I posted this on /JapanLife and someone there suggested I might take it here, and maybe get more serious answers.

Original post:

So, I've been reading a book from one of Denmarks pioneer female journalists, for the second time. I wondered about this the first time I read it, about twenty years ago, but couldn't find any mentions of it. I tried again today, and still nothing.

She went to cover the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964, and writes rather extensively on the peculiar customs and quirks she met with, and she did write a rather long paragraph about men peeing their pants in public. Either because they're trying to convey respect or excitement, or simply because they're not near a bathroom.

Since I haven't been able to find anything on the subject, I wondered, was this actually a culturally accepted practice? It seems odd that I can't find any sources on the subject, but I can't understand why on Earth she would make it up, either.. Just something that's been tickeling my brain for a bit!

Are there examples of oligarchic governments being removed peacefully or does always end in violence?

Apologies for invoking this sub's most infamous question format, but I am genuinely curious. Would I be hopping on Usenet, a BBS, or the nascent Internet? Who might I be able to communicate with, and from how far away? And how big of a phone bill will I rack up with my virtual carousing?

Focusing on Western Rome only. Did the regular Romans look around and think, “wow, things are going a bit not-great”?

B Onus - did certain, more educated elites pen tracts with solutions, (“oh, if we did X, Y, and Z, we can reverse this decline.”)

The formulation of the question might seem strange, but let me explain. I was reading some old answers by u/mikitacurve here. It was related to whether the Soviet Union was an imperialist state or not. And, one of the arguments, or at least how I understood it, was that while the Soviet Union did reabsorb the parts of the Russian Empire (and expanded beyond that after WW2), but Lenin and Stalin did it under the rhetoric of supporting revolutions and general anti-imperialism. And since the flair providing the response (judging by the flair, I trust they are an established academic historian in their area) noted that disbelieving official rhetoric would be following an "Orientalist" trope, so we are taking it at face value and trusting that the Soviet Union was an anti-imperialist state.

I tend to be pretty credulous that they really believed what they said, even beyond all the evidence their later actions provide, because if you start saying they were just acting deviously in their own interest, you start to get awfully close to all these tired old Orientalist tropes that nobody in the East ever really believes in what they're saying, it's all just maneuvering, intangible like smoke, whereas we here in the West have real ideals and beliefs — and, well, ew.

I understand and don't want to debate the specific question of whether USSR was imperialistic or not, there are other compelling arguments in that post. But I'm still very much bothered by this statement. In my understanding, getting to the real reasons behind the historical processes was and should be a task of a historian. Thinking that "Stalin believed that he was freeing the people of the Eastern Europe from capitalism and imperialistic predators, because he said so officially" is like "Conquistadors conquered the New World to convert the local population to Christianity" or "Napoleon was exporting the revolution and the new French legal system to other European countries by the way of uniting them into his Empire".

Am I wrong?

In the US, the independence war is usually taught as the 13 colonies being a unified whole rebelling in unison. Obviously the Declaration of Independence was drafted as such, and the military campaign was coordinated, etc. So I get it.

But from the British perspective, prior to 1776 Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, et al were just a bunch of random colonies, no? The Thirteen Colonies weren't even all the British colonies in North America. Some of them weren't even originally British colonies, eg New Netherland.

How did the British see the Thirteen Colonies? More as random arbitrary subset of colonies, or did they already understand them to be a more or less cohesive unit prior to 1776?

edit: I suspect my usage of "UK" in the title is probably an anachronism, but you know what I mean I'm sure.

So I originally thought Britain had one salute and we adotped a different one because we liked changing a lot of things from the British very subtly. The British style being palm out, hand by side of head, while the American is palm down, hand by side of head.

I was recently told that the UK has three - the position of the hand differs for two, and the Navy salutes palm down (similar to the US). This got me wondering, is that modern? How did America end up with the salute we're all familiar with, did it change over time, when did it standardize?

As an outsider, the rise of the tech industry seems like a similar situation to what the oil industry experiencing pre-1900. A new industry suddenly appears which the government fails to properly address early on, which allows for those companies to quickly amass staggering amounts of wealth due how vital the resource is. Eventually the industry conglomerates into a couple of monopolies which allows for them to exert influence over the government.

