After browsing this thread, I felt I should just come ask the experts. Was it for travel time? Religious observance? Pay day being the 1st? All sound plausible. Why do we vote on Tuesday? What's the history behind that decision?

This claim can be found at the end of Chapter 10, in the section on The Colonies.

I often see the "myth-busting" fact touted around that the age 25-30 average life expectancy of medieval peasants was brought down by an extremely high infant mortality rate, and that if a medieval peasant made it past their first few years, they could generally expect to live to ages comparable to that of modern people.

Now, I can easily believe that the middle ages have been overly denigrated to make people of the Renaissance and afterwards feel better about themselves, but the above strikes me as over-corrective romanticism.

What I'm really curious about is...where exactly do all these statistics on lifespans and infant mortality rates come from? Exactly *who* was tallying all these dead peasant babies? Where can I look at these records or the analysis thereof?

I could ask a number of questions about this, which I just found out about the other day, but the fundamental thing I can't stop musing over is, how do you react to being expected to work with members of a nation (and often, believers of an ideology) that your nation just spent four years mobilizing to destroy? Was there any dissent from within these institutions (in general, but particularly from rank-and-file scientists expected to interface with them on a daily basis)? Was there a range of reactions? Did this evolve? Thanks in advance.

And why would she refuse, if it was customary to do so? It seems odd that she would think of it as "gross" if it was a commonly accepted practice.

Pretty much what the title says. I grew up hearing stories from his time in the war and I’d like to learn more about the big picture of what they did. Any information is appreciated. Thank you.

I was taught that killing knights (especially by peasants) was heavily taboo in the Hundred Years War, instead being taken hostage for ransom. I have also read accounts of the thousands of dead French knights at Agincourt and even the English soldiers wading through the mud with knives the end the lives of the dying after the battle. What context am I missing that reconciles these two facts? Thank you in advance for the answers!

I've just finished playing a video game called "Ghost of Tsushima" set during the first Mongol invasion of Japan and it piqued my curiosity. We never really covered this period of history much in (British) school (the 13th century was just "dark ages") and I'm looking for a good primer / overview of the Mongol empire, and if possible a book with a sub section about the attempted invasions of Japan.

Many thanks in advance!

Hi everyone!

I am wondering why soldiers (I am mainly thinking of the Serbs in Sarajevo) were specifically targeting civilians? I am not talking about carelessness or accidents, but about deliberated targeting.

What was their objective by doing so? Was it part of a policy of punishment-revenge? Was it "simply" soldiers not giving a fuck and """having fun""" by doing these things? Did they consider civilians as actual threats so shot them "whenever they had the chance"? What's in for them to shoot people who were obviously civilians in "Sniper Alley"?

Thank you very much for your time.

I don’t remember ever hearing about a war ensuing immediately after this, but I find it hard to believe that a King would willing let his subordinate become independent without trying to claim that all of England was his by default.

I'm reading Augustus by Adrian Goldsworthy and have seen them referenced a couple of times. My understanding of this era is limited, but I've always assumed that the Plebeians were the poor or the working class or something like that, and the Patricians were the rich and were presumably nobles - or something like aristocrats. Is it the case that some plebeian families were quite rich and therefore considered to be aristocrats? Or is there some distinction that I'm not grasping here? Thanks in advance.

Speaking that Granada fell in 1492, some 27 years before Cortes and his band of colonizers invaded the Aztec Empire, I assume that they were some Moors or Iberian Muslims who joined the Conquest if they were all not expelled by then.

I am thinking not just of Troy, that was repeatedly destroyed and repopulated, but also of cities of Mesopotamia that literally became hills, many Chinese of Egyptian capitals whose locations had to be guessed by archaeologists, and even Rome, which clearly was mainly fields in between ruins of bigger buildings in the Middle Ages, when its population was about 3 percent of the Ancient peak. How does this happen?

Edit: in particular, what did those cities look like at different stages of the process, say Ur just before and a hundred, and five hundred years after being abandoned, or Rome not long after the end of grain shipments and war population losses? Was it an endless stretch of empty buildings with a few inhabited ones in between? Could you just walk into a palace or mansion and say "okay, this will do for me"? Sorry about the typo in the title.

I know the defendants at Nuremberg were given IQ tests and scored fairly high, one as high as 142. They all praised Hitler’s intelligence and character. So has there been any attempts to analyze Hitler’s intelligence on any scale?

So It's "common knowledge" here in Australia we were under serious threat of invasion by the Japanese in WW2, but I don't really think the threat was that great given as I understand Japans situation at the time, fighting in China, lacking serious oil resources, fighting in west Asia and threat of the American fleet in the Pacific. Was Australia actually under a serious threat of invasion from the Japanese? To me it doesn't seem so.

I'm curious about how much the taxes on tea (and other goods by the British) impacted the average American. I thought these were more like export taxes, which would surely only affect the exporters. Were there also sizable taxes on goods into the colonies resulting in high prices paid? And how much importing did the average American do because I would assume most people lived a bit minimalistically and provided for themselves or locally for the most part.

And that ties into the representation side too since that was the rallying cry.

Were these causes of taxation and representation important to the average American?

I had decided to rewatch Rome on HBO which i had not seen since latin class 2006, (great class better teacher) and the opening scene has lucious vorenus, a centurion blowing his whistle to rotate troops from the front line of the century ostensibly to keep those fighting fresh.

My question (well questions...), was this a roman innovation? Did the Greek phalanx do this or something similar? Did this come about from the Marian reforms or was this something the hastati principes oe triarii used during the maniple system?

Apologies for formatting and errors am on my phone and thanks in advance.