Sunday Digest | Interesting & Overlooked Posts | January 17, 2021

by AutoModerator

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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.

Gankom

Its my favorite time of the week folks, its Sunday Digest time! Gather round for another compilation of AskHistorians answers just waiting for you to browse through and burn a few (tens of) hours! Don’t forget to thank those brilliant authors and shower them in the upvotes they deserve.

You can also check out some of our weekly and special features below!

And so we come to an end once again. The list is written, the threads ready for your viewing, and my computer has finally stopped complaining about the 300 tabs per browser window I had open. Enjoy all the great reading folks, and I’ll see you next Sunday for yet another fantastic edition!

mikitacurve

Some good questions from the last few days that I would really like to see answered include:

u/tombomp asks How were the early online communities for LGBT people organised before the web? Was there an early internet LGBT culture? ^1

u/Lamujereenrojo wonders Historically, how have the Uzbeks (a 96 percent Muslim population) reconciled making Tamerlane a cultural icon in spite of his actions at Baghdad and other Islamic cities that he sacked?

And u/JJVMT ponders Well known is the Old Norse-derived name "Halfdane." Did similarly formed names like "Halfswede" or "Halfgeat" exist? If not, why was having partial Danish ancestry deemed notable, but not having partial ancestry from other Norse sub-groups?

And although it isn't unanswered, I want to bring attention to u/Klesk_vs_Xaero's response to a question about how historians study Everyday life under dictatorships, because it has very few upvotes, which to me suggests very few people have seen it, which is a shame. I was considering writing an answer coming from the angle of Stalin and the Soviet Union, but they've done such a comprehensive job that I can't really think of much more to say.

^1 I have an anecdotal answer to this, actually, which is not good enough to post in the thread itself, so here it is: I once attended a presentation by the linguist Rusty Barrett about how the bear subculture was made possible by internet mailing lists in the early '90s. As you can see, that is wholely inadequate for a top-level comment on this sub. But the reason I remember it is the fun fact that, because the kind of men who had access to email in the early 1990s were generally younger and worked with computers or in technical/academic fields, they were almost always middle class and from coastal urban centers, particularly Californian ones. Bear subculture, on the other hand, draws heavily on archetypes of rural, working-class, white American masculinity, so bear message boards are often full of sociolinguistic markers that are popularly believed to belong to those kinds of men, but in fact are mostly just concocted folksiness, and can end up reinforcing class stereotypes. His book on the topic is From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures, and for now, at least, the chapter on bears is at this link, because I'm sure I'm doing his argument a disservice.

jelvinjs7

Welcome back to another installment of "The Real Questions", where we take a look at the wilder side of /r/AskHistorians! Here, I shout out some of the unique, oddly specific, atypical, amusingly phrased, or otherwise interesting questions of the week, the ones that make me say "Finally, someone is asking the real questions."

Below are my entries for this week - questions with a ‡ have a link to an older thread. What do you think were the realest questions? And be sure to check out my full list of Real Questions.

Gankom

Sunday is also a moment to pause and reflect on some of the interesting questions that caught our eye, but remain unanswered. Feel free to post your own, and maybe we’ll get lucky and attract the eye of an expert.