I understand that the king or lord would have been inside the castle (perhaps with much of the treasury/gold), but an enemy army could just walk through the cities and countryside, looting and pillaging, while the defending army is stuck in a small castle.

What was it about a castle that made it such an important strategic objective for the attacker?

I know that a lot contries emerged in Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. After middle ages, England and France succeeded to come out in one county. But why Germany and Italy remained partial until 19th century?

I have heard that the concept of Valhalla was created in response to the Heaven of Christianity. Seeing as a lot of our knowledge of Norse religion (Odin, Thor, Freyja,...) comes from Christian sources like Snorri Sturluson's Poetic Edda, does anyone have any good sources that may cast some light on the matter? Perhaps Roman sources regarding Germanic religions?

I’ve been wondering this for a while and it’s not supposed to be racist, I’m just confused to why Jewish people are referred as their own race even though I would consider them to be just people who practice Judaism. I wouldn’t consider Christians or Catholics to be their own race or Muslims to be their own race, rather people who practice their respective religion.

I frequently use google to search reddit and one frustration of mine is how often I will find many, sometimes dozens, of posts on this subreddit related to the subject I am searching but the vast majority of them will have no answers. Obviously this is unavoidable to a certain extent since the integrity of the subreddit matters more than the frustration of encountering answerless posts. A big part of the reason why I like this subreddit is because of the rigorous moderation after all.

What I would like to propose is a system where posts that have not received any answers will be removed after a certain period of time to help clean up the amount of old empty posts cluttering the search results. Even if it were only for posts that are at least 1 year old, that would help a ton and I don't think that those year old threads with no answers would be missed at all. Would this be possible without a lot of moderator work? Could a bot be tasked with this? I'm pretty unfamiliar with how moderation of a subreddit works so maybe what I am proposing is not really feasible.

It seems all the toddler-aged kids these days (Western/American anyway, I can't speak to other cultures) all act similarly - squabbling with siblings, slapping each other, throwing fits during bike rides and their parents having to bring them home. I am not speaking of poor parenting here; it just seems like an innate quality of kids that age is to scream a lot and be really difficult and just...poorly behaved, because they don't know what manners are yet! 3 year olds are just mean to their siblings for the most part!

However, has this the case throughout history? I have trouble imagining it in past eras. Is there evidence of kids acting this way in ancient Rome or in Victorian households? Or did past eras use corporal punishment to force kids to go against (what seems to be) their innate nature to squabble and scream at their siblings? Did toddlers of older times understand manners far before modern kids do (which seems to start to be around 4 or 5 now)? Or has this always been the case, but other eras never bothered to document it?

(I understand that in some eras and upper-class households, kids were handled by nurses during the "doesn't understand manners yet" age range. However that doesn't mean that the kids didn't act that way, it just means it was seen less in upper-class society, I would think? So I am not necessarily referring to whether the children were seen behaving that way).

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I would love to learn more! Thank you.

The Viceroyalty of New Spain was historically located in modern day Mexico City, so what are the strategic and tactical advantages of having the viceroyalty of Spain be so far away from the Philippines?

(Before you start your angry comment I am absolutely aware they lost a large chunk of territory and had to pay back a large amount of reparations)

For most of WWII, Finland was aligned with the Nazis. Not only did they give invading Soviet forces a very hard time during the Winter War, but then also conducted a war of aggression against the Soviets in the Continuation war, hampering relief to the Siege of Leningrad.

Other Nazi-aligned nations, such as Hungary, did far less to directly hurt the Soviets, but still got conquered and made a satellite state after the war. In fact, most of Eastern Europe became Soviet-aligned after the war. However, Finland only gave up half of Finnish Karelia and accepted to pay reparations and consequently got to keep their market economy and functional independence. Ofc they didn't accept Marshall aid and the Soviets had some measure of power in the gvt. through the YYA treaty but still.

So why didn't the Soviets vassalize Finland and make it a Nordic asset for the Cold War? I'm sure they wanted it, and they had the strength post war to do it...

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tl/dr: why didn't the Soviets just make Finland a satellite state after WWII? They had the chance to but didn't, instead exacting some soft power and requiring some land and money.

