u/ExternalBoysenberry

The way the story has always been told to me is kinda like an "oopsie now we know!" but surely thats too simple, especially after reading answers on here about gold inflation and coin weights and stuff. So what was the discourse like around monetary policy at the time - did they have a strategy that could have kinda made sense and it didn't work, was it really as simple as "print more money have more money be richer"?

Something I've always found strange as an immigrant in Germany is the customary sleeping arrangement. While couples typically share a bed, they sleep under separate blankets (the duvets are half the width of the bed and lay side by side). The standard pillows are, I believe, 80x80 cm and to me they resemble smaller, slightly thicker duvets more than pillows: they are very loosely packed and lay flat, and the procedure seems to be that you kind of fold/squish/mash them up into a usable shape. (Edit: Another one came to mind: it seems common to have two mattresses on the same bedframe, one for each partner. Box springs seem rare, mattress sits on slatted bedframes... or maybe that perception is a function of my socioeconomic class lol)

Aside from that, there are more traditional accessories like the incorporating the wood or shavings from Swiss stone pine (Zirbelkiefer, Pinus cembra) either into the bed or little pouches because its smell is believed to facilitate sleep, or little pillows full of cherry pits.

I'm interested in all of it but if I had to prioritize... tell me about the history of those strange formless pillows that are big in all the wrong dimensions and basically nonexistent in the one dimension that matters!

Have I personalized it or made it individually identifiable in any way?

Out of courtesy to the mods I'll also include this remark by u/storyteller69 from last time I tried to ask this question:

"Stop! Before you type anything, ask yourself this question:

"Is my answer that the pilum was designed as a single use weapon, bending on impact so it could not be reused?

"If so, please explore this post by u/Intranetusa about how pila functioned alongside Roman swords and also this post about whether pila were made to bend.

"Our regular rules continue to apply, and short answers with insufficient context or explanation will be removed."

Sorry for the niche and long-winded question. While both countries cap the maximum chlorine concentration at the point of delivery, the US also sets a minimum requirement for how much chlorine should remain in the supply as it enters the distribution system.* As I understand it, the idea is that stuff can go wrong (line breaks, backflow, pressure) that could re-contaminate the water between the treatment plant and your faucet, so that maintaining some residual disinfectant keeps a buffer in the system and helps with monitoring. If the residual level drops, increase index of suspicion for contamination or other problems.

Germany, by contrast, aims to minimize disinfectants in the distribution system - so there generally is no minimum requirement. To my understanding, the idea is that a well-designed and correctly-operated system should stay hygienic; and if we assume that these things are true, the water should stay clean, and there is no reason to maintain residual disinfectant in water entering the distribution system.

I could imagine that there is some kind of technical/logistical reason for this. Spitballing, something to do with German water treatment systems being historically designed in the context of a geology that reduces the risk of surface contamination, or for population densities where it's more feasible to do systemwide monitoring or quickly identify problems, etc.

However, I could also imagine that the explanation could be more cultural/ideological/philosophical. After all, we are talking about a country whose historical concern with notions of purity and contamination is, shall we say, well-documented. Setting aside the Big Dark Example, it was one of the first countries to prohibit lead paint, and helped give rise to movements around e.g. local/organic agriculture (let's minimize the use of chemicals in food production, but mainly new synthetic ones) and homeopathy (the idea that compounds diluted to infinitesimal concentrations can have powerful effects on health). It remains a place that takes pride in strictly regulating which ingredients are allowed to be used in the production of beer, where bottled water is marketed by its mountain aquifer, plastic children's toys are quietly looked down upon (wood stained with organic dyes is correct), and where systems often feel designed on the assumption that the user won't make a mistake. I think you could make a similarly stereotyped argument about the US but this question is already way too long (sorry).

Basically, it doesn't strike me as unimaginable that the regulatory philosophy for water quality could be informed by cultural frameworks substantially older than modern water treatment and distribution systems, and that those frameworks might evaluate "maintaining a bit of chlorine in the water supply just in case" very differently.

My question is basically: is that a thing? Is there something like a "history of the philosophy of water quality regulation and municipal water system design" that can tell us something interesting about the modern difference in how the US and Germany view the role of residual disinfectants? Did they diverge from a shared starting point, or are they built on different paradigms from the beginning?

*IIRC this is for systems that involve surface water specifically.

