His coat and armband seem to look like pseudo-nazi garb. But he is studying at Berkley and, being with the Black Panthers, it seems he is supposed to be far left intellectual coded. So why would he be wearing neonazi-like clothing?

I am Dr. Joohee Suh. I was trained as a social historian of early modern China with a focus on the history of the body and death. My interest in this topic was originally inspired by Qing-era (1644-1911) stories of undead corpses, and from there I became interested in how dead bodies shaped social practices, interactions, and changes. What I found particularly interesting was the fear of dead bodies lingering in the world of the living to harm them in various ways, which seems to be quite universal across time and space. I hope this book can be both informative and amusing for those who share this interest in death, the body, and how they have shaped human history.

You can find my book here: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295754925/the-unburied/

Here is the Press's instruction of the book:

When coffins lingered above ground, Qing China reimagined care, kinship, and the meaning of death

In late imperial China, death did not always lead swiftly to burial. Across the Qing empire, coffins frequently remained in temple courtyards, storage houses, or shallow pits for months, years, even decades. These unburied bodies unsettled the social order: they were neither gone nor fully incorporated into ancestral lines, inhabiting a liminal space between presence and absence. The Unburied explores this unsettling phenomenon, showing how exposed remains shaped mortuary ethics and practices across families, communities, and the state.

Drawing on government decrees, criminal cases, epitaphs, charitable records, and popular stories, Joohee Suh uncovers the unexpected social roles of the dead. Families crafted ornate epitaphs to sustain ties with kin whose coffins had no resting place; magistrates and officials confronted disputes over graves and desecration; Buddhist temples and philanthropic groups organized to shelter and inter abandoned bodies. Even as Confucian orthodoxy condemned corpse exposure as ritual failure, ordinary people developed adaptive practices that wove the unburied into moral and social life.

This study reframes death in early modern China not as a stable ritual sequence but as an extended, negotiated process. By centering the precarious fates of the unburied, Suh illuminates how scarcity, migration, and filial obligation reshaped the relationship between living and dead. Original and deeply researched, The Unburied offers a powerful new history of mortality, ritual, and care in a society where the dead continued to dwell uncomfortably among the living.
This study reframes death in early modern China not as a stable ritual sequence but as an extended, negotiated process. By centering the precarious fates of the unburied, I illuminate how scarcity, migration, and filial obligation reshaped the relationship between living and dead. Original and deeply researched, The Unburied offers a powerful new history of mortality, ritual, and care in a society where the dead continued to dwell uncomfortably among the living.

The idea of the portal features very prominently in the cosmology of my five-year-old, and is common in the mass media he consumes. Its features are usually most or all of the following:

• It is a permeable, flat surface, usually suspended vertically, often circular in shape
• It often has a border of some kind around it
• It allows a person to instantly move from one (often mundane) setting to a completely different place, biome, period of time or parallel/magical world
• One has simply to walk or otherwise move through the portal to use it, sometimes after activating it in some way

Now, I know some relatively recent fiction that helped popularise the concept, like the 1994 film Stargate and the 2007 video game Portal. But how far and from where does its origins stretch before that?

Obviously there are related ideas in folklore, like fairy rings, summoning circles and various magical/underground/parallel worlds that can be travelled to and from. There are also other means of fantastical instantaneous travel in fiction from Star Trek transporters to time machines. But the specific idea and form factor of the portal, is there a more decisive origin for that?

Given that The Quran prohibits the consumption of alcohol, due to its intoxicating effects, and throughout history, one of the primary reasons for the consumption of alcohol, besides getting drunk, was due to fermentation being highly effective in its killing of bacteria and diseases, did Muslims throughout Arabia, The Middle East, South East Asia, Anatolia, and The Balkans for example, suffer from significantly higher rates of illness and death from viruses, bacteria, parasites, infections, when compared to their alcohol drinking Jewish, Christian and Pagan neighbours? (Prior to the advent of modern water purification and sterilisation methods)

Side question: As alcohol was also a significant, readily available and cheap source of calories for the poor, were Muslims from the same low social-economic background and within the same localities noticeably thinner than other religious communities when given the higher cost of food?

I'm specifically *not* asking about the decline in men's headwear in general or the casualization of fashion over the 20th century.

I'm asking how we reached the point today where outside of particularly important meetings with higher levels or customers no one bats an eye at a baseball cap in an office while basically any other form of hat would be noteworthy and out of place. The only other hat that I've seen accepted are flat caps which are perceived as somewhat eccentric.

So I know the Hanseatic League was basically a confederation of German merchants that wielded a lot of political and economic power. And they kept the roads and seas safe from bandits and pirates. But what I don't know is what their military and navy? Did they have an organized army and fleet or did they hire out mercenaries and privateers to protect their routes and interests?

This is a really really controversial topic, but ive heard quotes by Hertzl saying that his project is a colonial one or things of that nature. How did infulencial early zionists such as hertzl and ben gurion view it, as a colonial project or a nativist one?

This is a historical question I have been trying to answer for a long time, but I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation.

How were the Qarmatians able to conquer parts of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Oman, establish control over al-Ahsa, and capture numerous cities during their military campaigns?

They even sacked Mecca in 317 AH (930 CE) and later advanced toward Cairo, besieging the city. Yet, despite their military strength and extensive influence, they never captured Medina.

