In his book, Utopia For Realists, he states "If you were to put an Italian peasant from 1300 in a time machine and drop him in 1870s Tuscany he wouldn't notice much of a difference." Is there any truth in that? I find it remarkable, given how much must have changed between 1870 and, say, 1920. Technology like cars, radios, etc became common. Society all changed radically during that time period. A man born in 1860, living to the age of 85 would have seen an astounding amount of change, if Rutger is right.

Edit: I made a type, his name is Rutger Bregman.

As the title suggests, I am looking into the historical precedent of cultures and civilizations using letters or symbols to track what they thought of as historical periods. I began to be interested in the question as I learned that "B.C" once meant "Before Christ", but we now refer to it as "B.C.E.", meaning "Before Common Era". I have read a lot of fantasy and historical fiction books, and many in the fantasy genre just have the people invent their own "B.C.E /A.C.E", but I am skeptical of this being a historical commonality. I realize this may seem like a simple question, but as someone not well versed in this subject yet, I seem to have inadequate knowledge to ask google the right question, as it normally just pulls up videos referring to what other cultures thought of each other, which is not really what I'm looking for.

For example, if you went back in time during the the Ming Dynasty of china AD 1368 – 1644, and asked what year it was, how would someone explain the current year, and how it is connected to other periods of time.

Thank you very much for your time

I am currently listening to and greatly enjoying the incredibly well put together, insightful, and monumentally informed audiobook version of 'The Boundless Sea: A Human History of Oceans' by David Abulafia, and in Chapter 28 Part III, David notes the following:

The bodies of strange people had been cast up on the shores of Ireland, and their features were rather like those of Tartars. In other words, the 'Orientals' with whom Westerners were reasonably familiar through political contact and through the trade in slaves from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. Almost certainly, these were the bodies of native North Americans which had been washed out to sea. If, as is possible, the young Columbus travelled to Iceland, he might well have heard tales of lands to the West visited by Norse sailors in the past. In Bristol, he could also have picked up rumors of lands to the West, because several Icelanders had taken up residence there, and because English expeditions had penetrated deep into the Atlantic in the 1480s. Besides, he seems to have read some mysterious papers in the possession of the Perestrelo family of Porto Santo near Madeira (into which he married) which provided further evidence of land to the West.18

As I am simply listening to the audiobook version and do not have access to specific sources, I am wondering if this is common knowledge, and/or known to historians as a matter of fact or likely probability?

Thank you to anyone able to illuminate this further. And, for anyone curious, I highly recommend this audiobook and have been addictively surprised by David Abulafia's ability to provide a nuanced perspective on thousands of pivotal historical events through the medium of oceanic exploration.

Almost all plays use preexisting characters, but some even follow older storylines event-by-event. Take the trilogy of Agamemnon for example, or Hercules. From whom and from what time do these storylines originate? Does there exist some sort of corpus?

Just a short one, but would the early Egyptians have encountered neanderthals/ neolithic people, or am I mixing these up?

Also is there any accounts of homo sapians encountering the neanderthal or are they too far apart?

Are there communities in these areas sourcing their heritage from the crusader states? Interesting internal borders? Or are they no more than footnotes for the modern states?

It is a common joke, that though the Soviet Union prided itself on providing everything its citizens could ever want, it still failed repeatably to feed its own populace.

This does have some basis in the truth, as the cases of the Holodomor, the loss of large amounts arable land during WWII, as well as need to import millions of tons of American grain during the seventies, all testify to the fact that the Soviet Union was at times unable to properly feed its own populace independently.

However prior to the soviet-era, the Russian Empire was a net exporter of agricultural products to western Europe and in fact, received massive amounts of investments from the west, which would increase Russian export.

How come is it then that the Soviet state failed to continue this success, even after the agriculture-focused era of Khrushchev?

Note: Much of my information comes from the book "Merchants of Grain" (1979) by Dan Morgan.

The way that I was taught almost implied that once Hitler was vanquished the "curse was lifted" and Europe went back to normal, but it seems like the way that those ideas were spread and proliferated wouldn't allow them to just fade into obscurity.

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How did Germany handle this divide in its population once Hitler had died and WW2 was over?

I was doing some research into the Sino Japanese wars of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and was wondering if there had been previous wars between the two nations, and what their overall relationship was over like throughout history.

I’ve been wondering this for a while now. I’ve always wondered why Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States over New York, New York. New York holds a massive amount of history from the 13 colonies to present day. I feel like a lot of US’s history comes from New York. Political history, economical history, sufferings, military history, cultural history and so on. New York has been there since the beginning, and if you ask anyone that lives outside of the US to name one US state, they will most likely name New York first out of any other state. So how come a state which has been a part of the US before it even became independent and holds so much sacred history and holds one of the most known territory in the US with such high popularity not the capital of the United States? Isn’t that what a national capital is supposed to represent? A historical piece of land as a portrayal for government representation and illustration? I feel like New York holds all of that if not more than what our current capital holds. Not saying that our capitals should be changed, but it’s a bit weird to think that New York has been such a sacred piece of history and popularity for the United States, you’d think that our founding fathers would chose land in New York to be our national capital.