women aboard ships in the age of sail, the mutiny on the Bounty (and other mutinies), and German battleship construction and its flaws, in WWII.

I'd like to highlight /u/Bigglesworth_'s answers to two of my questions, which were both fascinating in their own right and also gratefully appreciated by my family:

• Great Escape from Stalag III-E
• Why and when did we start bombing civilians in World War II?

Some threads I enjoyed and bookmarked throughout the year:

• Why did the Soviets accept the Finnish peace agreement instead of installing the puppet government they had prepared, despite having (at great cost) crushed the Finnish army? - Lots of really interesting answers in this one.

• I for one am deeply dissatisfied with the amount and quality of historical information available about the mullet. Can anyone properly enlighten me about the rise and fall of this magnificent hairwreck? - /u/yodatsracist provided an interesting and thorough response to something I never would have stopped twice to consider.

• Why is Omaha beach the most famous D-Day landing, when there were 4 other beaches taken on D-Day by American, Canadian, French and British troops? - This was another thread full of a number of good responses that made for interesting reading, but /u/the_howling_cow in particular offered a lot of information and organized a lot of data in a way that was easy to understand.

• As a german I never fully understood Watergate. What happened and why was it such a scandal? - Also full of good comments and book recommendations throughout the thread. I've been particularly interested in Watergate this past year, so I really enjoyed this one.

One I really liked this year that hasn't been mentioned yet is u/StormTemplar's answer to How did "Saracens" become "Arabs"?