Edit: Struck "quietly" for the same reason I am reluctantly relinquishing the em dash (looked like a formulation chatgpt seems to like and I don't want to sound like chatgpt).

Peninsular Spanishes mostly retained vosotros for the informal 2nd person plural, but use tú for the singular informal (eliminating vos). Dialect groups with voseo, like Rioplatense, retain vos as an informal 2nd person singular, but generalize ustedes in the plural regardless of formality. Of course, many Latin American countries dropped both, and use tú/ustedes.

What did people think of these divergences as they were taking shape? I have to imagine speech communities noticed: were other uses mocked/stigmatized/prescribed against etc?
And is there a particular reason beyond chance and idiosyncrasy that no major variety of Spanish today uses both vos and vosotros?

He also describes, iirc, an old woman hanging herself so low off the ground that she had to pick up her feet. I can't begin to imagine what it was like to experience such a horrific event, or how desperate and helpless that mother must have been to cut her children's throats, if Soule's account is true. I also don't want to ascribe my own cultural associations regarding suicide to the victims of the massacre. How did the Cheyenne and Apache understand the meaning of these kinds of acts? Without assuming that religion is the only possible lens for this, what mix or religions or religious beliefs would have been present within the community camped at Sand Creek?

Apart from the notion of essences and purity I guess there often seems to be an element of return-to-roots nostalgia combined with elements of mysticism coloring many of these examples, with which I could imagine Nazi discourses resonating (racial purity, blood and soil, interest in pseudoscience and the occult). I believe homeopathy was promoted in a way that was supposed to highlight German folk medicine, that there were biodynamic agriculture experiments going on at Dachau, Hitler was vegetarian, etc. But the fact that some Nazis were influenced by these ideas doesn't mean that they all kind of arose together as, like, a family of ideas we could group together in an ideological taxonomy.

To be very clear, this question is not me trying to hint at "are vegans Nazis" or "gotta hand it to the Nazis, they were ecofriendly" or anything like that. Obviously you can have good ideas and evil ideas that organize themselves through a similar logic or way of understanding the world. I am just curious if trying to zoom out to these other movements would be helpful in understanding the appeal of Nazism, or if it would be more of a red herring that mostly serves to muddy the waters, and if there is much scholarship in this direction.

Was it viewed as a technical or artistic challenge, and if so, how were lullabies understood from a philosophy-of-music perspective? Was writing a good lullaby considered a prestigious accomplishment? Were they competitive about it ("Watch how fast my shit can make a baby sleep")?

(Edit: Here I have in the back of my mind something like absolute vs program music / formalism vs aesthetics of feeling / War of the Romantics-type stuff. Just as a made-up example, something like "These composers cared about lullabies because the fact that we can make a song which speaks to an infant says something about the (in)effability of its language, whether it can point to something beyond itself, etc.")

Or was the lullaby market driven more by demand than supply, with wealthy patrons commissioning lullabies--maybe conspicuous consumption, or a belief that a lullaby composed by a Mozart would be edifying for the baby--and composers just filling orders as craftsmen without viewing these projects as artistically interesting?

Either way, how was Brahms' Wiegenlied received when it came out? Was it obvious to everyone that this was the GOAT--like, this one will be knocking babies out for centuries to come?

Finally, were they even used to put babies to sleep at all? How would that work--a patron would commission the sheet music and then have a pianist or string quartet or whatever play it while their baby slept? Or was it more to give the idea of bedtime vibes as a short segment of a larger orchestral performance with people dressed up in a concert hall or ballroom or something?

A part of me suspects that as a kid, I would have been equally impressed by the idea of a dinosaur and a well-described bee - I didn't yet have a good reference to differentiate the everyday from the exceptional. And I can imagine a not-obviously-absurd world where older kids are like, "You think thats crazy, just wait until you learn about blue whales, the largest animal ever to have lived, which still exists today?" A lot of stuff works like that - starts out kind of simple and mundane and you build up to the crazy interesting stuff. Why not elementary education?

Sorry for the showerthought question but just to double down on it: the reason I regard the topics in the title as especially mind blowing definitely isn't BECAUSE I learned about them so early and organized my conception of the world around them... right?

I get that we don't and can't have, like, a NYT "what percent Nazi are you?" needle. I'm also familiar with (and sympathetic to) that famous quote I'll paraphrase as: the term for the innumerable ordinary Germans who quietly loathed Hitler but out of fear or convenience went along with it all is "Nazi." Morally I guess my question could start and end there.

