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.
Gather round one and all for another edition of the finest Digest I write up on Sundays. Grab yourself a grain fed, organic AskHistorians answer written by some of our amazing flairs and non flairs. We had ourselves a pretty good week with an impressive amount of posts and topics! So have a gander through the list and enjoy the great history.
Start the week off with Announcing the Best of January Award Winners!
Get all your book suggestion needs covered in the Thursday Reading and Rec thread.
Check out the always fun Friday Free For All.
/u/Klesk_vs_Xaero is back to fine form in The Saturday Showcase.
Everybody loves META threads! See the community feedback in The level of removed posts on this sub is ridiculous.
On a different note, I’m trying something different with the digest this week to see if changing the style makes it a bit easier to read. Especially now that its significantly bigger than previously. Let me know what you think, but also don’t be surprised if it changes a bit over the next few days. Experimenting with bullet points and things like that.
That wraps us up for another week and I retreat once more into the shadows to lurk. Shout out if you have any favorites and don’t forget to thank and upvote our amazing writers.
Welcome to the second week of our Black History Month showcase! We here at AskHistorians have been teaming up with /r/BlackPeopleTwitter to showcase some fascinating parts of history. As part of that, every Monday we’ll have an entire tweet line up on Black history, every Sunday will revisit some old but gold threads, and on February 28th we’ll be joined by Dr Megan Hunt for a fascinating AMA on the Civil Rights movement and the ways in which our audience has actually been exposed to the movements through popular media and education! Mark your calendars now dear readers, because its going to be great!
Today’s theme is Black Leaders and Famous Figures!
/u/vpltz did an incredible job writing about In 1920s France, Josephine Baker became the most successful American entertainer and the first African-American to star in a major motion picture. Yet she never reached an equivalent reputation in the US. What was Baker's relationship to her American homeland and to its civil rights movement?
/u/EdHistory101 gives us an important perspective on ‘doing history’ when they use the question “Is it true that MLK Jr. was not a man of upstanding character?” as a springboard for a much larger discussion.
/u/LordHussyPants wrote about To what extent was the emergence of effective black leaders the main reason for the growing demand for civil rights from African Americans (post WW2)
I’ll be back with the rest of the digest later in the day!
Once more its time to shout out the interesting yet overlooked questions that caught our eye this week. Got any favorites of your own that you still hope to see an answer for?
• /u/PierreBourdieu2017 asked Did the URSS and other socialist countries try to develop team sports in their policies ?
• When it comes to asking the real questions, we have /u/KingArthurPotter wondering Did they have slides in the middle ages?
• /u/yummytapioca wants to know about Enlisting in the Late Roman Army