I’m reading books about Hungary before they conquered Pannonia and they nemesis were the Pechenegs. I wanted to search what happend to them and if they still remain as a small group of culture somewhere, but nothing. Did they all died or all of them get assimilated into different cultures? If yes, what cultures resemble them?

“But out of this deformed equality was forged quite undeliberately, yet inexorably, a state of affairs which could harness an immense potential in the black woman. Expending indispensable labor for the enrichment of her oppressor, she could attain a practical awareness of the oppressor’s utter dependence on her – for the master needs the slave far more than the slave needs the master. At the same time she could realize that while her productive activity was wholly subordinated to the will of the master, it was nevertheless proof of her ability to transform things. For ‘labor is the living shaping fire; it represents the impermanence of things, their temporality’ [Marx].”

As a lord in, for example, France in the High Middle Ages, I get income from taxes or my personal domain. Let's imagine I don't go to war and want to save it for the future. In what form would I stockpile this wealth? Would I just keep a big pile of gold or other metals? Would I be able to purchase some sort of real estate? Would I be able to lend it with interest (a loan or "bond")?

This is maybe a weird question but the common image of a treasury as a pile of gold pieces seems naive to me...

Thank you for your answers!

Most of the world relies on codified civil law. Anglo-Saxon legal systems, on the other hand, utilize common law, which is arguably more flexible than civil law. It seems that common law was based on the desire to make royal rulings consistent. It surprises me that no other culture has developed common law, given the prevalence of monarchies in the past.

I mean everybody knows about Henry VIII. and his six wives, but I just wondered if this has something to do with his father, if that kind of behaviour is perceived. I couldn't find anything about that. Henry VII. was married only once with Elizabeth of York and according to sayings they even seemed to be married happily.

Our tree has been traced fairly solidly to an Ann Harrison, but that's where we get stuck. Ancestrydna keeps trying to link Col Benjamin Harrison Sr (born abt 1710) as her father and a Martha Randolph as her mother, but after research online this doesn't seem right. We've looked at multiple different resources, and in many the man listed as Col Benjamin Harris sr.s dad in many places was born 30 years after him. Have we just been unlucky? It seems thing were well documented.

In a lot of movies and video games portraying WW2, we see a lot of scenes of both sides fighting against each other in rather short distances. When watching modern war footage however, it appears that firefights occur from longer distances. A few modern soldiers have said that they have never actually SEEN the enemy during engagements. Was this the case back then? Or were the movies right about how close and intense firefights commonly were?

Would a conscription/army officer arrive in your village in rural France ahead of one of Napoleon's campaigns and order all young able-bodied males to come forth? Or was it an ongoing process throughout the year, where names of young men in each town/village were regularly drawn from a hat?

Was the process different or the same for men in cities vs men in rural towns/villages?

I've been watching Marooned with Ed Stafford. He starts by sleeping in a cave but then builds a shelter. Got me thinking about cavemen, hench the question.

The popular historical and social narrative is that women were little more than homemakers for most of western history and men would mostly be the only income provider. Further more, the two generation Nuclear family of parents and kids was presented as the corner stone of our western societies. At the moment in the West women have labor participation rates on par with men, a change which is said to have started during the world wars, really sped up with the sexual revolution and was completed around the early 2000s. Now it is becoming more apparent that women entering the work force en masse has screened a reduction in net family income, a realization which is only recently entering the public consciousness.

I am not a historian, so I lack the knowledge of the proper sources to figure this out myself. But I do remember that in my little corner of the West, this entire narrative only existed for the briefest of moments in the 50s. My ancestors were lower class as far back as the mid 1700s and likely before that too. And they and their families all worked, all the time. According to parish registers often a profession was noted for both male and female ancestors at time of birth of a child. My grandmother said they all worked and the kids were taken care of by either an infirm neighbor, a grandparent or local nuns, and when the kids were about twelve years old, they worked too. Logic dictates that it must have been this way too, as their state of poverty simply didn't allow them to have unused labor to comply with social norms.