But I am curious anyways in another way (maybe that way is "perversely"). The relevant Wikipedia sections about Birkenstocks (shoes and family) are written in a way that strikes me as a bit apologetics-y (sure, the father and son joined the party, as every business owner at the time clearly had to, but late! sure, they tried to market Birkenstocks to Hitler but only because they cared about feet and anyways they were unsuccessful! etc.) I live in Germany and hear similar stuff about grandpa not so uncommonly, so I guess I am curious about the Birkenstocks in their own right while also hoping to build up a more detailed picture of what it meant to be a Nazi from the perspective of people at the time. So in that sense, I am curious about how a historian might think, even subjectively, about the gradient from rabid Nazi to NINO (as in RINO for US readers) to, say, resistor/victim/refugee, understanding that these categories are not static or linearly arranged or non-overlapping. Maybe something like: the Birkenstocks were Nazis in the style of [better known figure]?

As a tangential bonus question: if anyone can give a sense of the ideological element or Weltanschauung, I would be especially interested. I mean: was there something about the worldview whereby Birkenstocks (shoes) had appeal as a concept - say, ideas of naturalness and German folk medicine or return to nature or purity or even the idea that things have a natural tendency to degradation or decadence that needs to be resisted by applying a rigid idealized form - that might place someone in the overlapping region of the Venn diagram of "people who think Birkenstocks make sense as an invention" and "people who think Nazism makes sense as a political project"? ie If the answer to the main question is "Yeah they were pretty Nazi", was that in tension or alignment with the philosophy of design that gave rise to the presumably then-unique shoe?

edit typos

Saw Nolan's Odyssey and came away with a question not about the actual Odyssey (oops). When Telemachus crashes the wedding at Menelaus's place, the festive atmosphere is made unambiguous by the brief background presence of these fire juggler guys. They basically have a chain with a small flaming metal ball at each end that they spin around.

I don't think I need to find a picture because it's everywhere in depictions of festivals or fairs from Renaissance times to, I guess, weddings very emphatically set in the imminently-gonna-collapse-due-to-Sea-People-Bronze-Age (plus maybe even a version in like one of the Matrix movies?). Is this circus device a Hollywood thing or was it actually a fixture of fairs or whatever at a particular time and place? If it's just a Hollywood thing, where did it come from and how did it become so ubiquitous?

Did the US really allow human rights concerns to supersede its geopolitical interests in this case, or did it make a strategic move (ie maybe assessing Batista's position to be hopeless?) and sell it as moral integrity?

If the answer is "totally optional and join at your own risk", do we know what motivated posse regulars?

Let me start by confessing that I don't know anything about this, except that I think it was on its way out (but still kinda present) when I was a kid. To be honest, not even sure it actually was a sexist trope, just vaguely feel like I've heard that, plus the jokes I heard as a kid typically didn't need to specify the gender because it was implicit in the setup. So answers rejecting the options in the premise are of course also welcome

It feels like the kind of thing that could have emerged as a meme referencing something from Hollywood, in which case I guess the hair color itself could be just an idiosyncracy based on the styling of the original referent? If something like that is the case though, then I would be curious to know if there are any hair colors that WOULDN'T have worked at the time it was popularized, for example.

I try not too ask this question too often because it tends to create a lot of work for the mods mass deleting anecdotal comments (sorry!) but I would really love to understand The Great Transatlantic Keyed Exit Divergence. Basically I straight up can't figure out why you would want a keyhole on the inside of an apartment door unless you want to be able to lock people in.

In case you're not aware, in the US, you don’t really see keyholes on the inside of apartment doors. There is usually a little knob or button on the handle, plus a thumbturn for the deadbolt. I assume this is because we don’t want to make it easy to lock people in, or for someone to get stuck inside during a fire because they misplaced their keys, or etc etc etc. However I've stayed or lived in apartments with inside-keyholes instead of knobs in the UK, France, Portugal, and Germany. I currently live in such an apartment. Why? What is the possible advantage of having a situation where you might need a key to get out?

To try to head off some of the most common objections to this question from previous attempts: yes I know you don’t need a key to get out if nobody has locked the door. I’m asking why it is considered acceptable, useful, or preferable to have a setup where someone can be locked inside. If this is just an objectively worse way to design an apartment lock, then when, how, and why did Americans adopt the keyless-exit standard (knobs/thumbturns/buttons on the inside instead of keyholes)?

