Hello.

Can you suggest me a book about the history of the British Empire? Even in English and Italian language

From the 1000 to its decline and nowadays facts!

Thanks in advance!!

I understand many former samurai joined the Meiji government. Is there any record of who the longest living ex-samurai was, well after the abolition of the samurai class itself? I imagine some could have lived well into the early 20th Century?

I can’t seem to get a definitive answer from google. When were Jewish women FIRST taken to concentration camps? I’ve seen some websites say 1941, others say 1939. But how long after the Night of Broken Glass did they get taken away? And where did they go? If anyone can answer this I would be very grateful. I need the information for a book I’m writing.

For example the Auroch survived longer in Eastern Europe and finally went extinct in Poland in the early 1600s. The European Bison continued to survive in Eastern European forests until reintroduced into Western Europe fairly recently. Lynx, bear, moose, wolves, continue to exist mostly in northern and eastern Europe and the Baltic region. Is it because there are more old growth forests? If so then I have a second question which is why were old growth forests better preserved in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe?

From what I know at this point, Abraham is mentioned in Torah. But if Torah is written by Moses, and Moses was supposedly born a millennia after Abraham, how did he come to know about the story of Abraham?

I know gay men, disabled people, Slavic people etc were also murdered in camps by Nazis but I never hear much about them in documentaries or when talking about the Holocaust.

Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

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this thread is for you ALL!

Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!

We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: Whaling, Fishing & The Sea! Call me Tuesday Trivia! This week is about whaling, fishing & the sea. Let those sea shanties fly, tell us all about hoisting the main, the histories of collecting large and small quantities of animals from the sea, how humans built collection tools, or other tales about human’s relationship with getting good and resources from the big pools of water.

I doubt there are statistics on this, but I was wondering if other information could answer the question. I was reading about how police (at least in the modern understanding) haven’t always been a law enforcement practice, and I know during the time period in question public punishments were the norm, but I’m wondering if we have any way of knowing how effective this method was at preventing crime. If possible, I’d also like to know how crime rates then compare to current crime rates, and if the types of crimes commonly committed (I.e violent vs. non-violent) differed as well.

Was it solely an adaptaption to their environment or was there already a similar practice in use by their neighbors? And was it used anywhere outside the valley of mexico? Did the high yield chinampas give the aztecs an edge over their competitors or was it mostly other factors?

It baffles me that neither the Roman Empire nor the Arabian conquerors and their successive caliphates attempted to settle the islands, which were well-know since Antiquity.
Maybe it was too far for the Romans, but the Arabs were spreading Islam full of religious zeal and the islands were inhabited by native pagans, which could be converted. Also the Muslim armies were able to cross the strait of Gibraltar into Spain.

Okay, this is a bit of a weird and horrid question but after often imagining medieval and earlier latrines, toilets, etc. as being a bit smelly I suddenly started wondering if this was actually the case.

Archaeological evidence often shows that straw ended up in cesspits, which we assume was probably used for wiping or just waste from food or bedding.
But when I saw a video about modern day composting toilets I suddenly realised that these were a bit similar to the medieval ones but these do not stink at all.

Could it be that the straw, thrown in as wipe-waste or maybe on purpose, resulted in ancient toilets functioning much like composting toilets do today and perhaps resulted in them not stiking very much, if at all?

New fresh cesspits were sometimes lined with straw before use and people also threw other waste into these pits which also made the content "healthier", as it all helped breaking down the human waste.

What do you reckon?

Not saying he deserved one. But the whole arc of

• seemingly chosen by trajans wife not trajan
• early killing of senators
• withdrawal from trajans conquests
• his general 'unromanness'
• his Nero like belief in his own brilliance up to and including alleged jealous killing of Apollodorus
• his relationship with Antinous, and Antinous's suspicious death and scandalous deification

Clearly the senate wanted to damn him but were stopped. But I'm notnsure why the traditional English language histories don't paint him as a bonkers cowardly pervert monster. You could see how the story would be told.

Is it as simple as not having the same sort of narrative sources we have for other scandalous emperors? Was Gibbon including him as one of the Good Emperors following received wisdom or an unusually positive take that was then influential.

