Daniel Lewin, Barbary slavery, tunnel rats: five sourced answers from r/AskHistorians, August 16-30, 2026

This issue covers five readable, source-rich answers posted in r/AskHistorians between August 16 and August 30, 2026. The entries move from Flight 11 and the 9/11 record to early-modern slavery, Spartan succession, tunnel warfare in Vietnam, and the Church of England after the English monarchy fell. The scores below are snapshots from retrieval, while answer quality rests on the evidence each answer names.

Every answerer in this table has the same identity note: no flair or credential was shown in the retrieved public record. A username and an upvote count identify a Reddit contribution; they establish neither an academic appointment nor a field of training.

Question: American Flight 11 passenger Daniel Lewin is often called the first victim of 9/11. How do we know that he was stabbed during the initial hijacking? The question was posted on August 23 and had 1,952 points when retrieved. 1

Answerer: cookestudios, answer score 2,326; flair or credentials were absent from the retrieved record. 2

The strongest identification comes from two calls made during the hijacking. Betty Ong reported that someone had been stabbed in business class. FBI interviews with American Airlines employees who received the calls placed the injured passenger in seat 9B. Daniel Lewin sat in 9B. Flight attendant Amy Sweeney separately reported that a passenger in row 9 had his throat cut by the passenger in 10B, the seat occupied by Satam al-Suqami. 2

The evidence becomes thinner at the next step. The 9/11 Commission said Lewin may have made an attempt to stop the hijackers. His Arabic, service in the Israeli Sayeret Matkal unit, and seat immediately in front of al-Suqami make that reconstruction plausible. The surviving record supplies no eyewitness account of Lewin standing up, confronting the hijackers, or fighting them. The distinction matters: the seat records and call reports strongly identify the stabbed passenger, while the intervention story remains a reconstruction. The answer cites the 9/11 Commission Report, FBI 9/11 interview records, the May 23, 2003 commission hearing, and a Washington Post obituary for Daniel Lewin. 2

The original question and answer are available here:

Question: Thomas Sowell's essay says that the number of white people enslaved in North Africa by the Barbary pirates exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in the United States and its colonies. Is that historically factual? The question was posted on August 21 and had 1,809 points when retrieved. 3

Answerer: holomorphic_chipotle, answer score 2,217; flair or credentials were absent from the retrieved record. 4

The answer begins by separating a numerical comparison from the history behind it. The category white Europeans was not the administrative category used across early-modern Mediterranean slave systems, and a total requires decisions about geography, period, origin, captivity, ransom, and people who died before reaching a destination. The phrase "Africans sold other Africans" also compresses many different polities and identities into a single modern continental label. 4

The familiar 1.0-1.25 million figure traces back to Robert C. Davis's Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800. The answer records criticism from Ehud R. Toledano's review, which points to Davis's lack of Ottoman sources and limited treatment of Ottoman society. Diarmaid MacCulloch repeated the number in Reformation: Europe's House Divided, giving it a much wider afterlife. 4

Other figures describe narrower populations. Daniel Panzac estimated 180,000 "white slaves" from 1574 to 1644. Magnus Ressel's work, as summarized in a follow-up comment, placed the total number of Christian captives held in North Africa between 1500 and 1800 at roughly 350,000-700,000, treating both Panzac's estimate and Davis's 1.25 million as outliers. Giulia Bonazza's Slavery in the Mediterranean chapter in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History gives a Mediterranean-wide estimate of 7-9 million enslaved people and emphasizes that historians lack sources for precise country-by-country totals. 45

The answer also names Daniel Panzac's La marine ottomane: De l'apogee a la chute de l'Empire, Nabil Matar's British Captives from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1563-1760, Magnus Ressel's Zwischen Sklavenkassen und Turkenpassen, and SlaveVoyages estimates of transatlantic and intra-American transport. The answer's conclusion is about the comparison's method: a single dramatic number cannot settle a question whose categories and counting rules change from one side to the other. 4

Question: Did Greek women ever explain unexpected pregnancies as unions with deities, and how would people have received such a claim? The question was posted on August 27 and had 1,865 points when retrieved. 6

Answerer: KiwiHellenist, answer score 412; flair or credentials were absent from the retrieved record. 7

The answer finds one case that comes close to a historical record: the disputed parentage of Demaratos, a Spartan Eurypontid king deposed in 491 BCE. Herodotus presents Demaratos's birth as politically useful evidence. His father Ariston first doubted the child because Demaratos was born seven months after the marriage, then acknowledged him. Once Demaratos became king, the rival king Kleomenes used the birth story to attack his legitimacy, while the Delphic oracle became part of the political dispute. 7

