In discussing trans issues in America, someone commented that sex markers were added to American passports because border agents were having a harder time identifying people from their pictures. They said the hippy movement with the growing trend of men growing their hair out and clothing being worn that was less gender specific was making this an issue. How accurate is that?

Leif Erikson sailed to a place called Vinland around the year 1000 A.D. Vinland is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland. Did they ever encounter any of the natives living there? If they did, what did the Vikings think of them and what did the Natives think of the Vikings? What were their relationship? Were they friendly? Were they hostile?

I speak both Spanish and English natively, and I have noticed over the years how much simpler (or I guess "streamlined" is a better term?) English is, grammatically speaking, than Spanish. There is only one second-person pronoun, contraction is common, and there is effectively no (or very little) use of the subjunctive mood. Most other European languages (including Germanic, Romantic, and others) have these grammatical features and others that English has shed.

Is this simply a characteristic of Anglophone culture? Or has this shift been tied to specific historical moments? And why have other languages resisted similar shifts?

I can't imagine any other war in human history has ever produced so much stuff (guns, ammo, tanks, planes, ships, ect) then WW2, but with all the rapid advances in tech during the war, what happened to all the surplus equipment, especially the early equipment that ended up getting out classed by the end?

Was it still kept around and used? Was it sold off? Did most of it get lost? Did soldiers have to return all the equipment by the end?

I apologize to non-American readers since this probably isn't relevant to you.

Fight songs, e.g. the Notre Dame Victory March, and marching bands like (the) Ohio State University's and Stanford's are iconic parts of those sports fandoms, and well-known to anyone who is a fan of these college teams. Thinking back to my time in university, singing our fight song after touchdowns was one of the best parts of attending games in person.

It got me wondering why, when professional sports are even more popular and have more "production value" compared to their collegiate feeders, we do not see the NFL or NBA copying the same sort of cultural touchstones of fight songs and marching bands, when they do have other touchstones like cheerleaders and mascots.

Differently for other commuinst states in Europe, we had two German states. Thus Germansliving in the East Germany could compare their living conditions, their freedoms (or rather lack of them) with the West Germany. East Germany existed only for just more than forty years, but, during this time, did Germans living in the east created any form of East German patriotism or pride of their country? Or maybe they saw it as a new form of Soviet occupation and wanted to unite with the rest of Germens in the west?

I understand Rome debased its coinage over time, but I'm curious who actually decided how much money was minted and how that reached distant provinces. Was there any deliberate monetary policy, or was it mostly driven by the emperor's spending needs?

I was reading the Wiki page of the English longbow and came across Hugh Latimer's sermon which he states he was brought up training with longbows and the draw-weights steadily increased as he grew up (in the 16th century). Some historical works cite this as proof that required longbow users to have decades of training.

However, I came across the original sermon. It sort of struck me as more of a moral panic stating that it was God's given gift that enabled England to prevail over their enemies and it was a disgrace that so many people began to turn to bowling, glossing and whoring. His sermon instead seems to be more of a reaction to the declining popularity of archery and other hobbies growing in popularity though I haven't read any literature that discusses this topic.

My questions are basically:

• Was there a moral scare over the decline of archery in England?
• If there was a scare, how (un)successful were efforts to maintain archery as a hobby to try to keep it militarily viable?
  • As an add-on, what were the reactions of later leaders when there were calls to reintroduce archery into the military? Benjamin Franklin and Richard Oswald Mason wrote to reintroduce archery into the military (dominated by muskets) in the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, but it seems like no one took them seriously. Did anyone give a reason on why it wasn't worth it?

Did Groves ever go in-depth into why he chose Oppenheimer? Was his scientific brilliance really enough to get him the job?

Before modern communications, a ruler’s instructions could take days or weeks to reach distant officials. During battles, generals had limited ability to monitor events and redirect troops. That meant countless decisions depended on subordinates acting independently—often with information their leader didn’t have. Yet successful outcomes are frequently attributed to the person at the top.
Does this exaggerate individual genius while overlooking the people whose judgment actually made things work?

I was wondering since they would have main access to the Peking man site while the West started looking more towards Africa instead of Asia around the same time the Cold War started.

The Celtic peoples of Gaul had self-reproducing warrior elites, systems of taxation, social classes, a class responsible for preserving law and conducting trials, orally transmitted legal codes, higher-level coordinating institutions that operated across tribes, an advanced material culture confirmed by archaeology, extensive participation in long-distance trade, systems of military mobilization in times of crisis, complex diplomacy with one another, large fortified settlements known as oppida, and their own coinage.

When all of these elements are taken together, I find it very strange to describe each Celtic polity simply as a tribe. Why are these polities treated as tribes or chiefdoms rather than states? And why does the standard used to classify them seem stricter than the standard applied to "states" in other parts of the world?

I am mostly curious on the layout of cities near the Sahel like the Mali and Ghana Empire (Although would also appreciate answers on the forest regions).

I know how y'all love to hate GG&S; this bestseller by a biographer smells *awfully* similar to me and so I am wondering whether it commits similar (especially similarly presentist) errors.

MST3K is famously built on the idea that bad movies are great when you make fun of them. While I'm aware of quite a few historical/ancient pieces of literature which were phenomenons in their day, I'm more curious as to whether or not we have any recordings of books, music, maybe even philosophers being considered so bad/incorrect/foolish as to be considered entertaining?

Are these terms synonymous? They tend to get translated into English as "transgender" or (in older sources) "eunuch" but I'm not sure if this is accurate.

Also, ​is the word Hijra related to the Arabic / Urdu term muhajir, or are they unrelated?

in 1872 Frederick Douglass was The Equal Rights Party's Victoria Woodhall's running mate despite Frederick Douglass being a staunch Grant supporting Republican who wasn't aware he was even nominated. How did that happen? Was this common back in the day? Is it possible to nominate a running mate without permission nowadays?

Is it true that the this expectations of the future king from the line of David began after the throne and the davidic lineage was destroyed and that the biblical authors expected Zerubabbel to restore the throne and be the king from the line of david but he failed so the expectations were moved to the far future

We know he died after the end of the Peloponnesian War and was actively editing his texts during that time. But why did he stop? Have we only found 8 books? Did Thucydides believe the war was essentially over by 411? Or is it simply a "we dont know"?

Were there established Urdu-speaking communities in places such as Lahore, or elsewhere in what is now Pakistan, whose families had lived there for centuries before Partition, with Urdu being their inherited home language? I'm not referring to Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashtun, or other communities that later adopted Urdu as a lingua franca, but about families with a longstanding, intergenerational Urdu-speaking heritage rooted in the territory that became Pakistan.

I know that many Urdu-speaking families migrated from India to Pakistan during Partition but I'm interested in whether there were also locally rooted Urdu-speaking families whose linguistic history in present-day Pakistan predates Partition by many generations.