/u/RusticBohemian's posts
Ciphers and codes were all the rage in the Renaissance. In England, women embroidered them into dresses and put them in prayer books. Mary, Queen of Scots, wrote coded letters, as did the conspirators that assassinated Elizabeth I. How did so many people come to learn codes? How broad was there use?
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I'm a poor farmer's child growing up in rural 19th-century America. My mother just taught me the alphabet, and it's time to start reading. She puts me on her knee and opens a copy of....what? What sort of reading material for children was available? The Bible? Plutarch's Lives? Some Shakespeare?
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From Seneca's doctors sending him to Egypt in 20 A.D. to Doc Holliday being advised to head west in the 1870s, tuberculosis sufferers were told dry climates could heal them. How did this ineffective treatment become such a phenomenon, with sanitariums opening-up all over the world?
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Greeks identified as Romans during Byzantine times, but after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, newly-freed Greece went with a Hellenic identity rather than a Roman one. Did the English and the French push a Hellenic identity, or was it Greek-driven? Was anyone pushing for Roman identity?
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The Irish diet before the famine was 90% potatoes. What did the bodies built by such a diet look like, and how was their health?
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Roman emperors often had idealized statues of their physique made, but Nero let it all hang out. His coinage and statues feature a fleshy face and double chin. Do we know why he didn't have artists "photoshop" his appearance? Was this fidelity to reality unusual in emperors?
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Guardian Forests can be found all over Japan — Little islands of the wild amid farm fields and busy city streets. What's the history and purpose of these sanctuaries? Are the Japanese unique in their creation, or are were these forest shrines build elsewhere around the world but later destroyed?
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Was Marcus Aurelius the first ruler to try to build a state centered around "free speech," "equality before the law," and government "which respects most of all the freedom of the governed", or merely someone carrying a torch of earlier reformers?
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Door-to-door salesmen were still among the best ways to sell books in the late 1950s/early 1960s. When did that change, and what lead to their decline?
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