I was watching Solaris (1972), in which the main character says: "Man is the one who renders science moral or immoral. Remember Hiroshima." While I am curious about the line would have meant in the context of the film, I am more interested in the immediate response of the Soviet state and people.

By "the era" I mean the late Medieval and early Modern eras, and I'm including universities in both the Islamic world and the Christian world. What variations would you find between universities in, say... Timbuktu vs. Baghdad vs. Paris? How would the lives of scholars vary in each place? What about the administrative and legal organizations of the universities of themselves?

I’m referring to voluntary seppuku not obligatory seppuku. Cases of dishonored Samurai willingly committing ritual suicide to restore their honor. Why would a Daimyo allow this to happen to one of their own Samurai? Wouldn’t the loss of such a highly trained and valuable military officer be a considerable loss to their own power?

Not every single one of the twenty-four, I'm particularly interested in the histories of the medieval dynasties such as Tang and Jin. Have the histories been translated and available to the public?

I am listening to Ken Follett's newest historical fiction about this time period. I cannot get over their living arrangements. Listening to other books about medieval Europe, I just don't grasp why a peasant would want to share a room with their who family without privacy. So maybe they don't want to share a room, why would you not just build a few more rooms for privacy?

Thank you for your time!

I've often heard it said that the Treaty of Westphalia was the origin of the modern nation state, and yet I don't actually know what that means.

What practically changed as a result of the Treaty?

Or if you prefer a though experiment, If there had been no Treaty of Westphalia, what practically would be different in say the "Holy America Empire" with it's "50 principalities"?

I'm most interested in cities in the Han dynasty due to its rough contemporaneity with the Late Republic and Early Roman Empire, but would be also interested in how things worked in other dynasties.

In the Roman Empire, cities were run by provincial aristocrats who adopted Roman high culture to ingratiate themselves with the aristocracy at the City of Rome to gain their patronage to advantage themselves and their families in municipal politics. Despite the fact that these cities had significant autonomy to organize and run their internal affairs, they often came to imitate the collegiate oligarchic rule of the City of Rome as a result of these efforts. Were there similar imitative tendencies and patronage in Imperial China between cities at the center and at those at the periphery?

There are several big archeological sites on Crete from the minoan culture (Knossos, Phaistos etc.). They were build centuries before 500 BC and already partially disintegrated by this time. Is there any written documents about how the Greeks interpreted such preexisting cultures on their territory? Based on my beginners knowledge about greek mythology they adapted e.g. the creten sites as built by their "ancestors" and made up stories about the Minotaurus and the Labyrinth etc. but was there also a non-mystical view point?

By the time of the siege, the Ottoman controlled the entire Anatolia, as well as the land north of Constantinople.

So why was the chain even an issue then? Surely the Ottoman had navy in the black sea and could easily sail southward to the strait, wipe out the few ships the Romans had, and attack the weak sea wall of the city there?

Am I remembering this right? Google yields no results. I remember learning about an ancient civilization (in the context of also learning about Ancient Greece, Egypt, Assyria, etc.) that every year would hold a sort of holiday, where there would be a competition. Whoever won the competition got to be king for one day, and held all the powers of the king, but at the end of the day they were executed. Was this really a thing? If so, when and where?

All I know about it is that Thales de Miletus discovered that rubbing amber caused it to be able to attract dust. I Wonder what people thought about this.

I’ve been reading about the attack on Pearl Harbor and it just seems like an obviously bad idea. Australia and New Zealand would have been much better targets. The supply lines would have been much shorter. Japan could have actually held them. And it would have given them half of the British Commonwealth’s land, which amounts to a lot of undeveloped land.

Why didn’t they go that route?

I’ve been reading a lot today about packing the court, and it keeps going back to the last time the numbers changed were just after the war while Grant was president.

That got me thinking about the Civil War court.

I know most (not all) politicians and military leaders chose state over nation and joined the side their state went with.

I’m assuming some of the Supreme Court justices were Southerners. Do we know about their thoughts and their decisions? Were they viewed skeptically by their colleagues if they stayed? Did everyone manage to put aside the politics and war in order to work together from the bench? And did any Civil War based cases come before them? And if not, did they consciously avoid weighing in?

Thank you in advance.

It’s seen so much in media that it makes me wonder if it’s an actual thing thy tried.

I looked online for an answer but couldn't find one, so I apologize for the simple question. Do the majority have their roots in slavery or immigration?

I know on paper the Popes ruled the Papal States "directly" but what exactly does that mean? If power was delegated to minor local lords, wouldn't that mean the Pope ruled them indirectly? And if that's the case, could the argument be made that the Pope ruled every Catholic monarchy indirectly? Wouldn't all of Catholic Europe have been the "Papal States?" So what was the functional difference between a place like Ravenna and a place like Milan, or France? How was the Pope more directly involved in the governing of Perugia than Siena or England? And why weren't the Papal States governed by prince-bishops? That seems like it would be a logical power structure to follow, but if I'm not mistaken, prince-bishops were much more common in the Holy Roman Empire, and virtually non existent in the Papal States.

Primary sources from this event seem to be rare in quantity and there is wild debate over which ones are actually from the conquest and which ones are not.