When Demaratos prepared for exile, he asked his mother for the truth. She told him that a phantom in Ariston's likeness might have fathered him, and that the garlands left by the visitor came from a shrine associated with the hero Astrabacus. Herodotus 6.69 preserves the story in the Waterfield translation quoted by the answer. The story's political setting gives divine parentage a clear use: inheritance and royal legitimacy were at stake. 7

The answer treats the story as literary evidence rather than a report that can be verified as an event. Its resemblance to Jupiter's seduction of Alcmena in Plautus's Amphitruo points toward inherited storytelling, while Xenophon and Spartan traditions supply examples of how wanted illegitimate children could be classified or supported. The answer names Herodotus, Xenophon, Plautus, and the New Pauly entry on child exposure as its source trail. 7

Question: What did tunnel rats do in Vietnam, and what experiences did they typically face? The question was posted on August 26 and had 991 points when retrieved. 8

Answerer: Georgy_K_Zhukov, answer score 1,258; flair or credentials were absent from the retrieved record. The answer identifies itself as an older answer reused for the new question. 9

The role began as an improvised assignment, often falling to volunteers from engineering units. By the late 1960s, permanent groups such as the "Dirty Thirteen" of the 1st Infantry Division handled tunnel exploration. Volunteers were usually noncommissioned officers, while the confined spaces favored smaller soldiers with strict self-discipline. Informal schools later taught new tunnel rats in mock tunnels, with beginners first serving above ground as support. 9

The equipment was deliberately limited. A tunnel rat might carry a bayonet, a red flashlight, and a handgun, sometimes with a line tied to the team outside. Radios often failed at depth. A shot in a confined tunnel brought blinding muzzle flash and prolonged noise, so the handgun was a last resort. The answer describes the M1911, the suppressed .22 Hi-Standard HDM, captured Soviet-bloc pistols, stubby shotguns, and the experimental QSPR revolver developed by the Army's Limited War Laboratory. 9

The tunnel itself supplied the hazards. Water locks forced soldiers to swim through darkness. Branches, false passages, locked doors, spike pits, trip-wire grenades, claymores, fire ants, and Viet Cong defenders could turn a short crawl into a fatal trap. The answer recommends The Tunnels of Cu Chi, Viet Cong and NVA Tunnels and Fortifications of the Vietnam War, and Tunnel Rat in Vietnam for readers who want the military setting in more detail. 9

Question: How did abolishing the English monarchy in the seventeenth century affect the Church of England? The question was posted on August 26 and had 19 points when retrieved. 10

Answerer: Double_Show_9316, answer score 35; flair or credentials were absent from the retrieved record. 11

The civil wars joined a political conflict to a dispute over church government. Puritans had pressed for further reform since Elizabethan times, and Charles I's ceremonial policies in the 1630s intensified opposition to both episcopal authority and personal rule. Parliament abolished episcopacy in 1646, seized bishops' lands, and approved the Westminster Assembly's Directory for Public Worship as a replacement for the Book of Common Prayer. 11

The new settlement stayed unsettled. Parliament's committees ejected or sequestered many royalist and Laudian ministers, while the answer estimates that about 28% of benefices were directly affected. Presbyterians wanted a centralized church, while Independents favored gathered congregations with more local control. The 1648 Presbyterian project lost its political base after Pride's Purge, leaving the 1650s with a loosely national church, old systems of patronage and tithes, new state-appointed "triers" and "ejectors," and religious groups such as Quakers and Baptists outside the structure. 11

The Prayer Book dispute carried the older argument into the new regime. Some Puritans sought specific revisions, such as removing the sign of the cross at baptism, confirmation, wedding rings, and the words "priest" and "absolution." Others, including John Bastwick in Vanity and Mischeife of the Old Letany, rejected set liturgy as a ceremony that displaced preaching. The Westminster Directory therefore supplied general headings and aims for worship rather than a fixed sequence of prayers. 11

The Restoration closed the experiment. The 1660 return of Charles II led to the Savoy Conference, where bishops, Presbyterians, and Independents reached a deadlock. The 1662 Act of Uniformity restored the Book of Common Prayer and expelled Puritan ministers. Abolishing the monarchy therefore changed the Church of England's government, clergy, worship, and boundaries, while the settlement that followed the Restoration placed the Prayer Book and episcopacy back at the center. 11

The public records available for this issue support five complete answer summaries inside the August 16-30 window. They do not provide a complete, stable leaderboard for every question posted during those fourteen days. Reddit scores change, and the retrieved post list and comment trees expose different parts of the community's activity at different times.

The selection therefore gives priority to answers whose text, source trail, and direct permalink were readable together. Two additional candidates were left out after their answer pages returned network-policy blocks, leaving their arguments and citations unavailable for verification. The result is a sourced selection from the period, with the limits of the ranking stated alongside it.