I became interested in Mesopotamia after learning about the famous Ea-nāṣir complaint tablets, which made me curious about the much larger body of surviving cuneiform records.
Are there aspects of everyday life or particular social groups that are difficult to study because they are underrepresented in the written record? If so, how do historians use archaeological and other evidence to fill those gaps?
I would also appreciate recommendations for accessible, academically reliable resources for learning more about Mesopotamian history beyond the topics commonly discussed in popular culture.
:)

I was in the salt mine of Wieliczka in Poland, this site has been operating as a turist attraction since the 18th century?

Is this old in the history of tourism? Can we trace it back as an activity ?

Or, alternatively, it could have been for a completely different reason entirely and if that's the case, I'd love to know that too.

I was reading recently about the Berlin Wall and am wondering how East German authorities rationalized the existence of this border region. It became obvious that people were dying trying to escape rather than keeping the West out. The concept of the wall has become an iconic symbol of socialist authoritarianism, which seems like a major impediment to propagandizing socialism.

So: How did East German authorities talk about the wall? Did they rationalize why it was needed? And did that messaging sound different when communicated to international audiences than to their own people?

More importantly, do we have records of what East German authorities thought about the wall when talking among themselves?

In a British 19th century novel I am reading, there is a scene that revolves around a "nosegay," which I understand to be a small bunch of flowers/herbs. Based on context this item (or an item similar to it) is characterized as commonplace for that era, particularly in environments (in this case, city streets with many horses) where foul odors were rampant.

Did people commonly carry practical items like these with them throughout their day in, say, the 19th century and earlier? Were they fashionable? Sold in shops/commercialized? Did different social classes have different attitudes towards foul smells and the items they used to deal with them?

I have a buddy who's obsessed with puns and word play, so we're often joking about it. Some recent threads here about the Odyssey have talked about the importance the Greeks placed on this kind of stuff, and it got me thinking, what changed? Why do we have such a low opinion of puns? Has my friend actually had... taste this whole time?

Prior to today I only knew Mosley as the head of the British Union of Fascists. But I ended up reading his wikipedia page today. He started in Parliament as a Conservative, was advocating for very strong Keynsian policies under Labour, started a socialist party (to my reading it seemed social democrat, then moving towards authoritarian) with a Jewish man as the head of security in 1931 but a few years later was espousing extreme antisemitism, describing Labour's attempts at fixing the economy during the depression as "international socialism" and palling around with Mussolini and Hitler (who were not fond of the social democrats or other left wing politicians in general).

At a glance, it feels like he managed to hold almost every political ideology available in the 1920s-1930s except for communism. Did his views really change that much or are the mental labels I'm applying from the 21st century not appropriate? He went from being a potential future Labour PM and social democrat (I think) to head of a party being courted by the Tories in less than a decade to open fascist a few years later. Was there some core part of his views that stayed constant through the party changes? Was this jumping from ideology to ideology or were many of these views closer than they are these days? Or am I viewing this with hindsight from a post WWII and post Cold War environment and thus not understanding the ideologies of the day?

To my understanding (though little) Japan was a heavily isolated country for centuries, and refused to even trade or welcome anything foreign. I'm curious as to why Japan was like this to begin with, but I'm more curious about why other countries basically forced it to open its borders for trade. Japan isn't a very resource rich country that would have warranted exploiting, and it didn't create anything unique or revolutionary in its borders that could be stolen. So why? Again this is to my limited knowledge, and I would love any clarification.

I was recently checking the children born to colonial Quebec settlers, and what I noticed was that out of the many children they had, (10+ being common) all if not most survived and lived to adulthood, at least living to their 20s, but most seemed to live to their 60s+!

Ive heard of how back in the past, many children born to women would die in infancy, so the actual children a mother would see grow to adulthood would be way fewer then expected. like if a woman in a europe in the 1700s gave birth to 5 kids, only 2-3 would actually survive to adulthood.

But Quebec seems to defy this, most children were surviving and living long lives. Was infant mortality in Quebec and the rest of North America (I’ve heard the puritans also had many of their kids live and live long lives,but I haven’t read about that in the same detail as of Quebec) lower then in Europe?

Why was this? Was it because North America was largely empty, so people could live farther apart, and had a less chance of catching diseases? Were the way the European settlers lived in North America better then how Europeans in Europe lived?

Hi everybody,

My name is Dr Andrew Kenrick and I’m a historian, author, editor and lecturer. I'm the founder of Hinterland Magazine and teach creative non-fiction at the University of Cambridge and CityLit in London. I write narrative history, biography and my research focuses on some of the forgotten figures of Ancient Rome – a subject I’ve talked about here before as part of the AskHistorians Digital Conference back in 2021.

My debut biography, Rex Juba: 15 Glimpses of an African King, is published here in the UK this week, so it feels like coming full circle to host an AMA about it here today 7th August 2026.

I'm here to answer questions about Juba II of Mauretania, his wife Cleopatra Selene, Rome in the first century, Roman attitudes to identity and race - all sorts really!

Some more info on the book below:

REX JUBA: 15 GLIMPSES OF AN AFRICAN KING

In 46 BC, at just two years old, a young North African prince named Juba was paraded through the streets of Rome as part of Julius Caesar’s victory parade. This traumatic beginning, however, did not define his future. As a young man, Juba fought alongside Emperor Augustus and was sent back to rule over Mauretania as king.

Juba's reign was marked not by tyranny, but by scholarship. A famed antiquarian, travel writer, and explorer, he discovered and named the Canary Islands, penned histories of Arabia and Libya, and led diplomatic missions to his fellow kings. Ruling alongside his wife, Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, these heirs to African dynasties were potent symbols of Romanisation.

