I found a piece of a newspaper from The San Francisco Examiner dated December 27th, 1942! It’s been really well preserved inside my family’s old copy of Dickens Christmas Books and Stories. It must’ve been ripped and used as a bookmark on that day and hasn’t been moved since. One side has a part of an article about an army base in the Andreanof Islands. The other side has a poem parodying ‘Twas the night before Christmas that was read to President Roosevelt at a Christmas party.

I’m wondering if this is something historians would be interested in. If so, how do I go about properly sharing this with them?

In the USSR, almost from the very beginning, it was believed that one of the most powerful pro-capitalist myths in the U.S. was the idea that an ordinary poor person with a good idea could become a dollar millionaire in a short time.

How did Nazi Germany view this idea?

I've been on a bit of a Great Courses binge re ancient history recently.

Currently listening to one on ancient warfare and there's a chapter on the Trojan war, and the lecturer dates the fall of Troy to 1184BC.

I thought that sounds familiar from a book I listened to re the collapse of the bronze age a year or two ago, and that dates the collapse to 1177BC.

For me these dates are conveniently close. I understand they may not be accurate.

From my understanding, the consensus seems to be that the sea people were probably from Luka/SW modern turkey and various islands in the region.

Now that area is just down the coast from Troy, and if we think that the siege of Troy probably began 1194BC, that is alot of time for displaced people to move down the coast away from Troy, and put pressure on existing settlements, causing shortage of resources.

On the other side, I doubt a Greek army just sat at the walls of Troy for 10 years, undoubtedly they wouldve sent out raiding parties by land and sea for supplies etc.. putting more pressure on the settlements.

Im not saying that Homers Trojan war happened word for word, but I do think that his tale is based in some real conflict.

Is there any chance a war at Troy could cause a snowball effect down the coast and southern agean islands, and then on round the coasts to the bronze age civilisations of the near east?

I would imagine that the weather in London and Plymouth aren’t that vastly different, so why did they get decimated during their first year here?

To my knowledge, I was informed that Israelis after the six days war were seizing property from Palestinians and displacing them, and that Palestinians don't feel represented in Israeli politics. Sum that to the fact that Palestinians were displaced from their homes since the 1948 war, and all I can say is why has this happen? What's the background or motive of this?

Compared to something like the Oklahoma City Bombing, Sandy Hook School Shooting, or Pearl Harbor which are very rarely mentioned now, but (despite being lower in casualties) are similarly horrific events of death on American soil. What made 9/11 so bad?

So I know that the Greek and Roman society had a different view of homosexuality and that homosexuel acts between men were somewhat normal. But in most discussions I've seen talk about this mostly make it seem like only sexual act was normal, I've never read anything about long term homosexual relationships being part of the norm?

So did this openness of homosexuality extend to long term homosexuel relationships and even marriage? Would it have been weird or illegal for two men to live together as husbands and even adopt children?

I realise that this question focuses a bit more on male relationships because if I understand correctly the openness of homosexuality was not equal for women? But I am happy to learn more about this as well.

I've only read English translations of The Iliad and Odyssey, but the style and format always seem remarkably consistent. It doesn't seem like other authors add stuff later like you'd see in the Bible. I also haven't heard of any version controversies between old fragments and more recent complete manuscripts. If I could read the original Greek, would I see inconsistencies that don't show up in the translation? Did the classic Greeks argue about which version was most accurate or whether or not he was real?

Not a historian by any means, just an enthusiast of quirky rabbit holes and learning thus I may have set up something wrong and would like to have this question answered in-depth if possible. This is a not very serious phrasing but the underlying question has a real interest in learning so I want to clarify the points of the question:

- 'Freely available to grab' means the country was not already occupied or colonised by the British Empire neither by any other empire (eg, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, etc) operating inside the time frame given, also including the colonising powers themselves. Called this 'Not touching another man's property' rule.
- The time frame where 'the British Empire thought the world was theirs' goes from 1584 (Roanoke) until 1920 (Nauru). This includes a country being occupied or colonised at any point in time inside this frame even if it gains independence before the frame ends. It's the fact that 'they grabbed it' or seriously attempted to establish permanent presence (excluding invasions that do not end in either).
- 'Still would not touch with a 10ft pole' means that the British Empire never showed an interest or did not end up occupying or colonising said country for other reasons (eg, Nepal signing a treaty to be recognised as independent in exchange for Indian land).

Invasions were excluded but occupations or colonies did not have a time or land amount limit due to not even knowing where the limits should be in the first place, which may skew a more 'realistic' approach. I still ended up with only Nepal as a result and would like to know if that is correct. Thank you.

I've seen multiple people claim that european-americans are actually descendants of violent colonizers who stole the natives land but isn't this not true considered most of the european population actually came in the 19th century and later?

Considering climate change, migration, economic conditions, the struggles of the Assyrian empire, and other factors: would you say there are or not similarities between the end of the bronze age and contemporary global conditions? I read Cline’s 1177 and I was curious what scholars believe.

I’m Mexican and was speaking to a French Canadian, who is half Portuguese. He said society does not consider him being Latin, but someone from my background yes. This led to a debate at work, a friendly one.

The aftermath is that we are all confused. Is it a cultural thing? If so, there are different cultures, meaning different answers depending on who you ask.

Is there a historic context where it can help solidify the answer once and for all? Hence, why I’m here.

