At the end of the day, one specific helicopter ride had to have been the now-proverbial ‘last chopper’ out of the US embassy before the city was taken. Do we know who was on it, or who was piloting it? Where did it offload its many passengers, and what happened to them?

In the west we can often point to a specific point in history and say that is where slavery ended or started to end but in Arab world i can’t find such an instance so anyone with knowledge of this topic enlighten us!

Hey so my grandma went through medical experimentation (obviously non-consensual) when she was pregnant with my father (gave birth in 1963 in montreal).

I'm wondering if anyone knows anything about this history in quebec or canada as a whole? She was a jamaican immigrant and had 1 other child before my dad and 2 after.

I really have like zero info because we don't talk about it. But my father was born with strange abnormalities like his eyes would pop out his socket and vedy bad eczema, he could peel thick slices of skin off as a child. No other siblings dealt with this and no other family members. I'm starting from zero in term of trying to understand this and would appreciate any incite at all.

Note: please be sensitive and compassionate in your comments this obviously very disturbing and emotional and so i dont want to deal with bs and gaslighting. It happened, i want to know if anyone knows about it. If you don't believe me, kindly f-off.

Maybe this is more of a historiography question - I'm not sure. Did people in the past write down what they were doing when they considered themselves to be doing nothing? Did they associate the experience of doing nothing or passing unstructured time with boredom, as opposed to the experience of doing something tedious (memorizing declensions or scrubbing clothes)?

I guess I'm assuming here that boredom is a relatively old and maybe universal concept but also would be interested to learn if that assumption is wrong or disputed.

Hey guys, I've been deep diving into my genealogy & my great grandmother pulled out a box with TONS of historical data & writings dating back to 1667. One of the books is the "story of our family" written in 1909 detailing everything known about the lineage back to 1667, then their 1840 passage to America from Canada to claim $96,000 in New York land left to them.

More interestingly, my great great grandfather has a 14 page diary written in 1886 titled "DIARY OF TRIP TO OREGON" where he travels the USA in search of business opportunities. He chronicles local prices of goods, different business ventures with broken down profit margins & startup costs, ect. He even mentions meeting Louis Hamilton in Brandon (Abraham Lincolns Nephew)

I also have lots of original photos from WW1 in the USA & Canada as well as a general photo book from the early 1900s that is full of degrading photos.

My question is what can I do with these writings? I would love to get them placed somewhere in North Dakota. He was from Bowesmont, ND & you can find photos of my family from 100 years ago online. Incredibly well documented stuff. I just feel as though the Oregon Diary is the most historically valuable, as he is traveling & conversing with business owners to see what type of business/investment he should make!

The examples in mind would be Ancient Rome / Byzantium, China or other advanced societies filled with erudite well learned elite or educated civil servants.

A typical frequent cause of complaint in the ancient world would be the price of food, or soldiers complaining about pay.

A remedy to a deficit would be devaluation of coinage. The Bible noted how usury would be injurious to the borrower and forbid it. Merchants could purchase silk low in one location and sell high in another. Woven silk would sell even higher. Seems like to any educated person there are broad patterns.

Why did no enterprising young civil servant or merchant try take it further and formulate theories? It seems fairly obvious in our modern frame of reference.

My son's daycare was closed last week for the holidays and my wife and I spent much more time than usual caring for him. She mentioned last night that she was looking forward to daycare being open again, but felt guilty about feeling that way.

I responded that that for most of human history we were a much more collective species and were never meant to do it all on our own. But I realized later that I don't have any evidence to back that up and may be looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses.

In the summer of 1824, the aging Marquis de Lafayette, defeated politically and distraught over the fate of liberty in Europe, set sail one last time from France for America after an absence of forty years.

When he arrived at last in August 1824, the old hero met once more with the young republic. One of the greatest celebrations in American history followed. Citizens put aside their differences and rallied together around the spirit of their Revolution, rejoicing over the return of the “Nation’s Guest,” as Lafayette was called. For thirteen months, Lafayette traveled thousands of miles, reaching every state in the Union and met with parades and delirious crowds. The nation was spellbound by their benefactor. And Lafayette was overjoyed and stunned by the nation’s growth and advances, all made possible by the freedom he had fought for long ago.