From the little cursory reading I've done on Wikipedia, it seems that a lot of our knowledge of sign language is dependent upon hearing people taking an interest in deaf people. These hearing people then codify the language in a manner that's understood by other hearing people and get credited as being the founder of a sign language. When in reality sign languages are a naturally occuring rich language created by deaf peoples. Do we have many sources from the perspective of deaf people on their own languages? This is a rather broad question in both geography and time, but if there's any scholars who can answer it with regards their own specific field I would be grateful.

I should preface this by saying that my question is worded in a somewhat exaggerated way. Hopefully it will be clearer in a few lines what I am really trying to ask.

My understanding of the nation state concept is that it is defined by:

1. Centralisation of power, as opposed to the prototypical feudal society,^1 which is very decentralised (the king only really rules over the lords, who each rule over their own tracts of land, etc)
2. An understanding among the populace that they are part of a broader national identity - e.g. “French” rather than simply “from Marseilles”

I have read that much of the difficulty that various nations have had when attempting to invade (or “spread freedom to”) Afghanistan is - apart from the geography - that it is a very fractured country.

The central government as it is now does not exert full autonomy over the regions is governs on paper. This goes beyond The Taliban: it is also caused by a broad lack of that understanding that one is part of a national identity. That is, each person in the countryside tends to be a member of their village first and an Afghani second (if at all).

This would seem to indicate that, in a strict sense, Afghanistan as it is now is not a nation state - or perhaps a state without a nation.

Is this assessment broadly correct, when one compares Afghanistan to both contemporary and historical nation states?

Has it always been like this? Why?

^1. I understand that the generic feudal system did not ever really exist, and was more of an oversimplification (or outright invention) by later scholars - trying to make sense of a continent’s patchwork of different types of rule.

Edit: it should probably be worth noting, given that at the moment this is sitting on 0 with 3 downvoted and no up, that whether or not a country is a nation state is a completely neutral point as it relates to the people living in a country.

In Europe, in the 20th century, there were many nations without states and many states which encompassed what people felt were multiple nations.

There may be a way to read this that goes along the lines of “has Afghanistan always been backwards” or something like that, but that is not the intention behind the question at all. Thinking of a nation-state as the only “modern” form of government is ... well quite a narrow view of things.

Extreme apologies for the title, I have tried to write this in the least controversial way possible, but I know this is a very politically divisive topic.

I work in a field adjacent to the history of northern Greece, and know many Greek scholars who feel very strongly that North Macedonia should not be called as such and that the name invalidates Thracian heritage. Having read about the agreement on the name of North Macedonia at the time, I was able to find a lot of reasons why many Greeks dislike this name and the usage of the Vergina sun on the North Macedonian flag, but no news outlet would explain the North Macedonian perspective.

So, what historic reasons are there for the North Macedonian association with the Macedonian name?

I’m a Marxist-Leninist, and for me, I just want to know the facts. Typically the argument is, at least what I usually encounter from other Marxist-Leninists, that Holodomor was not a genocide but was the result of some other thing (whether it be Kulaks, or foreign intervention, or something else).

I want to be clear here, I do not support any argument for or against Holodomor, I do not know enough about it. I apologize if this question is offensive in any way to anyone, I don’t mean it to be, I just want actual unbiased facts on the root cause.

So, I've heard that nearly all European writings are derived from Greek, which might be derived from Phoenician, which itself might be derived from cuneiform (with some intermediates). Likewise in the far East, both Japanese and Korean writing systems are based on or inspired by Chinese. So how many times was writing invented separately, without being based on an already existing one ? I know one of the issues might be determining what we count as writing since nearly every culture in the world has had systems of symbols to convey more or less complexe meanings, so I'll let you narrow it down any way you find most convenient. Maybe if it's more simple, you could instead answer to "How many writing systems with no common origin among them are all the currently existing writing systems of the world based on ?"

I'm doing research and I'm trying to learn more about medieval slavery. How did the fall of Rome affect slavery? What was the life of medieval slaves like? How were they different from slaves in the past? What was slavery like in late medieval Europe? How did that tie into the translating slave trade and how people viewed African slaves?

I'd really like some books I could read related to this question. What books could I read pertinent to these questions? And medieval slavery in general?