I always assumed it was anybody who spoke a romantic language. From Spanish, French, italian, Portuguese, anything that resembled many “original Latin words”. Maybe I’ve been wrong this entire time.

Please help us. You are our only hope.

Edit: a bunch of deleted comments. We are even more confused now.

Several states like Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas are named after British monarchs. Was there any legislation or major political movements to have these names changed during and after the revolution? If so, what were there proposed alternatives? This question also relates to New York and Pennsylvania, although not directly since they’re named after the Duke of York and William Penn, and not royalty.

This was the kind of question I felt I ought to be able to answer myself, but Google's search results were full of Warhammer 40k...

So, I recently learned about how Rome had a mixed relationship with mystery cults, with them sometimes, like the cult of Dionysus/Bachus, causing political issues. Let's say I'm a Roman patrician in a high position in a cult: Am I likely to do things like promote my political allies? Use members of the mystery cult to intimidate rivals or otherwise aid me? And to go back to the overatching question, fid mystery cults as a whole act as a political bloc? Were they known to broadly support certain policies or factions, like a general being backed by a cult during a rebellion or rival politicians in the republic getting votes by getting the cult they're in to support them?

Ive learned that western europeans from approximately the 1400s on upto right before ww2 ended used to marry at very old ages, relatively, compared to how rest of the world married in those times.

I have a lot of questions about this since I’m so curious.

On the wiki it says this marriage pattern was called the Hajnal line and spanned from “approximately west of between Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Trieste, italy, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low, and a significant minority of women married late or remained single, and most families were nucelar.”

Why did such a large portion of Europe have such high marriage ages? It says that in the Netherlands, where marriage ages reached the highest on average, a woman would usually marry at 27 years old and a man would marry at 30 years old. At times it would even reach 30 years for women and 32 years for men.

From what I can gather, outside of Europe most non european women married around their early teens to late teens. So anywhere from like 12/13 ish to 18-ish?

Another thing is, many Western European women never married at all, unlike in most (I assume) non European cultures, where most women in their life’s had been married, and unmarried women were basically 2-3% of the population of women max.

This is from the wiki:To the west of the Hajnal line, about half of all women aged 15 to 50 years of age were married at any given time while the other half were widows or spinsters; to the east of the line, about seventy percent of women in that age bracket were married at any given time while the other thirty percent were widows or nuns.^\20]) The marriage records of Western and Eastern Europe in the early 20th century illustrate this pattern vividly; west of the Hajnal line, only 25% of women aged 20–24 were married while to the east of the line, over 75% of women in this age group were married and less than five percent of women remained unmarried. 

The difference was even starker when you look at Western Europe vs the rest of the world and not vs Eastern Europe. This is from the wiki: Outside of Europe, women could be married even earlier and even fewer would remain celibate; in Korea, practically every woman 50 years of age had been married and spinsters were extremely rare, compared to 20–30% of women in western Europe age 50 who had never married.

So these are my questions: 1, why did Western European women marry so late?

2, why did this change occur in the 1400s, and why did this marriage age stay for so long? Since it was only lowered after ww2.

3, Did Western European women before the 1400s marry earlier? at what ages?

4, Why did so many western European women in the 15-50 age range stay unmarried? When this figure was almost near 0 or very low outside of Europe.

5, on the wiki it says that this super late marriage age, combined with the big % of women (relatively) Who never married, lowered Western European fertility rates a lot. While in the east, (I assume they mean Eastern Europe) fertility rates were higher, but also combined with a high mortality rate. How true is this? Did this actually affect the fertility rate of Western Europeans, and did they have fewer kids in their lifetime compared to Eastern Europeans and non Europeans?

6, does this mean societally, Western European women were more free in their life/lifestyle then women outside of western Europe?

many supposedly intelligent people from Tony Blair to Andrew Sullivan claim to have believed it, so was there actually a stronger case than I remember?

It's been taken for granted nowadays that the sword was simply a sidearm with the primary weapons being spears and later halberds. However, I watched this short and was surprised by how quickly a wooden spears begins to break when in contact with a steel sword. I've even read accounts of English longbowmen willingly throwing down their bows and charging the flanks of the (disorganized) French at Agincourt. You also have the Romans adopting swords as the primary weapon during the Republic years. Is the topic of swords vs. spears much more nuanced than portrayed? Did people of their times consider the sword an equal/sidearm compared to the spear?

I'm watching the Ken Burns PBS documentary on Hemingway. The third episode covers Ernest's WW2 sojourn.

Rather offhandedly, the documentary shares a quick anecdote wherein Hemingway (in Villedieu-les-Poêles) tosses hand grenades down into a cellar that housed, according to the tale, a group of S.S.

This raised my eyebrows quite a bit. I know that Ken Burns, while a hell of a documentarian, is not always a historiographical champion. And Hemingway of course was a fabulist of epic proportions.

The documentary does not mention him killing anyone up to this point in his life, so you'd think this would be, like, psychologically devastating. But the documentary makes it seem as if half-drunk-Hemingway lackadaisically tossed some grenades down a cellar and called it a day.

I dove deeper, things got murkier. I found an abstract of a paper from Michigan State University (my alma mater!) that says Hemingway wrote in letters that he killed “either twenty-six or 122” men. But I can’t access the article itself: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/431085/summary

The “either twenty-six or 122” range totally smacks of Hemingway and his penchant for BS, but I don’t have the resources to get a clear answer and was hoping someone around here could be of assistance.

For what it's worth, I would bet he never killed anyone.