Short Answers to Simple Questions | April 02, 2025

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[u/FatCrabTits]

What was the funniest event in history?

Like, something that looking back at it in modern times just sounds objectively funny, like the Trebuchet Funny Moment at Tenochtitlan?

[u/Mr_Emperor]

Did the majority of Spanish settlers and trade to and from California use the overland routes established by De Anza and the old Spanish trail or did they go by ship?

Shipping would be a huge advantage but from what I understand, the wind and currents along the coast go primarily southward, fine if you're in California shipping things south but new colonists and vital supplies have to go far into the open ocean to get north and can easily miss their target locations.

Santa Fe New Mexico was all overland and struggled with trade and new settlers because of it but it seems like California's population was growing rapidly even prior to the gold rush and had enough craftsmen to begin constructing stone missions and producing bricks and tile, something New Mexico didn't do until the American era.

[u/Icy-Wrongdoer-9632]

How old is the oldest known Arabic bible

[u/Serious-Fish1886]

At any point did Hitler identify as a Social Democrat? I have seen sparse anecdotes that Hitler may have tongue-in-cheekly referred to himself as a SD but cannot find information on it anywhere, has anyone heard this? Is it just a reference to the freikorps fighting for the SD government at one point?

[u/KongChristianV]

Hi,

I would love good book recommendations on Japanese and (late) Qing modernisation and state-building, be it from an economical or other viewepoint (cultural, social, legal, military).

[u/AssistIllustrious439]

I'm looking for a extensive list of firearms used by civilians (shopkeepers, homeowners, criminals) in the US in the 1960s. If anyone could provide a list or direct me to a source, that would be appreciated.

[u/Mr_Emperor]

As the Colorado and New Mexico territory boundaries were being established, New Mexico used to have a large boot heel that went north and connected to the source of the Rio Grande. Traditionally New Spain/Mexico and therefore New Mexico's boundary was the Arkansas River, hence Bent's Fort on the north bank of the Arkansas.

However you didn't reeeally enter New Mexico New Mexico until you crossed the Raton Pass. So it's not too surprising that Colorado gained the territory north of the Raton Pass but here's my actual question;

Why did Colorado get the San Luis valley and the source of the Rio Grande? The area is/was far more connected to New Mexico, being settled from New Mexico. The Rio Grande isn't an important waterway for Colorado but is the lifeblood of NM.

Was there any pushback against the straight lines and championing keeping the Rio Grande and the San Luis valley in New Mexico?

[u/BaffledPlato]

Can you recommend any good books on the history of astronomy?

[u/postal-history → u/BaffledPlato]

Becky Smethurst's A Brief History of Black Holes has an excellent discussion of 20th century astronomy, specifically how black hole discoveries revolutionized our perception of the universe and also how they were interpreted and discussed on a social level. It's also a compellingly written general-audience read.

[u/CasparTrepp]

I have four questions for any Egyptologists here. Who are the most documented pharaohs; which pharaohs do we know the most about (not necessarily the same question), who are the most written about pharaohs by Egyptologists, and who are some important pharaohs that we know little about?

[u/Bentresh → u/CasparTrepp]

Ramesses II is by far the best documented king. The most important inscriptions were collated in Kenneth Kitchen’s Ramesside Inscriptions; some of the volumes are available on Archive.org.

Aside from Ramesses II, we know quite a bit about several other kings of the New Kingdom such as Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep III, and Akhenaten. Pharaohs of the Sun by Guy de la Bédoyère is a decent overview of the 18th Dynasty.

More has been written on Akhenaten than any other king. Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt by Dominic Montserrat and Akhenaten: A Historian’s View by Ronald Ridley are good overviews of the historiography and reception of Akhenaten’s unconventional reign.

We know very little about the reigns of Old Kingdom kings like Snefru, Djoser, and Khufu. Their pyramids are impressive, no doubt, but they reveal little about the personalities and deeds of the kings who commissioned them.

[u/JERRY_XLII]

The quote "the reed that bends before the wind, also offers a form of resistance" has been attributed to Sun Tzu. I would appreciate it if someone could help me find a source for this quote.

[u/Kalareth]

Hey y'all! In 2015 I audited a graduate level historiography course at a university in my town, and I have forgotten a book that we read and never been able to find it again. I'm wondering if any of you professional historians can help me track it down.