Like a lot of people I've watched Band of Brothers and was always awed by all the heroic and kind of unbelievable things the U.S. paratroopers did in the 2nd world War. In the the miniseries, the book, and online articles about the subject, the paratroopers are depicted as going head to head with other infantry units who are backed by tank units. During the battle of the bulge, tanks and other armored vehicles are shown a few times rolling toward the paratrooper lines, and in a few articles the the XLVII Panzerkorps are said to have engaged with these infantry units and been completely destroyed when they were supposedly cutoff from supply lines (except for ammo drops) and so you would think they would be without much anti tank gear. Is there something I'm missing here? Were the paratroopers in strategic positions that tanks couldn't reach or something like that?

I've found an old blog referring to old medieval windows made of horn with an example of an extant window in the "barley hall" in york. A few old forums said the horn was soaked for 3 months cut and flattened into sheets for windows. Some of the examples are fairly transparent even as seen on a horn window on a copy of "St. Cyprian's Works [M.9.19]". But no official resources or references actually saying how they made them.

On one of the forums a user also mentioned on the topic a cloth treated in some way to allow light in, but couldn't remember what country it was in. It was suggested it might have been an oil, so I tried to find a translucent oilcloth and got nothing but modern products, so I tried oilcloth windows and eventually found a tweet of all things with a picture example from in "Poplar cottage" tagging the Weald & Downland Living Museum. The official website doesn't mention oilcloth, oil cloth, or oil cloth windows, once. I went through 32 pages trying to find out more about their windows and none of them say much about them other than them being open. I'd love to learn more about these.

I've found a wiki page for "greased paper windows" used in the 1800s by American pioneers. It doesn't go into much detail

I've heard of but found no resources for oiled skin being used. No photo examples, no books, forums or blogs popping up that actually say anything about them.

And the one thing I found a resource for is the first greenhouse called the Specularium made for Roman emperor Tiberius. It used thinly cut mica for the windows.

If you have any other examples of transparent or translucent windows I'd love to hear about them!

I'm reading about the Civil War and seeing occasional references to slaves who the Confederates made dig trenches and build fortifications for their military installations. Is there any record of intentional sabotage here, to hurt the Confederate war effort? I know that there was occasional sabotage of the Nazi war production by the slave laborers across Europe that had been put to work in Germany.

They had myths and superstitious beliefs about everything but I have never heard any about static electricity. They wore fur and had hats so they must have noticed it. Like when your hair floats towards a hat you just took off because its all static ridden. What did they think was happening? Spirits? the gods?

Even doing stuff like petting cats or horses the shocks you get (especially in dry environments) are very noticeable. They even glow when its dark and crackle. Its just I have never heard anything about it from any culture and it's strange right?

I need information about the Samarrans. They were an "Empire" (Put in quotes because I am unsure as to how big they were) That occupied space to the right of the Euphrates River, and above the Ubaid Empire in 6200 BCE-5700 BCE. I have spent HOURS looking for any info about them. The only things it states online is that they traded with Ubaids. That's really it- I found out about them through a book on the Babylonian Empire, and I wanted all the information that I could on them. I couldn't find any books on them, information online thinks that I am referring to the Sumerians, or it segues into talking about the Ubaids over and over. There is also another area North of the Samarrans called the "Hassuna." Or on some maps the "Hassana" But I think the latter is just a typo- They are the same case, but from 6000 BCE- 5300 BCE. Anything helps! Thanks! : )

I've always been curious as to how and why did people settle lands not near a large body of fresh water? How does agriculture work in arid environments? Why continue to try to persevere through such harsh conditions? What drove people to believe that large swaths of land in Mid-West America could be tilled when so much of that land wasn't arable and more importantly, not near a large body of fresh water that could easily be brought in?

AFAIK, everyone that I know on both sides of my family, going as far back as 19th century have ALWAYS been near the ocean or fresh water rivers.

On the one hand, I know people from the non-Russian areas of the former USSR who consider the period of Soviet rule as Russian occupation in all but name. On the other hand, I know there were plenty of high-ranking soviets (notably Stalin) who were not themselves ethnic Russians. What is the scholarly consensus on this?

I was reading some Wiki articles and noticed that both Eastern and Western Germany shortly after WW2 retired almost all equipment and vechiles that was used by the Nazis in the WW2, why is this a case?

I refuse to believe that they were that bad, in fact i believe i read once that the Nazi equipment was pretty good (tho scarce, especially at the end of the war) so was it just a part of the Denazification process?

Thank you all in advance for your answers!