In the comment graveyards of previous threads, people have also pointed out that an inside keyhole can make sense if there is a window near the door, because otherwise someone could break the glass and reach in to unlock the door. Okay, but this question is about apartments, not houses, and there is typically no glass to break on the front door (would be weird to have a window looking out into the hallway or stairwell).

Some more encouraging but not-quite-AH-standard comments mentioned stuff like US adoption of the International Building Code, rules about egress not requiring special knowledge, tools, keys, codes, erc. I also understand that the IBC has not been adopted in the EU. But that still leaves the question: why is the double-lock/keyhole-inside practice so prevalent in the EU/UK? Who likes it?? and why?

Context on my anecdotes: The UK example was an older building with an old lock, and the only way to make sure the door stayed shut when you left was to lock it from the outside. That made it easy to get locked in if somebody forgot to leave you a key. I assume that particular setup isn’t standard, but I wouldn't be surprjsed if "keyholes instead of knobs inside" was common in the UK (I bet you it is even if not universal). France was an old building with a modern-looking lock, Portugal was a newer like post 1950 building with a modern lock (actually think I lived in two such apartments there). I have also lived in two apartments in Germany with a normal modern lock with a keyhole on the inside and no keyless exit. Come to think of it I also lived in an apartment you needed a key to get out of in Italy. Why is this a thing? What is the history of how the hell it remained a thing? Were there ever any movements to make it not a thing and if so why did those movements fail?

Today, I think most Americans realize that the US healthcare system compares unfavorably to peer countries in terms of eg cost and life expectancy, and is regularly outperformed by much poorer countries. I feel pretty sure similar critiques were prominent in US political discourse in the years leading up to Obamacare, even if they weren't widely accepted across the political spectrum (were they? So I think we can put this idea safely beyond the 20-year rule.

But was there a time this wasn't really true? Did US public health outcomes, once upon a time, stack up pretty well against peer countries? What about relative to expenditures per capita or as a percent of GDP? If so, how long did it take for the general public to start to agree not only that our system was starting to suck on its own terms, but also that other countries were routinely doing much more with much less?

PS I realize that the second "what happened?" question in the title is to big to answer in a way that will feel satisfying to the answerer (sorry), but I have so little idea how we got here that anything, however rough or incomplete, would be interesting for me! Also, I'm using "peer countries" in a bit of a hand-wavey way because I really don't know how far back we have to go and what would count as a peer for the purposes of this question in, say, 1949. But I think you get the idea.)

There are lots of r/ask[discipline] subs, but none have managed to achieve the same consistency in moderation and quality. Is there anything stopping them from just copying your governance structure and moderation approach (or whathaveyou), other than the fact that it seems like a ton of work and they probably don't want to do it?

I will depart from best practices and just speculate wildly in hopes clarifying the question (sorry, didn't have time to make this more concise). For instance:

-maybe the 20-year rule is critical and also a dealbreaker for science-y subs?

-or history has a unique way of relating to source material that lends itself to strict moderation?

-or historians are more prone to volunteering their time and expertise to this kind of platform?

-etc

To contrast three cases: (1) here, a mod can generally recognize a well-supported answer without egregious factual inaccuracies, even if someone else might argue a contradictory interpretation; (2) in contrast, a physics or biochemistry question might have a different epistemic status with a clear right/wrong answer which can be harder to sort through depending on mod expertise; (3) at the other end of the spectrum, something like political science may lack the factual true/false of history and be more prone to conflicting answers devolving into reddit arguments about current events where it can be difficult to separate well-supported expert from eloquent know-it-all bullshitter?

Or are all 3 pretty much what you're dealing with here already?

Is there something about history's "domain" that enables people ask about pretty much any aspect of the world they're curious about, provided it's appropriately framed, while also making feasible to distinguish between good and bad answers across a wide breadth of topics? Or maybe it's no more feasible than anywhere else, but here it's just harder to tell right from wrong if minimal formal and factual requirements are met?

tl;dr Is it just a coincidence that r/askhistorians is the special place that it is (and r/askanthropology could have equally accomplished what you have if they had developed your approach) or is it kind of only possible with history?

Anyway thank you all again for making this place what it is

edit: couple typos