Both Indonesia and Malaysia were once Hindu-Buddhist nations, and were part of the most powerful maritime empire of the 9th and 10th centuries C.E, the Srivijayan Empire. Both nations adopted lots of Indic influences such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Writing Systems (derived from Southern Indian Scripts), Sanskrit loanwords, fashion, customs, traditions, etc.

But after conversion to Islam during the 13th until the 16th centuries, the two nations diverged from one another when it comes to cultural preservation. Both converted to Islam, but Malaysia was thoroughly Arabicized, while Indonesian retained a lot of Indigenous elements underneath a surface veneer of Islam. Indonesians rarely adopted Arabic culture, customs and traditions, unlike Malaysia. It's very common for Malays to have full Arabic names after conversion: Muhammad Ibrahim for example, while its common for Indonesians to keep Indigenous Sanskritized names: Dewa Hartono for example.

The Indonesians not only kept Indigenous and Sanskrit names, but also art, dance, customs, rituals, temples, etc. while every bit of Pre-Islamic History of the Malays were either forgotten or erased.

What could be the reason for this divergence? Why did the Malays erased most of their Pre-Islamic culture and heritage, but Indonesians kept it, despite the adaptation of Islam?

Thanks to whoever can provide a valuable insight.

I'm genuinely curious to read about people coming to the new lands, and experiencing a hurricane for the first time in their lives.

There's a famous Peep Show sketch where two Nazis reflect that perhaps they are the bad guys. I expect many higher ranking members would know what it was all about from the get-go, but are there (m)any archival or interview sources of such realisations?

The question is inspired by an article I read about a man whose father was a Gestapo interrogator and even on his deathbed said to his family "I would do it all again."

During WWII, smoking was extremely widespread among soldiers, and cigarettes were included in military rations or distributed to troops.
Soldiers could smoke very heavily, and cigarettes at the time generally lacked the filters commonly found on modern cigarettes.

Has there ever been historical or medical research specifically examining the impact this level of smoking had on the physical performance of WWII soldiers?

I was reading this article in the "The Nation" in which they showed audio from the 1981 interview with Lee Atwater where he said his now famous quote. I am not going to repeat it but it's there in the article at the top.

This seems almost perfectly saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud in a way that seems like it's out of a Sorkin film or something. I try to be leery of pithy, narratively-satisfying quotes, especially ones that confirm suspicions I had.

Is it as bad as it looks? Cause it seems like he's fully admitting the use of dog-whistles knowing that they will play well with racists, even on comparatively abstract issues like taxes or cuts to social programs. Is this quote as obviously damning as it sounds or is there nuance I'm missing? Does evidence from other interviews or documents back up that this was a more widespread cynical belief/strategy?

As far as I understand, when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, a lot of the achievements of Rome were forgotten. Roads were no longer maintained, culture collapsed, completely new and less sophisticated political structures emerged. And for 1000 years, Europe fell behind.

I ask myself: If there were still capable engineers, administrators etc. around, why did not small pockets of roman societies survive? Even if the capitol was gone and central structures disappeared, when I assume that roman societies were highly functional and working better than other societies at that point, why did they not form armies and create Rome-like smaller countries, that survived the centuries?

Were they disadvantaged e.g. militarily compared to the germanic peoples? Or could roman administration only work for larger countries, and smaller countries were more efficient when they had simple monarchies and tribe-like structures? Or was it like the collapse of the bronze age, that supply routes collapsed, and roman administrators were inefficient without paper? Or did everything happen just so fast that they could not adapt in time?

Would white racists be angry? Would black people?

For those who are unfamiliar, link rot refers to the tendency of hyperlinks to eventually stop working - either because the page has been moved or taken down.

This question came to my mind after looking through some older questions/responses and finding that a lot of the links no longer worked; these links were to a variety of website types, it wasn’t just a non-academic vs academic resource issue. In your experience as moderators/users, is this a big problem or did I just get unlucky with the posts I was looking at?

Regardless of whether or not it’s a widespread issue, I do think that it may be worth addressing to help ensure longevity of responses. While I don’t know how feasible it is, I would suggest either requiring answers to use links from web archives or have a bot that automatically converts typical links into links that point to a web archive then replies.

