Friday Free-for-All | March 21, 2025

[u/AutoModerator]

Previously

Today:

You know the drill: this is the thread for all your history-related outpourings that are not necessarily questions. Minor questions that you feel don't need or merit their own threads are welcome too. Discovered a great new book, documentary, article or blog? Has your Ph.D. application been successful? Have you made an archaeological discovery in your back yard? Did you find an anecdote about the Doge of Venice telling a joke to Michel Foucault? Tell us all about it.

As usual, moderation in this thread will be relatively non-existent -- jokes, anecdotes and light-hearted banter are welcome.

[u/ADHDFart]

Can you guys make more comments visible? It’s really annoying looking at posts that have comments but we can’t see them.

Very counterintuitive.

[u/Abdiel_Kavash → u/ADHDFart]

Every now and then the mods reveal all the deleted comments for a post. You might be thinking that you're missing out on some insightful discussion that has been suppressed; you are not. What you're missing out on are one-sentence non-answers, comments like "I would like to know too", racist outbursts, pedantic spelling corrections, and, for the most part, questions asking where did all the comments go.

[u/ducks_over_IP → u/ADHDFart]

There's no in-Reddit solution for this (it's been discussed many times before), but the AskHistorians Comment Helper is a good browser extension for Firefox and Chrome. The reason there's so many deleted comments to begin with is that the moderation policies here are very strict to ensure that only good answers make the cut. Having seen some of those comments before deletion (contrary to popular belief, the mods are not in fact the Great Eye of Sauron and do take time to notice things) you're not missing much. It's a lot of underinformed/soapbox answers and questions about why the post has so many deleted comments.

[u/jschooltiger → u/ADHDFart]

No.

If you want to read speculative, non-expert answers with a healthy amount of "I don't know but I think ..." you can go to r/history or /r/AskHistory.

[u/subredditsummarybot]

Your Weekly /r/askhistorians Recap

Friday, March 14 - Thursday, March 20, 2025

Top 10 Posts

score	comments	title & link
2,321	105 comments	Did LBJ really pull his penis out in public?
1,212	12 comments	In “A Game of Thrones”, the character Jorah Mormont has a famous quote where he says that the common people don’t care who sits on the throne as long as the people are left alone. Does this accurately capture the sentiment of peasants in medieval Europe?
913	35 comments	Have people always said why would I bring someone into this crazy/messed up world?
801	14 comments	Some people believe we never landed on the moon. When it was clear Spain had arrived to unknown land (the Americas), was there anyone doubting their clams as a conspiracy theorist would today?
628	18 comments	During WWII, were white soldiers expected to extend military courtesies towards black officers or NCOs? Would a white soldier be expected to salute or call a black officer "sir"?
576	32 comments	I frequently hear that human history was generally much more sexual, and sex-informed, than people tend to assume, and that assumptions to the contrary stem from the 19th Century. But I ALSO hear that the Victorians were a lot more sexual than the stereotype. What is the truth?
432	24 comments	In the 1978 movie Death on the Nile, a 1000 franc bill is a plot element; at the time the movie was set, that would've been $200 USD which in today's money would be about $4600 USD. What the heck did they use bills that big for?!
411	50 comments	Did Nazi soldiers experience a great deal of mental illness, alcoholism, drug use and suicide after the war?
266	6 comments	When the rebel slaves won in Santo Domingo, they restored the native name of "Haiti" to the island. Why did they make this decision? How much would the black revolutionaries have known of pre-European Santo Domingo and its inhabitants?
245	11 comments	I'm a homeless male in the 1300's in a small European village. What does my life look like? Where do I sleep at night? Do I have even a semblance of a chance to escape this lifestyle? Are there or will there ever be any hope that the government might help me?

 

Top 10 Comments

score	comment
2,517	/u/police-ical replies to Did LBJ really pull his penis out in public?
943	/u/Capt_Blackadder replies to During WWII, were white soldiers expected to extend military courtesies towards black officers or NCOs? Would a white soldier be expected to salute or call a black officer "sir"?
651	/u/Spencer_A_McDaniel replies to Have people always said why would I bring someone into this crazy/messed up world?
607	/u/dalidellama replies to When pirates (or sailors in general) in the 18th century watered down their rum, were they doing this to extend their rum provisions, lower the alcohol content so they wouldn't get drunk, or to make their water safer to drink?
581	/u/J-Force replies to In many citybuilder video games, the first things a player builds are a logging hut and a forester's hut. The latter replants trees for future cutting. Was this actually a job in the medieval era+prior?
498	/u/Monty_Bentley replies to Why did America become Pro-Israel in the 1960s?
487	/u/stevetulloch04 replies to Did LBJ really pull his penis out in public?
464	/u/police-ical replies to What caused the USSR to fall behind the west in technology?
446	/u/Halofreak1171 replies to What fascist regimes failed before they could become full-on fascism?
397	/u/Mammoth-Goat-7859 replies to I frequently hear that human history was generally much more sexual, and sex-informed, than people tend to assume, and that assumptions to the contrary stem from the 19th Century. But I ALSO hear that the Victorians were a lot more sexual than the stereotype. What is the truth?

 

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[u/KimberStormer]

I don't know how I would make this a question that made the grade so I will bring it up as a discussion topic here. Basically I was thinking about Crusader Kings and the fact that players expect the realm to centralize and stabilize as time goes on. Makes sense as a game thing, but is it real? When I read about Renaissance/Reformation era history it sure sounds like things were incredibly decentralized and the argument that there were no "states" yet starts making a whole lot of sense. So I wonder if there was any trend in terms of centralization before the early modern era and if there was what direction it went, because to be honest I suspect individual cities got stronger and more independent, and furthermore that this would be more fun as a game -- if things got harder rather than easier as time went on -- anyway, I don't know. Curious what people think.