We’re back in action for the very first AskHistorians Digest of July 2021! Welcome one and all to another fantastic collection of the best, grain fed, free range history threads the internet has to offer. Don’t forget to show some appreciation for those hard working writers, throw some upvotes at your favorite posts and drop some thank yous!

As always I suggest starting off with some of our usual weekly fair, and a special thread or two!

• New Snoo Sunday: Introducing Pauli Snoorray, the Chevalier de Snoo-Georges, and Emiliano Snoopata! Check out the fabulous new additions to the gang!

• AskHistorians Minisode - Was Beethoven Black? with Tyler Alderson.

• There’s still some folks looking for suggestions in the Thursday Reading and Rec!

• Its been nice to see the Friday Free for All staying pretty active!

• /u/WelfOnTheShelf and /u/IlluminatiRex steal the show in the Saturday Showcase!

And with that we come to a close folks. Been a busy week jam packed with great stuff, and I have no doubt there will be even more things next week. Don’t forget to see todays new Snoo’s unveiled, and I’ll see you all next Sunday!

Catching up on the past month:

/u/611131 answered Gonzalo Guerrero was shipwrecked and then captured by the Maya in 1511; when found by other Spaniards about 20 years late, he had been made a warlord and refused to return to Spain. Why would the Maya make a low-born European sailor a warlord?

/u/A3591B on "The Last Emperor" was filmed in Beijing in the the 1980s, and has a scene that portray the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards in a decidedly negative light. Why was this permitted by the Chinese authorities at the time?

/u/AbandoningAll on Mass graves of Indigenous peoples keep getting discovered at the sites of Canadian residential schools. Should I expect mass graves to be found at Aboriginal missions here in Australia?

Sunday is also a chance to draw some attention to those interesting yet overlooked questions that caught our eye, but still hope for the attention of experts.

• /u/JJVMT asked How did Chinese opera get to be so called in the West despite, AFAIK, having an entirely separate (and earlier) origin with regard to Western opera? Has the West's linguistic equating of the two been criticized in China? Also, do they have any similarities deeper than both being "sung theatre"...

• /u/FrenchMurazor asked Arsène Lupin's got a gun. And everyone else too. How common and legal was it for someone to have a gun in early 20th century France (and Europe) ?

• /u/RusticBohemian asked The type of candidates elected to public office or the nature/tone of politics change when women got the right to vote in the United States?

Time for another installment of "The Real Questions", where we take a look at the wilder side of r/AskHistorians! Here, I give a shout-out to people asking the more atypical questions on this sub: questions that investigate amusing, unique, bizarre, or less common aspects of history, as well as ones that take us through intriguing adventures of historiography/methodology or niche/overlooked topics and moments in history. It's always a wide (and perhaps confusing) assortment of topics, but at the end of the day, when I see them I think, "Finally, someone is asking the real questions!"

Below are my entries for the week - questions with a link to an older response are marked with ‡. Let me know what you think were the realest questions you saw this week, and be sure to check out my full list of Real Questions.