Hi r/AskHistorians! I'm Dr. Colleen Shogan, former Archivist of the United States. I lead In Pursuit, a national initiative from More Perfect exploring America's history during our 250th anniversary.

A new documentary special, In Pursuit: Lessons of American Leadership, premiered last night on PBS - and is available now on YouTube. I'll be answering questions throughout the day and will check back in over the next few days. AMA!

More on In Pursuit: inpursuit.org

We know that Nazi Germany is probably the most famous nation when it comes to weird inventions that are often even impractical (Maus, Sonnengewehr, Schwerer Gustav, Ratte), especially in pop culture. But, how many other nations also had a lot of experimental, impractical inventions during that period? I know about the T28 Super Heavy Tank developed by America, but nothing other than that.

Specifically, the media trope of two (or more) children disguising themselves as one adult to sneak into some forbidden place. Did writers during the English renaissance, for instance, write about street hooligans donning kirtles to sneak into public houses?

In the Netherlands there were two major moments for voting rights in the twentieth century, 1917 and 1919. In 1917 non rich men got voting rights and in 1919 women got voting rights (they notably already gained passive voting rights in 1917). In school I was taught about the feminist movement and woman’s suffragettes and feminists like Aletta Jacobs. They succeeded eventually. However this small gap between the law changes made me wonder about the suffrage movement in general. Who wanted universal voting for men? Did they work with the women’s suffragettes? Were they even a separate movement? Were there people who wanted voting rights for all men but not women? If the movements were separate, did they work together?

I'm sure we can get bogged down into the definition of propaganda and what is or isn't. I'm sure we can count depictions of Ancient Egyptian kings as a form of propaganda. But what are some of the earliest forms of what a layman may consider propaganda?

When did junk mail start, and when did it become so ubiquitous? I feel like everyone just throws it straight on the trash without a second thought - has it ever been effective or profitable?

As most people probably know, the Arctic expedition of Sir John Franklin, commanding the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, departed England in the spring of 1845 with the aim of discovering the Northwest Passage, but ultimately became stuck in pack ice the following summer, its crew succumbing to disease and cannibalism after their supplies gave out in 1848 and a desperate southward march across the Canadian wilderness left no survivors.

A lot of what articles and videos about the expedition seem to leave out or gloss over is what was supposed to be a successful outcome of the mission. Were they supposed to literally sail all the way through from east to west and wind up on the northern coast of Canada? If that was the case, then I can't imagine they would've wanted to sail back the same way - it'd be much safer to take a southern route from there.

Or were they supposed to just find a navigable path westward enough to where they encountered a sign of some other expedition approaching from the west, and therefore conclude that the passage existed without having actually traversed it?

In either event, how long would it have taken England to find out? The telegraph didn't exist in those days, so any message from the expedition would have to have been hand-delivered. Would it have been possible for such a message to reach London before the returning Erebus and Terror did so themselves?

Something I've always wondered is when did the shift happen from what we (one assumes wrongly), view the Germanic, Gallic, Gothic, etc peoples from the traditional lens of small villages that banded together into confederations into more robust societies that emulated the Romans? I recall reading that the Huns, despite their late arrival compared to other peoples, elites and royals would have had a very similar upbringing to a member of the Roman senatorial class. Would have had most of the same amenities and the like which flies in comparison to our normal view of the stereotypical barbarian.

I know that many would look to Rome as the penultimate symbol of power and thus would have fineware, drink imported wines, have decorative rugs and tapestries and other Imperial products to show wealth. Do we know when this started to happen? Or around how the time frame of a people who started out as very tribal, turned to ruling their own kingdoms that seems to be Roman in a lot of ways with the cities, (or large towns), and all the normal infrastructure we would associate with?

Thanks for any and all feedback!

Modern maps of the Mongol Empire are either drawn over a rough territory, or directly mapped by click and coloring in modern countries, how do we know if it reflects the reality of the extent of Mongol rule in these areas? Lots of the areas were either uninhabited before the modern age, constantly at war but never submitted to the Mongols or occupied by tribal peoples never aware of Mongolian presence. Boundaries of modern countries were created way after the fall of the Mongol Empire, which makes no sense to extrapolate to the 13th century.

In short, what is the history of their cartography?

