u/Zeuvembie

Liam Sharp's Kickstarter campaign for his Conan portfolio just went live. I know a lot of members in this subreddit have expressed admiration for his Conan art, so you may be interested in this too. Personally, (along with Rob De La Torre) Liam is my favorite modern Conan artist and I am thrilled for the chance to obtain a portfolio with some of his amazing Conan drawings...

FROM THE KICKSTARTER: "In April this year, Liam Sharp was invited to create a unique exclusive portfolio for the Lake Como Comic Art Festival. The result was this already-iconic set of Conan prints, the originals of which were featured in a hugely popular exhibition at the show.

The pieces were representations of classic scenes from Robert E.Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories - a character Liam has adored since he was a young boy - and are as close to canon as the artist could get them based on the texts..."

I was re-watching Home Alone (1990) (as one does during a heat wave in August), and got to the joke about French girls not shaving their pits, and that led my mind down other avenues about other bits that weren't often shaved in the first half of the 20th century but which became much more common in the second half.

So why is that? Did WWII inspire greater shaving for hygenic reasons, or to accommodate new styles of clothing like the bikini, or what?

In the 1960s, suddenly people were talking about Crystal Power, and New Age shops popped up and crystals seemed to be available everywhere. Where did they come from? Was this a byproduct of existing mining industry, or something new to fill a demand?

This is kind of a broad question, but do we know if Native American cultures pre-contact had any tradition of deliberately making eunuchs to fulfill some role or purpose? I assume at least a few guys had bad hunting accidents or suffered debilitating injuries in war or the like, but I'm curious if there was anything like the specific roles that eunuchs played in various other world cultures (galli of ancient Rome, the bureaucratic officials/administrators of ancient China, castrati singers, Janissaries, etc.)

Probably not the best way to phrase this but: I'm aware that the introduction of New World foodstuffs (chili peppers, pumpkin, potatoes, turkey, etc.) strongly affected various Asian cultures and their cuisines, but I'm not sure how it affected Japan - or if Japan's long period influenced how it did or did not adopt certain New World foodstuffs.

The US occupied both Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 1920s. Was there any serious public or political discussion about just maintaining the occupation in perpetuity or in otherwise effectively maintaining ownership of the island?

Granted that films like Ilsa, Salon Kitty (1976), etc. are exploitation films where poor taste and shock value are the point, but did they receive any particular pushback from Holocaust survivors or organizations like the Anti-Defamation League?

At the time of its release, do we know if the readers of Little Women were primarily women, or if it was perceived to be a work by a woman for women? I think today it has that reputation, but I'm not sure who the audience was or how it was received in the late 1860s.

This is kind of a weird question since it's more about the practice of history than a question about what happened in history. Basically, is there an agreed-upon methodology or pedagogy about how historians interpret relationships that present as homosocial to the public, but which appear to have actually been homosexual?

Just wondering if there's any standard for how we get from "these two women were roommates/shared a house" to "yeah, they were probably in love/couldn't publicly reveal their relationship"? I suppose the only definitive evidence would be a cache of love letters or maybe a trial record, but I'm interested if historians have developed any sort of criteria or method they teach for assessing such things.

Hope that makes sense.

Today, electric crock pots, instant pots, and rice pots are almost universally well-received - but was it a slow adoption? Was there pushback? Was there a major marketing campaign that pushed electric rice pots?