Short answers, pulled from the story.
English documents largely stopped using capital letters for common nouns during the 18th century. Before this period, writing systems used only capital forms of letters for all text until later centuries established a distinction between upper and lower case.
Standard German and Luxembourgish remain the only major Latin-alphabet languages that capitalize every noun. Other languages like Dutch ended the tradition of capitalizing formal second-person pronouns in informal contexts with their spelling reform of 1948.
The singular first-person pronoun I stands alone with a capital letter in all English texts while objective forms like me or my do not receive capitals. Contractions such as I'll and I'm retain this uppercase requirement to distinguish them from standard lowercase usage.
German surnames containing Von or Van typically leave those particles lowercase unless they begin a sentence. American individuals with non-Anglophone surnames sometimes retain original language orthography or adopt US immigration authority spellings instead.
All-caps text is harder to read due to missing ascenders and descenders found in lowercase letters. Professional documents prefer small caps or italics to emphasize key names rather than using full uppercase blocks.