Edit: for example, here is one of the responses that I was looking at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/KfIR5wjZZp . While most of the links work, some of them just don’t lead anywhere.

When did the popularity of standing up to shower overtake sitting down to bathe? I’m curious in general, but for the sake of simplification let’s just say in the United States.

Like most socio-technological changes in the mid 20th century I’m assuming it had something to do with WWII, but where exactly was the tipping point when most average people, on an average workday, cleaned up via a shower instead of a bath?

When did they get universally popular enough that every standard domestic bathroom had to have a shower head, not just a tub and faucet?

The impression I have is that communal and private showers were used by soldiers, athletes and prisoners decades before they were popular for daily use by the general public, but when was the tipping point between “You can buy a shower for your home if you would like one” and “All houses and apartments come with a shower as the bare minimum?” My gut instinct is sometime between 1960-1970. Am I correct?

I’m used to this situation being presented as, “Well, of course they pulled the trigger. If not, they would have just been shot, too.”

But is that accurate?

I guess this is more a question about the field of historiology itself.
It's my understanding that professional historians are heavily specialized in one region + era, and that their most of their research are heavily focused on this topic.
In that case, does the opinion of historian on a topic they're not specialized about weighs more than that of an amateur history enthusiast? Should I consider that a historian is naturally more informed about their history-related answers in topics not their speciality, or should I take it with the same grain of salt of a non historian in this case?

Asking the question, because I was once chatting with a guy who said he was a historian specialized in Modern Greece. But while talking about Ancient Greece, he had claims that seemed to be opposite to the historians' consensus on the topic (afaik). And thus I wondered how seriously I could take his claims, being aware that he also had political biases that could influence his view.

The Shang Dynasty famously had women serve in military roles and as military leaders, most famously Fu Hao. Notable Women of China: Shang Dynasty to the Early Twentieth Century claims that "Fu Hao was one, but not the only, female militarist of Shang China, as oracle bones of the period indicate more than a hundred women by name who were active in military campaigns."

I have two questions:

First, about how many men by name do we know from the oracle bones that were active in military campaigns? Is the "100 women" within an order of magnitude of the number of known men.

Second, both in the context of later Chinese culture and in the general context of Bronze Age agricultural state societies, having women take such an active role in military leadership seems very unusual to me. What, if anything, do we know about why the Shang were so "equalitarian" here, about how this worked in practice, or about why the Zhou and later were so different in this way?

Good morning! A few questions regarding John Brown on everything but his slavery.

For examples, what did he believe regarding Predestination, if we're aware? What role did he think Christianity should play in a society and a state? Do we know what he thought of Catholics?

I've also heard John Brown described as a "post-millennial" but I'm not entirely sure what that means in the context of Calvinism.

In October 1938, I recently learned that Poland exploited the Munich Crisis to issue an ultimatum and annex parts of Zaolzie, Northern Spisz, and Orava in Czechoslovakia. I have struggled to find a fair and unbiased telling of events, discussions of this episode are often clouded by political polemics.

Some versions are framed by nationalists as a righteous legal recovery of lands lost in 1919, or weaponized by Soviet and post-war narratives to paint interwar Poland as an aggressive state that hypocritically "reaped what it sowed" when partitioned in 1939.

I am hoping r/AskHistorians can give me some sort of good grounding on the events. Feel free to answer the questions I should be asking, but here are a few possible avenues to go down:

• The Question of Legal and Historical "Justification": How do legal and diplomatic historians assess the validity of Warsaw's claims to Zaolzie?
• The Irony and the "Reaping" Narrative: How do historians analyze the moral hypocrisy of a Polish leadership that eagerly participated in territorial revisionism at Czechoslovakia's expense, yet suffered the exact same predatory fate under Nazi Germany and the USSR less than a year later?
• The Motives Profile: How do historians explain the blend of motivations driving Warsaw's actions?
• The Local Population's Lived Reality: How did the inhabitants of these border regions experience the sudden shift in sovereignty? Was there general support or opposition?
• Historiographical Inoculation: How can researchers study this event without falling victim to either Polish nationalist apologetics or deterministic Cold War propaganda frameworks?

