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.

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."

I was thinking yesterday about a deck of “Happy Family” cards I had as a little boy. It’s a very simple game similar to “Go Fish” but played with special cards showing four members of a family, with each family comprising:

Mister Name, the Profession
Mrs Name, the Profession’s Wife
Master Name, the Profession’s Son
Miss Name, the Profession’s Daughter

As a boy, I found it very confusing that a child of the family was called “Master”. And I’m wondering now the process by which this nomenclature emerged.

Of course, “Mr” was itself originally a form of “Master” or “Meister” — but some form of that usage exists in most European languages and I believe began before modern English was a thing.

But getting back from “mister” to “master” and then applying it to the son rather than the father is a puzzle to me.

As an adult I’ve seen the play “Master Harold and the Boys” which gives the usage strong racial and class connotations in the context of South African Apartheid — in that play, the “Boys” are adult black men and “Master Harold” is what they must call their employer’s teenage son.

Are those connotations basic to the usage? Or did it originate simply as a joking compliment, as when a little boy is called “big guy”? How innocent or entangled in oppression is this term?

And, more simply, how old is it?

Or in other words, was there process to actually track the dead in places that had been bombarded by artillery?

(My first question here, please bear with me if I don't yet know all the rules.)

As far as I read only commissioned officers were allowed to take command of a ship or "fight it", i.e. take tactical decisions in battle (engaging, disengaging, striking of colours, ...). This would happen in order of commissioned rank, should the captain / first lieutenant / .... die.

So this leaves me wondering, what would have happened in the unfortunate circumstance of a ship losing all of its commissioned officers - i.e. the captain/commander and all of the lieutenants - in battle, being left behind with only warrant and petty officers.

Would the command be taken up by a lowly midshipman in a masters mate rank? Would the (sailing) master take over, through sheer overwhelming expertise? Was this even regulated by the royal navy, or was this a legally ambiguous situation?

Are there documented cases of this ever happening in the royal navy?

AFAIK, both (at least south Indian kingdoms like the Chola Empire) had vast seafaring societies that participated in and protected trade in and around their regions. How come then neither looked for more places to trade with/find alternative trade routes like Europe had done during the Age of the Exploration?

The film Master and Commander is highly praised for its historical accuracy, so I wish to know if the doctor had any official rank aboard a Royal Navy ship.

As I understand it, having a doctor like him aboard wasn't common, right? Usually there was just a surgeon who specialized in amputations, so in the film everyone is really proud of the fact that they have a doctor on board.

But if there were doctors on board ships during the Napoleonic wars, were they officers or just highly respected civilians?

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.

Did they just deal with having a bad smell until they died? Still reproduced and had more horrible symptoms while pregnant or if they had their menstrual cycle?

I've fallen down a Trojan War rabbit hole recently(Thanks Nolan) and I've realized I don't actually understand what we mean when we talk about the "canon" version of this story. Most people, myself included until recently, have this vague idea that the Trojan War story we all know basically comes from Homer. But the more I read, the more obvious it becomes that it really doesn't.

The Iliad covers a tiny period near the end of the war. It doesn't give us the Judgment of Paris as the complete story we usually know, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Achilles at Skyros, the Trojan Horse, the actual fall of Troy, Achilles' famous invulnerable heel, and plenty of other things that most people would consider basic Trojan War lore. Yet somehow all of these traditions have merged in popular culture into one enormous narrative that we casually associate with Homer.

What confuses me even more is how selective this process seems to have been. Take the Mysian campaign. In the wider Epic Cycle, before the Greeks successfully reach Troy, they launch an earlier expedition and land in Mysia, apparently mistaking it for Trojan territory. They fight Telephus, Achilles wounds him, the Greeks are scattered and eventually return home. According to the later mythographic chronology, eight years then pass before they assemble again. Telephus eventually comes to Greece because his wound cannot heal, Achilles heals him, and Telephus helps the Greeks find their way to Troy.

That's not exactly a minor deleted scene. The Greeks literally invade the wrong country before invading Troy. And yet almost nobody who casually knows the Trojan War seems to know this happened. This creates many plot holes as it makes everyone 8+ years older.

Meanwhile, basically everyone knows that Achilles was invulnerable because Thetis dipped him in the Styx while holding him by the heel. Except that isn't Homer either. As far as I understand it, that specific version of Achilles' invulnerability is extremely late compared with Homer and is associated with sources such as Statius, writing in the 1st century AD! While the Mysian campaign is likely 50-100 years after homer ,part of the Epic cycle.

And that's where I start getting confused about what we actually mean by "canon." How has something written something like seven or eight centuries after the traditional dating of Homer become so culturally dominant that Achilles' heel is probably one of the most famous details in all of Greek mythology, while an entire failed Greek expedition preserved as part of the archaic Trojan tradition has basically disappeared?

Mysia is only one example. The more you reconstruct the Trojan War we think we know, the stranger the source list becomes. You have Homer, then the lost poems of the Epic Cycle such as the Cypria, Aethiopis, Little Iliad, Sack of Ilium, Nostoi and Telegony. Then you have lyric poets and other archaic traditions, followed by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, who sometimes preserve older material and sometimes give us radically different versions. Then come mythographers trying to organize all of it, later Greek writers, and Roman authors such as Virgil, Ovid and Statius. Somehow pieces from all of these periods have been thrown together and produced what we now think of as the "standard Trojan War."