Other groups had successfully attacked the holy cities before them. For example, during the caliphate of al-Muʿtazz, Ismaʿil ibn Yusuf al-Saffak captured both Mecca and Medina with relative ease in 251 AH (862 CE).

Why, then, did the Qarmatians never attempt to attack Medina? What prevented them from doing so, despite their ability to raid or capture other major cities?

I’ve been reading about Portuguese exploration during the 15th century, particularly the voyages along the African coast, and something that’s been puzzling me is how little information we seem to have about some of the people and expeditions that played such an important role in history.

For example, Gil Eanes is credited with rounding Cape Bojador in 1434, which was an important milestone in Portuguese exploration. However, the main account I keep coming across is Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. There seems to be very little information about Eanes himself. We don’t really know much about his early life, his date of birth, or his personal life. How much independent evidence do we actually have that corroborates Zurara’s account, and is there anything else we know about Eanes outside of this chronicle?

Another example is Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. We don’t even know his exact date of birth, and as far as I can tell, there isn’t a detailed firsthand written account of his voyage that survives today. One piece of physical evidence associated with his expedition is a padrão (a stone pillar used by the Portuguese to mark their presence) traditionally linked to Dias and his voyage along the South African coast. But how much of what we know about the expedition comes from contemporary documentation, and how much has been reconstructed from other sources?

These are just two examples, but they’ve made me wonder how much contemporary evidence actually survives for these early Portuguese expeditions. Given how significant these voyages were, I would have expected more detailed records, such as ships’ logs, eyewitness accounts, letters, or personal accounts from the explorers themselves.

This is kind of a weird one, but bear with me: the vast majority of people in modern-day India practice cremation of the dead, with the major exceptions being Muslims and some Christians. Ergo, fewer corpses to be reanimated. How did this affect the media and depiction of zombies and vampires in India?

It's something that I randomly thought about this morning. During the great plague, my city's people quarantined. The gates were shut, however to stop the people inside from starvation, fishermen from another village would bring food to the gates. The people in the city placed the coins in a sort of small stone basin filled with vinegar, because they believed the plague was caused by bad odours. Putting it in vinegar didn't stop the plague, but the social distancing did, because there was no direct person to person contact and prevented the outside villagers from coming in to contact with linen etc that had been contaminated.

The Japanese offensive was typified in the Malay peninsula but probing attacks on fortified positions followed by probing attack to find and turn the enemy flanks or establishing blocking positions behind the enemy line. Then we get to Guadalcanal and then its banzai charges against machine guns for the rest of the war.

The Gemma siege howitzers originally designed for the Belgium fortress lines during WW1 were supposed to be destroyed according to the post WW1 armistice. Yet one appeared at the siege of Sevastopol in 1942. Does anyone know the history? Seems like there’s an interesting story there

From the kitchen, to the student, to work, to marriages, and the larger Hindu community, every segment of Hindu society experienced colonization differently. Since much of the religion is passed down via community in modern times, the different experiences must have warped the religion's interpretation significantly, causing a confusion in what is "tradition" and what is "influenced by colonizer laws". Is there any concrete historical documentation suggesting the various ways certain traditions have significantly changed pre- and post- colonization and invasion?

For ex. Are these claims true or false HISTORICALLY?

Claim1 : "Marriages- the way of arranging marriages changed significantly to mirror Victorian matchmaking. A study of the Hindu religious texts suggests that women had greater agency over who they married as well as the age at which they chose to do so pre-colonisation and invasion. Dowry too, seems to be very different than the way we know it now."

Claim2 : "Transgender community was influential and respected in the court of god which formed the heart of any fortified city and therefore any capital, and played a significant part in the study of arts and religion until they were outlawed and suffered alongside destruction of temples. Today the Hindu religion seems to have kept the Victorian views."

Claim3 : "Property rights changed during colonization era causing the Hindu-household associated Hindu traditions to be redefined. This significantly affected the organisation of Hindu communities and the way Hinduism was practised in them."

Most people know about the North Vietnamese propaganda telling US soldiers to abandon their units and defect to North Vietnam, however, as far as I know there aren't any recorded instances of this happening.

This has me wondering though... How would any soldiers that did successfully defect likely have been treated? Both by the Vietnamese and the US?

Would the soldiers have been taken prisoner or just killed? And how would they be treated if they were taken prisoner?

Thanks for any responses

When I look back in history I feel like it’s kings and queens until we get democracy somewhere in (Greece?). Did we ever see any different political structures?

Admittedly I'm not entirely familiar with the whole world of Westminster governments, but Canada, Britain, and Australia seem to have a tendency against coalition governments that I'm not really sure of the historical basis for.

What did early humans do in order to stay alive while they slept before we had homes? Did they take shifts? Were their shelter good enough to keep predators out?

To my understanding, Homer may or may not have existed, or the Iliad and the Odyssey may have been written down by separate people, or maybe there was a Homeric school of authors.

But where does the name come from? Not meaning what is the etymology of the name but instead as in, do we have manuscripts that attribute the works to Homer, or is it all just tradition passed down by word of mouth or something else? And if it was a case of people writing these stories and attributing them to Homer to give them authority, do we think a historical Homer existed, a la a historical David or Solomon?

I don't know a lot about him. What I do know: He was born around 1926 and was part of the german minority in hungary. At around 17 he allegedly got conscripted into the Waffen-SS, including getting tattooed. This was apparently in the context of the Siege of Budapest.

Is this plausible?