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Responses to more common hazards weren't addressed to nearly the same degree, if at all. Off the top of my head: pressure and elevation to control bleeding; Heimlich maneuver if choking; don't swim out to a drowning person, throw them something instead; lightning position; don't pull out impaled objects; don't run if being chased by an aggressive or overexcited dog. With the possible exception of the Heimlich maneuver, I don't think those require any more cognitive or physical ability than stop-drop-and-roll. Those situations all have to be at least as common and can be as serious as being on fire. What was (is?) the deal with stop drop and roll?

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Welcome to this week's instalment of /r/AskHistorians' Sunday Digest (formerly the Day of Reflection). Nobody can read all the questions and answers that are posted here, so in this thread we invite you to share anything you'd like to highlight from the last week - an interesting discussion, an informative answer, an insightful question that was overlooked, or anything else.

Is Mel Gibson’s The Patriot accurate? For example, did the British deliberately target civilians who supported the militia? There was a scene where a bunch of militia sympathizers get locked in a church by the British, who proceed to burn it to the ground. Did they really do things like that?

I was looking at the wikipedia pages of the various Tokugawa shoguns and I found it interesting that pretty consistently the Shogun would end up adopting daughters, often many of them. There were also a few adopted sons, but after Tokugawa Ieyasu this seems to have mostly been confined to securing succession. On the other hand, even shoguns with many biological children seemed to have adopted daughters.

What is going on here?

I just learned that she was buried in New York's Ferncliff Cemetery on the immediately before the first Stonewall riots. Since she was a gay icon and a lot of queer activists were at her funeral, how did that gathering influence what happened after?

While I understand that wet bulb events are getting more common and dangerous today due to climate change, they can't be a new thing since the invention of AC right? Hot and humid places have always existed, and people lived there. How did the people who lived in those areas not die during humid heat waves? Especially people who often had no choice but to work outside? How do you keep your animals from dying? Most information I've found mostly focuses on the wealthy who could afford to slow down (and left convenient information in letters and diaries about how they cooled off), but how would the average farmer or hunter survive?

Cossacks were existing nation states for over three hundred years, but in XXth century they seem far less often mentioned,

What happened with them, that they went from a major force on the Eastern Steppes, to being by large non-existent today?

Firstly, I assume that such adoption has taken place, and isn’t just an Anglophone convention. But I’m curious about when the world moved towards this common word. I imagine that every country and culture has its own creation myths and related names for the world. When did that convergence on “Earth” occur, how did it happen, and are there any curious stories to relate?

I am curious in how democracies before the 21st century handled any situations where losing parties and/or leaders, whether they were incumbent or non incumbent, refused to accept electoral defeat.

What do historians say about how losers’ consent functioned in earlier democracies and what happened in cases where it broke down?

I'm Afroargentinian but in my country little is taught about the history of African people in Argentina. Lately I've been seeing many posts in social media about the genocide of Black people in the country. Some stories really caught my eye, for instance:

> Never forget when Argentina used there entire Black population in wars to get killed off on the front lines with no weapons against other counties in South America.

> a good time to remind that Argentina KILLED the entire black population of its country they were also erased from Argentine history books and censuses to wipe them from history supporting it is INSANE

> The history of Argentina’s egregious racism goes back further than WWII and Nazis. Go and research the history of Tango (a Black American art form), or their own genocide where they rounded up the Black population and marched them into the sea at gunpoint where they were drowned. This is why the country is so “white”. Systemic murder and erasure. A country whose culture was invented and built by Black People. Now infested with the most alarming racist beliefs and attitudes I have ever encountered including the Southeastern US where black people are at least respected if not liked.

Are there any books or articles that cover the history of these massacres and genocide campaigns?

Thank you

China’s endonym, Zhongguo, or 中国, means something close to “central state” or “middle state”. I’ve heard that the meaning behind the name is that the Chinese viewed themselves as the center of civilization, with barbarians surrounding them the further you went from the center. Because of this, the name Zhongguo has the implied meaning of “most civilized state”.

Is this true, or is it just a myth?

I recently saw a clip of the Coca-Cola bicentennial commercial, which showed Paul Revere riding across fields and into town to warn of the British coming, as the legend goes. Very cool piece of Americana. But it got me thinking. His riding style is totally anachronistic. In the commercial, the actor is riding in a cross country seat, posting the trot, and in an English jump saddle with short stirrups. But these are all decidedly modern.

So my question is, what kind of tack and horses did Revere use, and what was the riding style of the time actually like? It is my understanding that he would have been in a saddle with a larger pommel and cantle, a straighter leg, and would not have ridden like he was competing at the Badminton Horse Trials, right?

A 12-20 mile march in the infantry is exhausting. The idea of completing that and then immediately building a fort sounds super human. Did the legions do this every time, or was it more of an official doctrine that was not necessarily followed every campaign?

Often cities static is 90% of restaurants close in their first year, and 60% of the remaining close by their 5th year.

I’m Czech and I know basically no religious people. I thought religion was something people did in the past but not anymore until I was about 9.

The official data also shows that we have very low numbers of religious people. A lot of people will say that it’s to do with communist repression of religion - but this doesn’t seem a sufficient explanation to me, since we were one country with Slovakia during that period, and Slovakia is much more religious than us nowadays. Other Eastern bloc and ex-Soviet countries are also more religious than us.

So my question is, what are the historical factors that have contributes to this? What made us different from other countries that are culturally similar to us? Was this tendency present before WWII? Or did it emerge after we became a socialist country?

Hi, new to the subreddit!
As a hijabi myself (muslim woman who wears the islamic headscarf), who was born and raised in Europe, and a huge fashion history fan, I've asked myself countless times how other muslim women, regardless of how few there were, dressed in 19th/20th century western countries.
Was it in their traditional ethnic clothing or did they dress like most women around them? I'm specifically interested in the 50s and earlier, but my searches have yielded no results except for this picture I found on another reddit thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/islam/comments/ligfpa/a\_photo\_date\_back\_to\_1930\_of\_women\_wearing\_niqab/

Any information/sources/pictures would be greatly appreciated as this is something that interests me a lot and I'll take anything I can get lol.

The Dzungar genocide appears to only be encountered (in English at least) in an academic/academic-adjacent context, despite its apocalyptic scale and intensity rivalling the most extreme episodes of asymmetric mass-violence in world history. While Native American genocides have collectively (if belatedly) entered wider public consciousness with sensitive and controversial discourse about acknowledgement and reconciliation, I have never seen the annihilation of Dzungaria discussed by anyone other than historians and laymen with a particular interest in Qing history.

Is there a different story in China? Are there Qing-era sources indicating that any Chinese people at the time saw something unprecedentedly brutal or beyond the scope of "normal" warfare in what Qianlong had ordered? Did Republican-era Chinese ever evoke the genocide as evidence of the barbarity of the Manchus, or would acknowledgment have been too damaging to the Republic's claim to Xinjiang?

And on the other side of the coin, is there any evidence of continuous memorialisation of the catastrophe by descendants of Dzungars (apparently these include modern Kalmyks and Olots) or were survivors too dislocated and dispersed to have retained a shared conception of "national trauma" that descendants of survivors of other genocides have?