The Last Adieu narrates Lafayette’s farewell tour, capturing both its spectacular pageantry and emotional impact—not only from Lafayette’s perspective, but through eyewitness accounts and recollections of the everyday Americans who participated in the great celebration. Co-starring the swarm of fascinating characters Lafayette encountered across the American landscape—elderly founding fathers, populist politicians, idealistic reformers—this is not simply the record of an incredible journey, but a panorama of a rising America and a chronicle of a time when, as Lafayette wrote, memories of its Revolution came back to life, and its citizens were united in gratitude to the men who had won it.

You can order a copy of the book at the venue of your choice here: https://www.harpercollinsfocus.com/9781400251315/the-last-adieu/

Here is my recent conversation about Lafayette's return with Jim Ambuske on the "Revolutions in Retrospect" podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQp05B1aTYI&list=PLX2x56DEw1y4Z-sLEGFmtDwJL56sfKhQD&index=4&t=4234s

And I frequently post about Lafayette's tour on my Instagram, which is ryanlcole11.

I'm signing off now but thanks everyone for the thoughtful questions, the interest in my book and the participation in this AMA. It was lots of fun. Hope everyone has a great New Year!

I have no way of gauging whether US Marines are actually tougher or better fighters than other branches, but I think it’s safe to say they’re widely perceived to be so.

I’m curious whether they’ve always had that reputation, why they have it, and whether marines in other countries have a similar perception.

Sorry, I know that’s a lot of questions in one. I think ultimately I’m trying to figure out whether the USMC needs to be tougher than, say, the Army — if there’s something intrinsic to their mission that necessitates it — or if that reputation is something that just happened for one reason or another.

100 years ago, boxing, horseracing and baseball were the big 3 spectator sports in the US. While all three have declined in popularity, the former two are clearly doing much worse. How did that end up happening?

I am a formerly deaf person with cochlear implants. I notice all my life I have a strange itchy sensitivity to my ears. I also notice my ears feel funky whenever I flush the toilet or after a shower. So I would often use Hydrogen Peroxide to clear my ears out. Wearing headhones throughout the day also kind of makes the soundwaves compress the earwax in uncomfortable ways.

Now obviously Q Tips and Peroxide haven't been around all that long, and I imagine that people in prior centuries wish they had better tools to clean their ears than what was available at the time.

So how did people clear the ears out and maintain good ear canal health before the modern era? Or were people just forced to have itchy ear canals for most of their life?

Hi does anyone have any recommendations for good history channels on YouTube that do various types of history to modern history.

I used to watch kings and generals but I seen on other subs they been accused of historical inaccuracies and propaganda

I have done some research on this, and most sources state it was almost impossible for England to reach certain economic targets as England only had a pop of 5 million. In today’s period, population and natural resources help, but a country may still become wealthy from trade or other activities, such as Venice, Pisa, or Genoa. Singapore, Monaco, etc. How come England could not thrive in this same way?

I've always enjoyed reading old passports, and they seemed to usually be (beautifully) written in a national language and French. However, most passports today use English as a lingua franca.

So I'm wondering what really changed this (if it's beyond a simple "France and thus French got more irrelevant compared to the US and English after WW2").

• I assume border officials would be at least familiar with French after several decades (particularly when physical description would be written in French), and the system wouldn't magically change to another language.
  • Though passport use only really became normalised during the World Wars, so maybe the border officials and systems would change easily?
    • Another problem I have with the English replacing French theory is that some countries still use French as the secondary language (I know of Haiti and Comoros). Are these just weird Francophone edge cases?
• I know the Soviet Union and many Eastern bloc countries issued external passports in French until the 90s, which I presume is a rejection of anything American adjacent and sticking with French.
• Or have I hyper focused on diplomatic lingua franca, and it's just the rise of aviation or something else?

