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.
I wrote this ridiculously rambling monstrosity on Iran in the mid-17th century.
Great discussion here on the reconquista and beyond (which didn't get much attention) and how this time period differed from more current social/racial ideas, featuring u/mrhumphries75 and /u/Itsalrightwithme.
/u/Bentresh on "Why is the Egyptian Hieratic script not considered the world's first alphabet?"
/u/Chamboz on "Since the Ottoman Decline thesis has been challenged, what could be the explanation to their loss of territory and military defeats in the 18th and 19th century?" as well as "suppose You're a 13/14 year old girl in a (tradesmen/working class) Muslim family in Edirne (the capital of the Ottoman empire) in 1397. Suppose you sleep with a boy and get pregnant. What will happen to you when your family and/or community find/figure out?"
/u/cdesmoulins answered "How did hunting come to be such an important part of medieval aristocratic life?" as well as "Why did Charles III expel the Jesuits from Spain and its Territories?"
Tapped out an answer about trench warfare [such as it is] in the American Civil War
Super late to this party, but this past week I really enjoyed /u/sunagainstgold's answer to the very long titled I live in a European city where they have found lots of old houses from the 14th century burried in the city center. At what point are those houses 1/2 burried and how do people just forget that the buildings used to exist in a location that has been constantly populated since they were built? because I love stuff like how cities were built in the past. I also really enjoyed seeing /u/hillsonghoods display their truly impressive range of knowledge in an answer to Was Aristotle really such a great philosopher, or is he mostly famous because of Alexander the Great?
This is late, but I have to give props to u/cdesmoulins for their fascinating discussion of the queerness and blatant homosexuality in Plato's Symposium, how the text has been handled and taught in homophobic Christian Europe, and how queer Classicists through the ages have related to Ancient Greece.