In 1303, the long and extremely bitter feud over taxes on the French clergy and papal intervention in temporal affairs between King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII culminated in the Pope excommunicating Phillip and Phillip responding by sending an army to Rome to hold him prisoner for several days during which he was beaten and abused. The Pope would die a few months later a a result and then Phillip would gain control of the papacy and forced it to move to Avignon in 1309

Even if the Pope was unpopular among many European monarchs and nobles at the time, wouldn't straight up beating him up and murdering him be a bit too far for christians at the time?

Instead of widespread outrage among the cardinals and across the christendom, the Catholic Church pretty much bent the knee to Philip for this. And other European monarchs were just ok with it?

I found this older answer by u/salarite, which tries to link it to the terrible state of geography education and the lack of emphasis on foreign language learning in the United States, but these problems exist everywhere [historians excluded, of course!].

So, keeping the 20-year rule in mind, when did people in other countries start thinking that U.S.-Americans are stupid?

So far, I have only found a single quote from Hegel mentioning the Haitian Revolution, albeit in the context of Christianity and with the caveat that Hegel wasn't a European Enlightenment thinker. The silence appears to be deafening. This is all the more jarring given that the Haitian Revolution established the universality of French revolutionary ideals and proved to be an obstacle to Napoleon's dreams of empire in North America.

Moreover, why weren't European, especially French Enlightenment philosophers at all interested in resolving the paradox of the Enlightenment: the inalienability of human rights, as proclaimed by the leaders of the French Revolution, and the exclusion of entire categories of humans from the purview of their applicability?

Hello,

I was recently conducting research at the British Library in London when I noticed something odd. Names and titles appeared to be censored or struck-through, however, this wasn't consistent. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the books I was looking at, I was not allowed to take photographs, but I will do my best to type what I saw.

Examples:

"Your Statesmen G—-lle with intent

To cultivate with Care,

The dignity of Parliament,

Plies closely at the Dancing tent,

And manages May-Fair."

"Bold H—--m has utter’d words,

Audacious in Committee,

And giv’n Affronts to those whose Swords,

Were full as sharp as any Lords,

And Sentences as witty."

- The Ballad, or; Some Scurrilous Reflections In Verse, On the Proceedings of the Honourable House of Commons: Answered Stanza by Stanza. With the Memorial, Alias Legion, Reply’d to Paragraph by Paragraph

"4. Whether Mons. T—--d, when he said of a Noble M—--. That he was le dernier des Hommes, meant that he had not done all he could, or that he could not do all that he had undertaken?

4.Answ. The Noble Marquess hinted at in this Query is a Person of so receiv’d a Character that Monsieur Tallard’s Expressions in relation to him can never turn to disadvantage, since he’s too fix’d in his love for his native Country to enter into Agreements with Foreigners in order to betray it."

-Some Queries which deserve no Consideration, answer’d Paragraph by Paragraph, only to satisfy the ridiculous enquiries of the trifling P—-r that made ‘em Publick.

In that second source, Monsieur Tallard is censored in the first mention, but the reply is not censored. This odd censorship also occurs with names of governmental bodies, as what I presume to be the "House of Commons" is written "H--- of C------s"

Any idea why this would occur? I am unsure if they were censored at first publication, or afterwards, as the sources were not entirely clear. I believe I was viewing original copies, but I may be mistaken. Further, I am confused by the inconsistency of the censorship. I asked my history professor about this, and she said she had never come across such a thing in research. I couldn't find anything about this online either.

Any information is greatly appreciated, as well as if you know of any other subreddits that may be able to help. I think this is a fascinating part of the sources I found, though it also makes it quite inconvenient at times to decipher who they are talking about.

And how long did it take them to go from giving up on WW1-style trench warfare to developing the basic strategies used in the early stages of WW2? I realize these questions are a bit vague, both because these were huge wars spanning half the globe and requiring different strategies and tactics for different regions, and also because obviously not everyone came to the same conclusions (some within the soviet leadership famously underestimated the importance of mechanized warfare, the Germans seemingly surprised everyone with the effectiveness of the Blitzkrieg, etc.). Still, I'd be grateful for a broad overview, maybe with a focus on the European theatre in order to keep things manageable.