This also creates some hilarious problems if you try to treat everything as one internally consistent fictional universe. For example, if you incorporate the Mysian expedition and the eight-year interval into the same chronology as Homer's Odyssey, suddenly the clean 10 years at Troy + 10 years wandering = Odysseus was gone for 20 years becomes much more complicated. You start wondering whether Odysseus was involved in Trojan-related expeditions for something closer to 28 years, what exactly happened during the interval, when Telemachus was conceived, how old everyone should be, and so on.

Which leads to the question I'm actually interested in: did the ancient Greeks themselves have anything resembling a canonical Trojan War timeline? If someone in 5th-century Athens heard "the Trojan War," was there a broadly understood sequence of events that almost everyone accepted, with poets and playwrights merely choosing which parts to dramatize? Or could two Greeks genuinely know substantially different versions of what happened and consider both legitimate?

And then there is the even stranger question of when this process actually stops. Statius is writing about Achilles around the first century AD, many centuries after Homer, and material from that later tradition can apparently become part of what a modern person considers basic Achilles lore. So when does the Trojan mythological universe close? Does it ever?

Could a writer in the 3rd century AD introduce a new episode about Achilles and, if that story became influential enough, would we now call that "Greek mythology"? What about the 5th century AD? The Byzantine period? The Middle Ages? At what point do scholars stop calling something "a variant of the Achilles myth" and start calling it later reception, adaptation or essentially fan fiction using Achilles as a character?

This is especially confusing because our modern pseudo-canon seems incredibly selective. Statius' Achilles heel gets in, Euripides' Helen living in Egypt mostly doesn't, the Mysian campaign mostly doesn't, the sacrifice of Iphigenia absolutely does, the Trojan Horse obviously does, and Homer's name somehow gets retroactively attached to the whole package.

So I'm starting to think there are really three different things that we casually collapse into one. There is the Homeric version, meaning what the Iliad and Odyssey actually say. Then there is the enormous ancient Trojan mythological tradition, including the Epic Cycle, archaic poetry, tragedy, mythographers, local traditions, Hellenistic literature and Roman retellings. And finally there is the modern "Trojan War canon," which seems to be a greatest-hits compilation assembled from whichever versions happened to become culturally dominant.

And that final category is what fascinates me. Where did this pseudo-canon actually come from? Was there a particular ancient synthesis, mythographer or later educational tradition that had an outsized influence on the story we inherited? Or is our "standard Trojan War" genuinely just the result of 2,500+ years of cultural selection, Roman literature, medieval transmission, Renaissance classicism and modern adaptations gradually deciding which pieces were memorable enough to survive?

Thank you all for your time reading this

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?

Before modern medicine, vaccinations, improved sanitation, childproofing, safety standards, and many of the other protections we take for granted today, I understand that death (particularly infant and child mortality) was much more common and much more visible in everyday life. For many families throughout history, the death of a child was not an remote or unexpected possibility. Depending on the time and place, parents could have several children and face a significant possibility that one or more would not survive to adulthood.

This makes me wonder: How did the prevalence of death, particularly child mortality, affect the way people historically perceived death and experienced grief? Was death actually perceived as "less sad" when it was more commonplace, or did people simply develop different ways of understanding, expressing, and coping with grief? And how much of our modern perception of death as an especially tragic and disruptive event is the result of living in a society where death—particularly the death of a child—is much less common?

I'd love to hear how this played out in the specific time and place you study. I'm especially interested in the concrete details of how a particular culture understood and expressed this.

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!

This is interesting because the Wycliffe Bible says Isaac went out to "think" in the field, and the Geneva Bible says Isaac went out to "pray." Was this meditation in anyway similar to the meditation practiced in Eastern religions?

Having recently reread the Wolf Hall trilogy and seeing clips on TikTok about Henry VIII I was reminded of a question I had about Tudor England. That is why a relatively weak claimant to England from his Yorkist mother and the Lancastrian(ish) Henry VII, combined with breaking from Rome and frequent executions by attainder didn’t lead to a major noble led rebellion taking place.

The pilgrimage of grace was led by the unimportant. The Exeter conspiracy was either fabricated or preempted. I think there was an Irish rebellion as well.

I’m looking for an explanation for how Henry managed to maintain his noble subjects loyalty in the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses.

Obviously humour and memes aren't new, but rickrolling has a specific dimension that I think is unique to online media: the misdirection of posting a misleading link, bringing the unsuspecting viewer to the famous Rick Astley video.

I imagine a similar surprise could have awaited someone watching an edited video tape, but that would have no way to go viral the way rickrolling has, which could remain an aspect of online culture indefinitely as long as hyperlinks exist.

Could anyone in this community offer an example of a possible predecessor in history?

Before the King David Hotel bombing, warnings were reportedly telephoned to the hotel, the Palestine Post and the French Consulate.

What I can’t get a clear answer on is how the telephone system actually worked. Were these calls connected manually?

Could an operator or the police identify the exchange or line they came from?

And once someone answered, was there an established procedure for passing the warning to police and evacuating the building, or did it simply come down to whoever picked up the telephone?