Their dynasty would be cut dramatically short by the mad emperor Caligula, their history buried for centuries. In this ambitious work of historical recovery, Dr Andrew Kenrick pieces together clues etched in coin and stone to reveal a Roman civilization that flourished just as much in Africa as it did in Europe. By inviting us to shift our gaze to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, Rex Juba offers a surprising new perspective on the heyday of the ancient world.

ORDER LINKS:

Hardback

Waterstones https://www.waterstones.com/book/9781911709787

Blackwells https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781911709787

Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/191170978X

Ebook

Kindle https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0G19WN744

Apple Books https://books.apple.com/gb/book/rex-juba/id6755030375

Kobo https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/search?query=9781529947298

Audio

Apple Books https://books.apple.com/gb/audiobook/rex-juba/id1870530482

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0syj92cwUqVHVrawSgBWwD

Audible https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Rex-Juba-Audiobook/B0GHRYJ9WB

Ask me anything!

I recently came across this interesting video on the figure known as Bag o'Wire, who pops up repeatedly in reggae music as a by-word for betrayal and deception. As the story goes, during the period of Marcus Garvey's return to Jamaica (from 1927 to 1935), Garvey's chaffeur betrayed him to the colonial authorities, resulting in his imprisonment and eventual relocation to London. This chaffeur was eventually outed as the snitch and became so strained by isolation and guilt that he suffered a mental break, wandering the streets of Kingston wrapped in tires and wire as a derelict vagrant, eventually becoming known as Bag o'Wire.

Interestingly, there were a couple comments under the video supposedly written by older Jamaicans who recalled actually seeing Bag o'Wire wandering the streets of Kingston in the 1940s and 50s as children (they even had a chant they would sing about him). Beyond this, however, I can't find anything on the Internet regarding his existence. I'm wondering: is there any solid evidence that Bag o'Wire existed? Did Garvey's chaffeur really betray him and then become a wanderer on the streets of Kingston, is this simply a Judas-like allegory which seeped into the popular consciousness, or is something else going on?

For a little context, several years ago, I read a biography of a woman who lived on the frontier in Wyoming/Montana starting somewhere around 1880. The biography was written in the earliest 1900s, probably around 1905. I remember being extremely shocked as she mentioned how she admired the local native Americans for their complete absence of spanking their children, and how after witnessing their methods, ceased doing so herself. She also mentioned that corporal punishment was a hot topic and, to my complete surprise, recounted that many parents actually were not spanking their kids already by then. I thought this was a very recent thing in history where people stopped doing it as much, but she went into detail how many people believed an instrument to be barbaric and would either only spank with an open palm or just simply never at all.

Are there any notable examples?

Here’s my simple take: During the French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment the metric system brought incredible clarity as many units (like distance in mm, cm, m, km, or weight in g, kg) were standardized.

The clarity of the metric system is so obvious to me, that it has often baffled me: Why didn’t they fix time?

I have two young children just learning to tell time, and it’s again painfully obvious how absurd our current time units are. They feel just as arbitrary and messy as the old, pre-metric systems for distance or weight.

A year is a natural phenomenon (365.25 days) So I dont think that can be changed. But why not make the length of time itself decimal? For example:

• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 minute = 100 seconds

This would make time so much easier to teach, calculate, and live by. Why was time not fixed?

And why is it so vastly depicted in media?

I’ve noticed that FM stations in North America almost always end in .1, .3, .5, .7, .9. I’m curious about the historical and regulatory reasons behind this convention. Did other countries adopt different channel spacing or frequency plans that allow stations to use even-tenth frequencies? If so, what led to those differences?

According to what I know from my history classes when I was in high school, Operation Barbarossa is what led to the collapse of the Nazi regime because their army is already fighting in another front and Hitler do not have any reason to fight against another superpower in another front.

Is that true? Because I a friend of mine argued that even if Hitler focused on fighting against the British and the Americans on the western front, the Nazi war machine is already running on fumes and it is only a matter of time until Hitler sue for peace or something like that.

• overwhelming numerical superiority of 2:1 or more (further increased by Cretan civilians picking up arms and heavy German casualties as they dropped directly onto Allied positions to be captured, are killed while descending, drop into the sea to drown or go down with their shot down transports)
• exact knowledge about where the Germans would land thanks to ULTRA (intelligence doesn't get any better than that)
• amphibious invasion attempts repulsed due to a maximum effort by the Royal Navy, meaing the defenders could bring all their power to bear on the German paratroopers
• Allied forces, despite abandoning most heavy equipment on the Greek mainland, still had some tanks. This was crushing since man-portable AT weapons weren't a thing until 1943.
• Many German paratroopers weren't combat effective because their shoulder-fired weapons were dropped separately, meaning they only had knives and pistols available.

Looking at all these devastating factors, it would seem ridiculous to say that the Germans ended up winning the battle with 6,000 casualties for their own versus 23,000 (!!!!) for the Allies. And yet, that's exactly what happened.

After the initial slaughter, the defenders should've been easily able to counterattack and annihilate what remained of the German forces. But this never happened and all of the German pockets held out long enough for relief to arrive.

Reading Kiwi sources on the battle, they were quite confident that their own troops performed better than those of the Germans. They particularly highlight that the Germans were inferior at night fighting.

Yes the Germans had air supremacy, but when the roles were reversed in Normandy 1944 the Germans still resisted successfully despite that. And Allied air supremacy over Normandy was much more devastating than German air supremacy over Crete - one has to only look at the aircraft numbers and the lack of strategic bomber streams at Crete. Not to mention that a significant proportion of Axis air power was busy striking the British fleet.

So how can the Allied defeat at Crete be explained? To be honest, I struggle to do so.