Seeing as there aren't crocodiles in Europe, and most castles ARE in Europe, on reflection it seems like an odd stereotype. Did a niche kingdom import some crocs for affect at some time? Any castle history expert opinions would be great!

Hello everyone, just a heads up that I’m on mobile so I apologize for formatting or miss spelling.

My great grandfather was a tail gunner on a B-29. Ive know this for years and knew he never actually saw combat, I never truly knew why until the other day when his local newspaper wrote a story about him.

He states in the paper that everyone was trained on the B-29’s in Arizona and after training all the crews were sent to Mariana Island except for ten. His crew was one of these ten. He said he knew they were training for something big but no one knew what it was. After sometime he says five crews from the ten were selected and sent to the pacific ocean.

After the dropping of the atomic bombs he realized his crew was being trained to drop one of those bombs but his crew wasn’t picked.

I really have no reason not to believe him but I would love to have some hard facts! Thanks!

Did they have a similar loyalty to them that they did to Hitler?

Was the idea of sky sailors a common superstition of the time or is Abogard’s reference the only evidence of this belief?

I am recently became aware that in America, dead bodies are being embalmed before burial (it doesn’t happen in my culture), and to me personally it seems unnecessary. Why is it a thing? When and why did Americans started using it? How was this serves marketed to the “clients”?

Roughly when did graffiti on boxcars start? Did it start in the US?

Nowadays, the Democratic party is seen as more liberal and socialist and the Republican party as more conservative and traditionalist, but this wasn't always the case. There was a time when the republican party was the more liberal leaning and the democratic party were their conservative counterparts. When did this change and why? Was it an instantaneous change or was it a gradual process?

P. S: "switch ideologies" might not be the appropriate words to use since they're both advocating the ideology of democracy, but I'm not sure what to replace it with.

Crimea was controlled by a Muslim khanate for hundreds of years and Islam used to be the major religion in the area. Today, Crimea is only 15 percent Muslim. So what happened to Islam in Crimea?

Is it fair to say the movie Apocalypto represents Aztec culture/practices but depicts Mayan surroundings/timelines?

This is part of a larger issue I have with understanding the incentives at play under feudalism. Basically, enfeoffment seems kinda like a bad deal for the feudal lord, right? You're giving up a lot of power over your own land for (it seems to me) not that much in return. An easing of the administrative burden and military support. But why couldn't you raise your own troops and circumvent the second issue all together?

That's a bigger question, perhaps outside the scope of this one, but at least in the case of Japan under the Tokugawa, maybe someone can provide an answer.

What I mean to ask is — Is it factually incorrect? If so, in what sense? is it incomplete, and if so is that due to the unavailability of certain information about Rome during Gibbon’s lifetime or did he deliberately omit certain details? If so, what’s missing? Or, is it just that the opinions, analyses and worldview that Gibbon presents is currently out of vogue with historians?

On the latter point, I don’t really think that’s a valid reason for dismissing the work. For instance, one can firmly disagree with the outlook of and conclusions drawn by von Ranke, Freeman or Collingwood whilst still recognising the immense value of their works on Early Modern Prussia, the Norman Conquest or Roman Britain respectively.

Also, I have the same question with regards to Arnold Toynbee’s ‘A Study of History’, unlike Gibbon’s Decline and Fall I haven’t read it but one of my lecturers at university went on and on about, recommending that we all read it and saying that if she could base entire courses out of it she would, which is quite an endorsement. Personally I have mixed feelings about Toynbee, his survey of Hellenism is one my favourites but his works on Germany especially feel more like polemic and propaganda than anything resembling academic research, and some other works of his like the essays in ‘The New Europe’ and ‘Civilization on Trial’ and his BBC Reith lecture ‘The West and the Rest’ as something in between the two.

There have been many posts about the "longitude" problem and the steps it took to solve it. I just finished reading "Longitude" by Dava Sovel, which was a delightful book on the subject. However, one seemingly trivial piece of the puzzle kept stumping me. In order for the chronometer method to end up providing an accurate measurement of the longitude, you need to be able to know the time at a given common locale (hence the chronometer keeping track of say, Greenwich time), but you also need to know exactly what the local time of solar noon is on that day. You need to be able to know relatively precisely when solar noon occurs for the comparison of the local time to the chronometer to yield an accurate result. My question is: how were sailors able to precisely determine solar noon to within <60 second accuracy (which is implied in the book)?

Sorry for the vagueness, but I was talking to friends about how Crassus died, and we started talking about how cruel the romans were, which reminded me of a story I heard when I was in Rome.
I only remember it vaguely, but it was about how one time the romans massacred a village and in the same night had a very macabre banquet, involving the bodies of the victims? IDK if they burned them for warmth or something like that, does anyone specialized in roman history have an idea what this could be referring to?

Reading much about the Three Kingdoms period and I wonder who exactly are the Nanman? Is there much research into their culture? What did their society and culture look like? They are often associated with War Elephants probably thanks to the Romance novel but since they are more of a tribal society (I'd guess) I kinda doubt there is much truth to that since there needs to me quite some infrastructure to keep war elephants.

Particularly the history of Jewish people in Eastern Europe (with an emphasis of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).

Everything I find is World War II/Holocaust focused, but I want something more on the life in a shtetl, the history of how Jews came to be such a large part of the eastern European demography, and how they interacted with Polish nobility.

I’m watching a show (Ascendance of a Bookworm) and the characters remark that it’s surprising that someone can do math without an abacus. It is a fantasy show, but it got me wondering.

Who and when invented the modern methods of addition, subtraction, and multiplication of large numbers? I’m talking about the method where you stack the numbers vertically, and think of the numbers like columns, calculating each semi-separately.

I know that sounds like a strange title so let me explain. In this video about the 'forgotten' Second Korean War, we can see newsreel footage of some South Korean (I believe) forces training in Korea. The martial art they're practicing appears to be shotokan karate. (I recognise it as I used to do it myself.)

My questions are: 1) was this a common occurrence at the time?

2. Why shotokan karate, of all styles? Why not taekwondo, or another Korean martial art?

Why did the union care so much when the south seceded? Why not just let them go and end up with a friendly border ally? I can understand instances where the portion of the seceding country contains an asset detrimental to the country's well being as a whole like an important port or rich farmland. But the US is giant even without the south and i can't think of anything the south had that couldn't be found elsewhere in the north.