So I'm thinking about people who first colonized far-off lands, something like Easter island, Hawaii, South America, or anywhere where you would need to go very far to get there.

Of course you can't just drink seawater, and they didn't have large hulls filled with water barrels or grog or what have you. These were (I think?) much smaller than the kinds of boats European explorers would use much later.

I have some ideas but I'm not sure.

• Catch rainwater and drink it. But this means you'll have to sail during a rainy period and also have some large basins taking up valuable room on your boat.

• Store fruits such as coconuts. Break it open and drink later, and you can store these in the sun and they won't shrivel. But since you are rowing all day you'll need a lot of water and you'd need like a lot of fruits.

• I thought about boiling and catching the water as it evaporates, but I don't know how to do this in ancient setting. Maybe?

• I thought about some kind of sieve, but I don't think that can work on seawater.

• Maybe they just somehow found room for containers with water, but I think space would be at a premium and I'm guessing these weren't that big of boats.

So there are my guesses, help me out historians!

This started as a joke comment about combining the "I am a hot blooded male..." and "I am an average horse..." question category into one but I dug into it and now have more questions than when I started.

There are clickbait articles claiming that Harriet the tortoise was owned by both Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin. A more detailed article in the guardian mentions that genetics show that Harriet was from an island the Beagle did not visit. It then reopens that question by saying nobody can find the genetic study.

I tried searching for "land turtle" and tortoise in Darwins notes but it mostly seemed to be accounts of hunting them by natives and sailors alike.

The idea that a living tortoise can sail from the Galapagos to Australia via London makes the world back then seem smaller.

It seems that collecting tortoises and keeping them alive to eat later was a thing sailors did for several centuries. Were they just stacked in the hold? Did anyone look after them? Are there accounts of how this was done? Did every sailor get to eat tortoise or just the officers? If they were not eaten by the end of the voyage would they be gifted to people? Has anyone tracked down what tortoises Darwin owned and when? Did the admiralty or any other navies keep any other live provisions?

These days Robert E. Lee is a polarizing figure, rightfully many historians are trying to deconstruct the mythological status of him as a general and combat the decades of Lost Cause propaganda.

However sometimes it's hard for me to decipher where the Lost Cause ends and excessive criticism begins.

This seems to really be key when talking about both of Lee's failed campaigns into the Union which culminated in Antietam and Gettysburg.

Some things you read will scathingly point to these campaigns as why Lee was unfit for the position compared to someone like Joseph Johnston who would have conducted a more defensive campaign.

However other things I read, and often when touring battlefields, it's mentioned the campaigns were necessary due to Virginia's supply/agriculture being strained by multiple large armies, foraging, and raiding.

So my question lies in the fact of, what was the supply condition? Did Lee really need to invade the Union to give time for Virginia's agriculture and infrastructure time to recover? Or is this just a cover from Lost Causers to shunt blame away from Lee for poor decisions?

I'm curious about the history of towels, particularly how they evolved from simple pieces of cloth into the soft, highly absorbent bath towels we use today.

- What did people in Antiquity and the Middle Ages use to dry themselves after washing or bathing?

- When did towels resembling modern terry-cloth towels first appear?

- Were proper towels considered luxury items for much of history, or could ordinary people afford them?

- When did even poorer households begin to own dedicated towels?

I'm especially interested in everyday life in Europe, including rural households, and how access to towels differed between social classes.

Thanks!

I understand that during the Renaissance astrology was consulted by Popes, monarchs, etc. before setting dates for important events but how did the Catholic Church, given how seriously it prosecuted heresy at the time, reconcile this practice with church doctrine?

Could a person from India go to South Africa or a person from Canada go to the British isle without a passport or border restrictions?

Looking at pictures from soldiers back then practically nobody was clean shaven, perhaps 1/100, and this is including from shortly before the war as well so it's unlikely to be due to wartime necessity.

Who wrote about it first? Was the concept of a patriotic, national bourgeois as opposed to a comprador capitalist in early Marxist works under other vocabulary?

Mozart is probably the most famous, but a number of other well-known classical composers seem to have followed in his footsteps by getting an early start. Was this a function of how music was taught at the time, or was there a deliberate effort to find the next Mozart? Did other musical traditions elsewhere in the world experience a similar phenomenon?