Why did Lincoln believe that he lacked justification for a unilateral strike on the Confederate states prior to the attack on Fort Sumter? has /u/craneomotor explain the practical and very political concerns Lincoln faced.

The Noble Savage is an enduring myth, but just what was the situation really like for Native American's? Native Americans in what is now the USA have often been portrayed as having "idyllic" lives before Western colonizers arrived - is there any truth to this? How much "easier" were their daily lives? Before Western diseases and colonists arrived, was it a life of easy hunting and simple living? asks the question, and the amazing /u/Snapshot52 breaks down what could be a broad question to actually give some detailed answers. With a ton of follow up from some Snpashot and other great users as well.

Politics can be a tricky beast, and sometimes you get so focused on one thing you miss other things happening. Were the Byzantines and Sassanids aware that the different Arab tribes were being united and if so, did they take any preemptive measures against them? is a great example of two superpowers duking it out, and missing something big happening nearby.

Your friendly neighborhood mod dropping in to remind you that you can follow us on Twitter @askhistorians to make sure you don’t miss an answer!

One advantage worth pointing out: our Twitter systematically includes answers by the mods, which some of the Digest rundowns do not (on purpose). So until we have a quality contributor willing to collate mods’ answers each week, get them—and all the others—from Twitter!

Another week, another glorious Sunday Digest!

Starting off with one that's just a few hours old and already gilded, we have /u/sunagainstgold answering the great question 17,000,000 people can trace their ancestry back to Genghis Kahn. He had eleven legitimate children, but hordes (pun) of illegitimate children. What was life like for these children and their mothers through his empire? Come and find the amazing situation behind Mongol wives and how many of them there could be. I got exhausted just reading about it.

Keeping with the marriage theme Sunagainstgold also delved into interfaith marriages in How did mixed-religion marriages work in the Middle Ages in Europe? Turns it it's more complex then you might have thought!

In Roots, Kunta Kinte is determined to escape slavery and find his way home to Africa. Are there any known cases of slaves who were successful in finding passage back to Africa and then returning to their ancestral villages? is yet another great question with an answer ALSO by Sunagainstgold. (Choose for yourself whether I've accidently stalked them this week, or she just keeps writing fantastic stuff that crops up in my feed.) There are also some other great answers in the same thread by /u/bg478 and /u/swarthmoreburke with some other examples and book suggestions.

Playing catch-up on things I saved:

/u/Platypuskeeper answered How reliable is Adam of Bremen’s description of a massive Norse pagan temple at Uppsala?

/u/kochevnik81 on "Since western countries produced so much anti-soviet propaganda, and the USSR produced so much pro-soviet propaganda, how can we be sure that any history of the Soviet Union is accurate?"

/u/qed1 answered "If Isaac Newton "discovered" gravity, what did Galileo think he was dealing with when he did his experiments with dropping objects? Did he have a name for the effect that he was seeing?"