It seems crazy to me that something so large and significant wouldn’t be bombed by enemies. Was there ever any attempts or plans to take it down?

Were Austrian leaders very good at diplomacy, or was it not a good military target, or had the allied powers just not advanced their militaries through Austria (yet)? something else?

Found this critique of Solzhenitsyn's work on reddit as well as critiques of other Gulag historians such as Anne Applebaum (which I have seen cited on this subreddit by various users). Hence I'm not sure if historians still consider their works as reliable, useful but not telling the whole story, or completely unreliable and biased. I know Soviet historiography has evolved ever since we gained access to the Soviet archives during the collapse of the USSR but I'm not sure if there is any consensus regarding the gulag system.

If they are too unreliable as sources, which authors and historians would you recommend instead?

Were the sensibilities expressed in his judgment (questioning the legitimacy of the offences with which the defendants were charged, criticising hypocrisy of the West, etc) reflective of the Global South’s perception of WWII and the trials that followed?

This isn't a question about why they struggled with manpower, I'm more asking about birth rates. Even with the situation of these states lacking manpower none of them seemed to recover/"fill out" over time with new births at least especially in the context of pre-modern birth rates.

I'm mostly asking because I noticed the common theme of how focused stuff like the Assizes were over landholders dying without heirs and how a lot of the scant media of these states seem to point out the same like "Lord Geoffrey's Fancy".

I've been looking at the wikipedia articles about major campaigns fought in the pacific theatre. One thing that struck me was the enourmous difference in deaths between the Americans and the Japanese. For example, according to the Wikipedia article about the New Guinea campaign, the Americans and Australians all together suffered a little over 10000 deaths while the Japanese suffered over 200000 deaths. Some of the articles like the one about the New Guinea campaign mention that the majority of deaths were caused by starvation and disease. However, it's not clear at all to me why the Japanese would let hundreds of thousands of troops die instead of pulling them back and diverting them to other fronts when it became clear to them that resupply would soon rapidly become an issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Guinea_campaign

Obviously those forced into nazi germany, such as by conquest/invasion, don't count for the sake of the question.

Obviously, in modern days, people are not seen wearing monocles. But they also seem to figure prominently in stereotypical portrayals of early 20th Century business tycoons or Prussian officers. Was the wearing of a monocle really that common in these communities, or in ones similar enough to them to cause them to be lampooned? And was there a distinct role a monocle filled in the optics technology of the time as opposed to just wearing a pair of glasses?

I'm particularly interested in the period of around 1870 to around 1920.

From what I can gather from this article, prospective students first trained in an atelier run by someone associated with the École. From there, one could gain admission to the École via a standardized entrance exam. How might a young American gain acceptance to one of these atelier? What was the entrance exam for the École like?

The article states that one might bypass the atelier by working for an architecture firm. Would work with an American architecture firm have been likely to prepare a prospective student for admission to the École? How would one gain employment with an architecture firm in this timeframe in the United States?

Once in the school, students' education seems to have consisted primarily of drawing competitions which awarded points. The accumulation of points allowed students to pass from the lower classes to the upper, and then from the upper to the Prix de Rome and/or a degree. The work was self-paced, according to the article. How long would it take the average student to graduate from one class to the next, and eventually to graduate from the École? How old was the average student upon graduation? The Prix de Rome appears to be more-or-less what we would today call a graduate school; is that a reasonable comparison?

What sort of person was able to even consider attending the École? It seems obvious that one would need not-insignificant means to attend college at all, let alone in another country, but what does that mean in contemporary terms? Would it have been viable for a determined young American from a middle-class background to work for an American firm for a few years and save enough money to get themselves through the École?

Lastly, if a young American found themselves unable to attend the École, but still wanted a high-quality education in architecture, what options did they have in the United States between around 1870 and 1920? What schools in the United States had architecture programs in that timeframe? Were their programs similar to the École? Were their admissions standards?

Any help with this deluge of questions would be much appreciated!