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.
Its our first Sunday Digest of August 2022, and it’s a hot one up my way. So I hope you all are keeping cool, enjoying whatever your local weather is, and now you have a chance to relax with some cool history threads! Don’t forget to show some love to all the hard working contributors, answer writers AND question askers. Also check out the weekly features!
For the first time I can remember, the weekly theme announcement rocketed up the rankings and spawned some discussion. The new weekly theme is: Cults!, and a lot of folks want to know how we define that.
Tuesday Trivia: Cults! This thread has relaxed standards—we invite everyone to participate!
And then come for a great time in the Friday Free for All!
And that brings us to a close for yet another day. Enjoy the fantastic threads, keep it classy out there, and I’ll see you all next week!
It's the first Digest of the month, which means it's 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!"
No, I didn't almost do this last week before remembering July actually has 31 days - why would you insinuate that?
Below are my entries for the last month - questions with a link to an older response are marked with ‡. Let me know what you think were the realest questions you saw this month, and be sure to check out my full list of Real Questions.
Sunday is also a chance to give some attention to those fantastic, but overlooked questions that populated the sub but still hope to catch the attention of an expert. Feel free to post up your own, or any you came across this week, and maybe we’ll get lucky.
/u/banuk_sickness_eater asked Were the Byzantines Aware of "their" "Varangians" Vinland, or that they were pillaging Europe?
/u/gmanflnj asked Why are Classical/Hellenistic Mystery Cults called "Cults"?