/u/screwyoushadowban's posts
Weird and probably hard to test question: do we dream in coherent narratives or does our sleeping brain shoot out a bunch of random sensations that our waking brain organizes into narratives because human cognition tends see patterns even in meaningless noise?
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In the late middle ages and early modern period many thousands of Christians and Muslims were enslaved and then ransomed by corsairs of the opposite faith. Was there any anxiety in Christian lands about recently ransomed Christians (or Jews) being crypto-Muslims/"turning Turk"?
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Did ancient Mediterraneans read history for entertainment? Did they distinguish between "pop" history and "proper" history? Were certain fields (if they recognized history as having fields) especially popular with the wider public, like military history is today?
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When fighters carried both a spear and a bow & arrows into battle, where did they put their spear while firing their bow?
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Today in the United States if an individual commits a public act of violence (mass murder, political assassination), in the absence of other evidence, pop culture and journalism often rationalizes it as mental illness. What was the "easy" rationalization in 1960 (or 1963)? What about 1910? Or 1860?
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What was the international reputation and actuality of academic freedom in the Stalinist USSR? Why would academics and intellectuals from elsewhere willingly defect to such a seemingly repressive country?
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Did the British deliberately hide/underplay the contribution of colonial troops/non-white soldiers the way the French did during WWII?
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How did indigenous Americans of the Old Northwest and now Eastern United States conceptualize people outside of the gender and sex binary? Were what we know call LGBTQ people liminal beings or did they occupy something like a "third sex"?
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