So hence my questions:

Is the Nuclear Family, with a Stay-at-Home mom, a short lived anomaly in Western history?

Or is it that our societal norms are set by these higher classes, even though they were not practiced by the vast majority of people?

Or is it the other way around, and is the complete commitment of the entire family to the work force an anomaly of the Industrial revolution? Something it seems we are slowly returning to at the moment.

As what the title said, why?. Matchlock firearms even with self-loading rifles are slow to reload and would give the soldiers a chance to run and charge at them?. With bows they take less effort to reload and would be great as while the gunners are still reloading, the bow men would fire a hail of arrows at them with either lit up or with whistling arrows to rout them.

I do know Bows takes alot of time to master as compared to a gun but why haven't they thought of the idea?

I was educated in South Africa in the late 90s/early 00s, while the education system was being overhauled, so a lot of the history I learned was still relics of Apartheid that had not been revised by the new government. We learned that there was a famine in Kenya in, I think, the early 1000s, and East Africans migrated down and started populating South Africa from the Northeast. When Europeans landed in the Cape there were indigenous Khoi people but no black/bantu people. I think the books even mentioned that large parts were uninhabited (which sounds like a bit of an excuse..) Is this true? When did Dutch settlers and Bantu people first meet then?

It is often stated that the Mongols would spare cities which surrendered, but depopulated by mass execution those which resisted. The reasons given for this are that

• the news of this would spread and cause subsequent peoples to give up without resistance
• the relative lack of their numbers combined with large size of the empire made it unfeasible (infeasible? non-feasible?) to attempt to occupy the areas

My questions are:

How well regarded are these claims by modern academics?

If regarded as at least partly true, how would this realistically be carried out with the technology of the time?

Mongols were horse archers according to my understanding; urban warfare is incredibly difficult involving close quarters -- how did it work that they would use horses and arrows to kill sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands of people?

Wouldn't they run out of arrows quickly?

Wouldn't the horses be unable to enter the extremely densely built structures?

Assuming swords used, wouldn't they get dull extremely quickly?

Wouldn't soldiers become incredibly tired after days or months of siege warfare and then having to chase down people individually and hack them to death?

Assuming fire, weren't walled cities created with ability to resist incendiary weapons?

Assuming they just threw everyone into a pit or something, how would crowd control work?

This has been bugging me for a while, and online research reveals little besides re-iterating 'the Mongols just murdered everyone'.

Thank you. Any recommended reading is appreciated.

From What I recall, legal slavery continued into the mid 20th century in Saudi Arabia (1962) and Oman (1970). Its recent enough that there must still be living survivors of it. Has there been any attempt to document there experiences, like the US did with former slaves in the 1930s?

While reading “the pillars of the earth”, I got really surprised by the description of the battle of Lincoln. King Stephen decides to let peasants and poor citizens fight on the back line, which apparently is described as a common sense tactic since they will cause more harm than good in the front line and will also have minimal casualties on the back. Which is really far from what I would have imagined which would be: peasants used as a meat shield on the front to spare the valuable fighters as king as possible.

I've read that Romans held the univira, meaning women who only married once, as the ideal. However, I also came across a law introduced in 9 AD called the Lex Papia et Poppaea, which actually encouraged remarriage, and gave widows only a couple of years to remarry before they were subjected to certain penalties.

So my question is, how did these conflicting ideas work?

I imagine that this law remained valid for at least a few years, but what happened later?

Was this law ever abolished, or was the univira ideal eventually dropped? What would happen to widows decades after this law was introduced, say, in 70 or 80 AD?

A lot of films, memes, and especially video games (the original catalyst of the question) paint the Russian army as having a reliance on overwhelming amounts of manpower to win battles, as opposed to their Western counterparts who had more "effective" or "efficient" armies. This seems especially the case when compared to a nation like Prussia in the same conflicts.

Thinking especially about the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic/French Revolutionary Wars, is this really the case? Was overwhelming numbers really the source of Russian military power, or did they have armies and command structures on a par with Western Europe in the same conflicts