I would think an escaped convict would have better things to do than assasinate a civil rights leader. How did this escaped con get to Spain after the murder?

Who was behind the man holding the gun?

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

I’m curious if the admissions of both Alaska and Hawaii to the union had any influence from the country being at 48 states for almost 50 years, especially with their admissions being passed in the same year.

I’m also curious if there was any similar urge to round up after the United States started adding more states beyond 40 to reach 50? Were there pushes to add island territories to statehood to continue increasing state numbers?

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?

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?

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.

**TLDR: I went down a history rabbit hole and now I need someone to convince me history isn't just an endless list of atrocities.**

I am very curious and have a tendency, sometimes a bad one, to go down rabbit holes. The internet has plenty.

Here is how it went:

Politics has been constant hell in France lately. The madness is awe-inspiring, so much so that everyday conversations, no matter the age or group, somehow end up being about politics: how unfair the system is, how terrible the president or the police are, the circumstances around the recent terrorist attack, how some other countries like Japan & US are reacting to the riots and using them to further their own (fascist) political agendas despite not even understanding what the riots are about, etc.

It's just too much. So during my lunch break I thought, ok, let me read about something completely disconnected from France.

For some reason I became curious about the US Constitution and why it's considered such an important document.

So I wondered how long it was,
→ then who wrote it and why
→ then what "due process" actually meant
→ then whether there were actual cases where due process wasn't respected
→ then I realized the Constitution isn't really a rulebook, but more like **a rule that defines the rules**, and courts have to interpret what those rules mean in actual situations etc.
→ so then I wondered where those interpretations are actually written down and how some random judge 100 years later is supposed to know about them
→ somehow that led me to the Fourth Geneva Convention
→ which made me wonder what the fuck happened for so many countries to collectively decide "okay, we REALLY need rules about how civilians can be treated during war"

And here. **Here I started to find doom.**

How can human beings be so cruel? So evil? How is this possible? How can one human being treat another human being this way?

I was born in 2001. Reading history sometimes makes me feel like I'm reading something that isn't real. It's just too much. Not to say atrocities don't exist anymore, obviously, but as someone who has never witnessed atrocities on anything close to that scale, it's genuinely difficult to comprehend.

How do you even process the Holocaust? The Nanjing Massacre? And how the hell do you process Unit 731?

"An estimated 14,000 people were killed by [human experimentation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_subject_research) in the facility itself.[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#cite_note-The_day_the_earth_died-8) Its activities included infecting prisoners with deadly diseases, conducting [vivisection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivisection), performing [organ harvesting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting), testing [hypobaric chambers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypobaric_chamber), amputating limbs, and exposing victims to chemical agents and explosives. Prisoners—often referred to as "logs" (or "maruta") by the staff—were mainly [Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese) civilians, but also included [Russians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians), [Koreans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans), and others, including children and pregnant women. No documented survivors are currently known." [Unit 731 - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731)

And then you learn that people involved in Unit 731 received immunity from prosecution from the US in exchange for information from their research.

I know I'm probably just emotionally shocked by what I've been reading for the past hour, but is there anything that helped you stop seeing history as **mostly just a gigantic list of atrocities?**

"prior to 2007" added to avoid violating 20-year rule

Both on those occasions the Europeans had deployed the largest armies to date.

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?

Hey everyone, I’ve been looking into the political history of mid-20th-century Egypt and noticed some striking parallels to 19th-century Prussia/the German Empire that I’m wondering if historians have drawn connections between.

Specifically, I'm looking at a few areas:

1. Vexillology (The Flags): The Arab Liberation Flag introduced after the 1952 revolution (red-white-black horizontal tricolor with a central eagle) looks remarkably like the old German Empire’s flag (black-white-red) just inverted, complete with a central bird emblem reminiscent of the Prussian black eagle. (I know Pan-Arab colors technically have their own lineage, but the visual similarity is uncanny).
2. State-Building and Unification: Both Prussia and Nasser's Egypt pursued ambitious projects of uniting disparate territories or peoples under a single national identity (Prussia uniting the German states; Nasser attempting to unite the Arab world, culminating in the United Arab Republic).
3. Statecraft and Modernization: Both relied heavily on a strong, modernized military apparatus as the vanguard of national unity and industrial strength. Plus, Nasser did travel to Germany during his career for scientific/technological exchanges.

Was there any direct or indirect intellectual inspiration drawn from Prussian state-building or German nationalism by Nasser and the Free Officers, or are these visual and structural parallels purely coincidental?

Looking forward to any insights!

I’m a student studying the American Civil War and I’m trying to understand why Northern opinion turned increasingly against slavery in the decades before 1861. I know most Northerners weren’t calling for immediate abolition everywhere, and that the main political fight was over whether slavery should spread into the western territories.

How much did Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1833, and the transatlantic abolitionist movement more broadly, influence American opinion? Was it more significant that the North’s economy didn’t depend on slave labour, or were domestic factors such as religion, free labour ideas, and events like the Fugitive Slave Act more important?

Any recommended reading would also be appreciated.

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?

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."

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?

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.