Recent news of newly uncovered mummies reminded me of this claim that i have previously seen on twitter before and was wondering if it's a misinterpretations of something factual or if it's actually real.

Early Modern European armies were by and large composed of professional soldiers who were difficult to replace owing to the time and cost of training and maintaining them long enough to become effective. Battle would risk the loss of many soldiers, and thus immense costs and the possibility of creating a window of vulnerability that other powers could exploit. Thus commanders might be reluctant to offer pitched battle for fear of irreplaceable losses.

If one army had chosen terrain or manipulated the circumstances such that they would be advantaged in pitched battle, their opponents would usually understand that they were at a disadvantage and could use a variety of techniques to decline any offers of battle when they were in a bad position.

Yet there were still battles in Early Modern Europe. Why did armies ever accept their opponents' offers of battle?

Basically, I'm asking for a direct comparison to whether the populace of the USA treated Polio with the same regard that modern people treat Covid with skepticism.

And if it really was one a large city, how was mobility made possible? Was there any public transportation?

This has troubled me a lot, i tend to think that ancient battles were bloodbaths in such a manner that they cant even compare to battles today (hacking and slashing face to face compared to aiming down the sights) and that the fatality rate was much higher, so how come that any of the legionnaires survived the 16/25 years of servitude?

Was it like just a small percentage and also given the lifespan, if the lifespan of a roman citizen at that time was approx 50years, how long did they have left to live if they got out of the army after a full term?

Also please forgive me if i was wrong in some of my assumptions, thats why im asking the experts here! Thanks a ton!

That is, how influential was his “historical materialism” and ideas about class struggle to the work of subsequent historians? How dominant was the “great man” theory of history before his time and how common was it to take a material, economic or otherwise structural approach?

Conflict between groups over natural resources in rural areas is one of the leading causes of violence in post-colonial countries. The really tricky thing is that the authorities that might solve these conflicts (the government) are often not very involved in rural areas, so things can get out of control very quickly. I am curious if anything similar happened in the history of the U.S., given its large agricultural base, waves of new immigrants, and the scarcity of government involvement in its Western areas.

I have been scouring the internet for several hours and cannot find any mention of any specific agency or division of a security agency within the USSR that was specifically meant to guard the Soviet leaders. But I can't imagine that there wasn't one.

For reference I am Italian, went to mass the other day and was wondering when the whole schedule of a catholic mass was decided ne the things the priest says.

I understand that there hadn't been primogeniture, and the desire for a male child wasn't the same as, say, medieval Europe, but Augustus was the wealthiest person in Rome, and lacked good male heirs after the deaths of Marcellus and his grandchildren. Did he try to have additional children, but could not? Certainly Livia was capable of bearing children (Drusus, Tiberius)

Japan has a reputation of hostility to foreigners and outside trade. But I recently learned about its brief period of openness under the Tokugawa shogunate from 1600 to 1636. There were waves of Japanese migration throughout Southeast Asia and a rise of successful Japanese merchant fleets.

In his chapter in the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Leonard Andaya writes "A measure of the importance of this Japanese trade was their export of silver. Between 1615 and 1625 an estimated 130,000-160,000 kilograms of silver was sold, amounting to 30-40 percent of the total world output outside Japan." (He cites Seiichi Iwao's article 'Japanese foreign trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries' which I was unable to find).

It seems like Japanese traders saw fairly quick and dramatic success. But after 1636 we see trade drastically limited to a few foreign merchants in Nagasaki. I know many other countries saw foreign trade as an attractive and easy source of taxation. How could the Tokugawa shogunate turn down such a potentially lucrative revenue source?

In many Chinese secondary school textbooks, the conflict between eunuchs and scholars in medieval China is a recurring theme. And in most occasions, court eunuchs are demonised as corrupt, power-hungry and out for personal gain, while scholars are portrayed as defenders of morals and the staunch guardians of the dynasty's long-term stability. Has there been any challenges to this popular perception, especially considering official court histories are written by the scholars themselves?

I'm thinking specifically of books like 'Call of Cthulu', 'Jekyll & Hyde' and 'Frankenstein' which both have the main plot told by a character recounting what they heard from a different character who witnessed the events, aswell as stories like Dracula with unconventional framing. When did this style become popular and when was it replaced with modern story framing? Is it limited to horror?

Sorry if this is the wrong subreddit for this, I don't know if there's a good 'AskLiterature' sub or anything.

Mansa Musa is generally regarded as the richest man to ever live my a massive margin. But where did his wealth come from, and what did he have that other powerful/rich rulers didn't?