/u/electrovalent's posts
"In 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive," claimed George Orwell. Is this actually true? If not, where could he have heard such a report from?
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"In the Japanese navy, sailors reacted to additions of Western food (meat and bread) by sneaking their bread out of the galley and throwing it over." Why did sailors in the early Meiji era react so negatively to these rations?
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The modern-day Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582, but for centuries many European countries stuck to the Julian calendar, which was 10+ days behind the Gregorian. Did the difference in dates cause confusion in matters of international travel, trade, and communication?
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I am a musical young lady born in late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century Europe into circumstances that allow me an extensive musical education. Should I wish to go pro, what are my prospects?
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Both Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson owned—and used—guns. So did a fair few of their antagonists. How widespread and concerning was firearms violence in the late Victorian era?
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How common were women entrepreneurs and business-owners in 19th-century Britain? Did perceptions of women running businesses vary among different social classes?
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Lytton Strachey, Bloomsbury litterateur and writer of Eminent Victorians, propounded an aesthetic theory which emphasised history as narrative art. What would an academic historian think of it in the present day?
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In most countries I know of, the largest research universities are nearly always public/government-run. However, many of the biggest-name US universities (the Ivies, MIT, Stanford, Caltech) are private. Is US higher education an anomaly in this regard? How did it come to be this way?
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How would a traveling merchant in medieval Europe's large trading centres conduct transactions? Was there a wide variety of acceptable currencies at any given marketplace, or was the selection limited, whether by law or in practice? How was one currency exchanged for another?
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