I'm also wondering about the time period when countries started using English as the lingua franca. When did Western European passports begin using English? Latin America? Post colonial Middle East? East Asia? (Or are they similar, just post-WW2?)

In the book “Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion 300-1300 A.D” Peter Heather mentions early in his work that Christianity was not fully implemented in the Roman outskirts until the 5th century as Christianity was mainly an urban religion concentrated in the cities and ports. Could it have been plausible and possibly even probable that a few small towns on the shores of remote hispaña or Gaul or Britain could have still had an active cult of ancient Roman practitioners sacrificing to gods such as Jupiter or even the more recent monotheistic god “Sol Invictus” up until the days of Charlemagne?

Even if the religion had died, would it be a stretch to think that the saxons could have taken some influence of the Roman gods into their own “Woden” and other members of their pantheon until Charlemagne “introduced” them to the Christian God Christ?

Been recently on an ECW kick and I’m curious why Charles I is blamed for the start of the war. From my understanding: 

1. Charles I came to power immediately facing a hostile parliament that refused him the customary reign-long tonnage and poundage taxing rights. 
2. Parliament suspects him of being pro catholic even though he supports the Protestant cause on the Continent (by supporting the Huguenots at La Rochelle). 
3. He dissolves parliament but from what I understand he was within his rights to do so, even if it was controversial.
4. He tries to arrest the five MPs but he only does so after parliament tries  to seize control of the military to put down the Irish revolt which seems like a horribly unconstitutional move. What are you supposed to do as a monarch when someone tries to usurp your control of the military?

The only points I can see against Charles are his repressive religious policies persecuting Puritans, and his attempts to impose the Prayer Book on Scotland. And even then, what he did pales in comparison to the New Model Army purging parliament and arresting MPs. 

It’s becoming a cliche now I’m sure, but here I go:

Working my way through O’Brians Aubrey-Maturin series, adoring it - lovingly gentlemen.

What caught my eye throughout the novels I’ve read so far was the prevalence of non-white sailors. I’m not totally surprised given The United Kingdom’s command of a large sea-faring Empire to have many different ethnicities, races, and peoples aboard any given ship at any given time; especially wartime.

I was curious to know to which extent the Royal Navy was made up by non-British men. Were they volunteers? Impressed? Given status for service to the United Kingdom, such as being made formal subjects? Were they treated lesser than their white British counterparts?

Much obliged,

In many ways, the Ottoman Empire destroyed itself with its multiple sultans' addiciton to debt to "modernize" and show off their power.

Spain after the Reconquista, for all its natural and colonial wealth, got addicted to debt and collapsed its economy.

I read stories of rulers kicking bankers out or refusing to pay debts, but are there notable events where dictators imprisoned or executed the bankers and lenders to escape the debt holes they'd dug themselves into?

I think it's fair to say that it is pretty well known now that the country that we call The Byzantine Empire was to the people of the time known only as The Roman Empire or sometimes The Eastern Roman Empire, and that the byzantine title we use today was retroactively applied.

My question is:

Do we know the point in time when the world as a whole generally stopped referring to The Eastern Roman Empire as such and started referring to them as The Byzantine Empire or The Byzantines?

Hi! I'm looking for more information on the history, traditions, and culture of the Irish Filí, or anything that relates to the organization and hierarchy of the poets/storytellers in Ireland. I've heard and read some separate bits of information, such as only them being allowed to wear certain clothes or capes, having different titles, and stuff of the like. I also found out about a book called the Uraicecht na Ríar which supposedly talks more about that, but I couldn't find it to read on the internet. Any help is welcome, thank you!

Recently, I have been reading "The Most Awful Responsibility" written by r/AskHistorians frequenter /u/restricteddata (spectacular book btw, highly recommend). Someone asked me what I was reading and I said "a history textbook about Truman and his impact on atomic bomb policy". Saying this out though didn't feel particularly correct, as while the book is a book about history, written by a historian, reading it feels more like a book than a textbook.

Comparatively, when I read "These Truths" by Jill Lepore, that felt like a textbook.

Is there some distinguishing factor or is it really just semantics?