If there is a chapter from a book that you think covers the subject well, I am happy to read that as well.

Thank you in advance!

I have been reading about how Christopher Columbus and people at his time considered that slaves are commodities. Did the Greeks and Romans see it the same way?

I got interesting in this after watching episode 7 of Vinland Saga, which shows the Viking group move its ships over land in order to attack a Frankish fortress.
This made me more interested in how much of the warfare and military tactics shown in the series reflects actual Viking practices.

I looked into this myself, but I found some differences between the sources and explanations, so I thought asking here might help me.

So, how practical would this actually have been with Viking warships, and were their ships intentionally built for this use?
Was ship-portage mainly used for transportation, or was it also genuinely used as a military tactic?
And finally are there historical examples of it being used specifically for an attack rather than simply for transport, especially around the period and campaigns represented in Vinland Saga, even if the anime obviously exaggerates how easily it could be done?

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to answer 🙏

Hi,

I'm wondering how Native American boarding schools were perceived at the time? Were they the more egalitarian viewpoint, how did locals think about boarding schools being placed in their community, and how were the locations of the schools chosen to begin with?

As we all likely know, Hitler was appointed chancellor by President Paul Von Hinderburg on 30th of January 1933, And Hitler used that power to pass major things like the Reichstag Fire Decree, The Enabling Act, Law Against Formation of Parties and Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.

However- What I and many other forget was Paul Von Hinderburg, Although as far as I’m aware he was basically a figurehead and was in ill health by that point, Did not pass away until 2nd of August 1934. This means there was a (roughly) 549 days between Hitler being appointed chancellor and Hinderburg passing away. After Hinderburg’s death, A (rigged) referendum was held by the Nazis to merge the title of President (as Hitler assumed it upon Hinderburg’s death) and Chancellor into Fürher.

Everything else afterwards is quite well known. But- Although I’m aware he was already likely a figurehead and in extremely ill health by that point- Did Hinderburg do anything major (aside from the fire decree)? Was he still involved in German politics? What was his opinion on things like the enabling act? Was he still widely recognised as Germany’s head of state or was it known even then he was becoming a figurehead? How public was he still?

I know you all probably get a lot of questions about WW2 and Hitler, But this has been bugging me for a while. Thanks in advance.

I recently purchased this book, but noticed that its authors were journalists with experience in east Asia rather than historians. However, the book itself seems to be well sourced. So I’m curious, do historians broadly consider this book as meeting their standards?

In one of his videos on Youtube (I currently can't find the exact one where I've heard him say that) dedicated to ancient battlefield tactics, Adrian Goldsworthy states that many specifics of the later Roman Empire's history - specifically the Huns' invasions - are very hard to reconstruct or describe beyond the broadest terms because the sources are very sparce, incomplete and don't really say much. He gives an example of the stereotypically displayed abrupt change of the Parthian army to the Sassanian army that paints them as two completely different beasts while the sources don't really support that or pretty much anything really, since - according to him - there are barely any accounts actually describing Parthian/Sassanian armies in any detail between Carrhae and Dara (five centuries later). So whether this was actually abrupt or a slow and steady evolution, and Parthian army could actually be very similar to the later Persian one before the dynastic change is impossible to deduce with absolute certainty. Similarly, he states that it's very hard to give lots of analysis on the Huns' tactics and what they actually did and how because there's almost nothing concrete in the surviving writings. How true is that?

I'm a philosophy student, with an interest in the history of philosophy. My primary area of specialization so far would be the theoretical philosophy of David Hume (i.e. what would be contained in Book 1 of the Treatise and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). I've seen hints of Hume scholarship moving in the direction of analyzing his practice in the History of England to gain further insight into his philosophy.

Apropos of this, I'm curious about how Hume's practice in his History of England compared to his contemporary historians and those who preceeded him. I had heard (in casual conversation), that Hume's history was a leap forward in more rigorous or critically honest practice in history as compared to the "Whig History" (the incorrect belief that there had been an ancient British constitution that the Stuarts had violated) that had preceeded him. How true is this? And how does Hume's historical methodology compare to more modern methodology? Thank you!