For context we read various titles (The Cheese and the Worms, etc.) Foucault's Discipline and Punish and other texts introducing the idea that systems have their own inherent momentum that limits individual agency. Then, to challenge that idea, we were asked to read this book by a prolific Brazilian historian that specifically focused on the ways that people found ways to exert their autonomy and leverage their position within a system to meet their own personal goals, and that individual agency and expression can never be fully subsumed and regulated by an institution.

Can you help me find the title of the work, or give me some leads on authors this might have been?

[u/Mr_Emperor]

From a complete layman's perspective, the Rio Grande Gorge next to Taos, New Mexico seems to begging (from a mid 20th century perspective) to be dammed to create a large reservoir for a state that goes through frequent droughts.

The Rio grande obviously has a few reservoirs and irrigation weirs and it seems to have been declared a "natural river" in the 1960s so that hinders potential dam construction.

Was there ever a plan to construct a dam at the gorge or was that always out of the question due to cost and environmental concerns?

[u/I_demand_peanuts]

If I want to start writing about historical topics, like in a blog, what would be some quick, general advice?

[u/restricteddata → u/I_demand_peanuts]

1. Cite your sources. It is good for you, your audience, the general world, the people whose works you are using, etc.

2. The best posts are usually the ones that could be titled with a question and whose content would be answering the question. You don't actually have to be explicit about it. But this is the essence of any good historical paper — a research question, and an answer to it. If you can't identify the question that your post is trying to answer, you probably haven't thought it through enough.

3. Do it for yourself primarily. Do it because you are interested in it. Do it because you like an excuse to write and research and communicate and think. Do it because it is something that will encourage self-growth, the honing of skills, and force you to put time and thought into things that you might not otherwise. Don't do it because you expect to be read by a lot of people. Maybe that'll come to you, maybe it won't. If you do it for yourself, you'll be happy with whatever happens. If you do it because you expect it to lead to fame, fortune, money, whatever, you will probably be disappointed. If you do it out of love and interest, it'll also likely be better quality than if you are chasing some more external goal, and that could help lead to that external goal. But don't do it for that external goal itself.

4. It will take longer than you think to write blog posts. You have to make time for them and keep to a schedule that is reasonable. Even figuring out what images to put in my blog posts (and formatting them, etc.) can take upwards of an hour. Even an "easy" post — something I know backwards and forwards — takes several hours to write, and takes concentrated attention. Give yourself a reasonable schedule. But if you have no schedule, and it is just "when you have time/interest," you probably won't get many written — that is a recipe for kicking the can down the road for a very long time, because life will not give you time unless you carve it out.

5. Set it so that commenting is disabled after some period of time automatically. Aside from spam, you don't need (or want) to deal with comments on a post you wrote several years ago.

Just my thoughts after having blogged historically for +10 years now. Happy to give opinions on other questions that might come up. But there are no rules here.

[u/Miserable-Client-460]

I was wondering: A paper I read said most marriages across cultures/history were between girls aged 12-15 and men aged 19-21

That said I read most were consummated later/had children later around mid teens/15 as the harms of early pregnancy were known

Is this true or correct?

[u/dub-sar- → u/Miserable-Client-460]

While that might be true in a specific culture and/or time period, age at first marriage varies substantially across time/cultures. Any attempt to give an exact age range of ages for marriage across all of time and all cultures is going to be a massive oversimplification. There are many cultures and time periods where age at first marriage significantly diverged from those age ranges. The general trend of men usually being older than women when getting married for the first time is something seen across many (but not all) cultures, but those exact numbers are certainly not culturally universal.

[u/SouthernViolinist0]

How would a Finnish person refer to the city of Saint Petersburg in 1918? What are her options, specifically in formal and informal letters?

[u/TheCalSlate]

What are a few good academic resources for The Battle of Lepanto and the resulting effects upon the Ottoman Empire?

[u/lurkergonewildaudio]

I keep seeing this anecdote about a Chinese concubine who was only chosen so she could play chess with her husband. No other purpose. Obviously she had a good family background, but basically she got out of a potentially bad marriage into a loveless but cushy one where she only really had to play chess. Honestly the dream for a concubine. No vying for attention because you’re just here for chess lol.

I can’t seem to find the name though, and every time I search her up, I just keep getting stories about concubines who were loved by their husbands for being good at poetry, painting, instruments, and chess.

Or fictional C-novels.

Is this a myth? And if not, could I get the name (or names, if there have been multiple women who fit this story)?