So I'm less interested in how accurate the depiction of specific characters is but rather the daily life aspect and interactions between groups. Were settlement of that size common? Would they have had access to clothes in bright colors? Is it reasonable to think that there were regular religious travels all the way from Kattegatt to Uppsala? Do we imagine tribal warfare being conducted in the manner presented? Thanks!

The Byzantines considered themselves culturally Roman and regarded Constantinople as the seat of Roman power after the fall of the Western Empire. The idea of a separate Eastern/Greek identity was superimposed by historians long after the Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. Did the Byzantines consider Britannia a lost former colony overrun by barbarians? Did they have a sense of ancient connection and a cultural memory of Londinium as a vestige of bygone Roman power? How did they approach diplomacy with medieval England?

Conversely, did the English have an understanding of the Byzantine Empire (as Rome) being past rulers of the Isles? Did this change after the Norman conquest in the 11th c.? Did they have a connection through the Roman cultural vector of the church? Did they consider the Pope to be the authentic representative of Rome and the Byzantine rulers to be foreign/oriental/illegitimate? Did they understand the Romanness of various elements of their culture and surroundings (e.g. Hadrian’s Wall, amphitheaters, baths, forts, etc.)?

Fwiw, I have a solid grounding in the withdrawal of Roman interests between the 380s and early 400s (i.e. Saxon/Pictish/et al raiders, Magnus Maximus, Constantine III, the emergence of barbarian and Romano-British warlords, and so on).

The lion is the national animal of England and is still prevalent in many areas of English society. The earliest use of the lion I can think of concerning England would be with Richard I’s nickname the ‘Lionheart’. If anyone has any further details on how England and the lion became almost synonymous I would be interested to know.

Goedemorgen!

I recently moved to the Netherlands from the UK, and I'm looking to vastly improve my understanding of Dutch world history.

Beyond the basics, I don't know that much about the pre-modern period, so I'm looking for general primers as well as adjacent history such as:

• The Dutch East India Company
• Dutch American and Asian Colonies
• The Orange Free State
• The Transvaal

Hard mode:

• The books are Dutch Language.
• The books are by Indonesian, Suriname or South African authors.

Very Hard Mode:

• The books give a multi-or-alternative viewpoint treatment of Dutch history. Specifically, I'm looking to avoid a situation such as: You pick up a biography of Winston Churchill, and it almost completely ignores his role in the Bengal famine - instead focusing on what an ePiC cIGar MaN he was.

Bedankt!

Recently read 'Saladin' the John Man biography and while he has some answers to the posed questions, I wondered if there were more takes on the subject matter.

It doesn’t make sense why they would do that, it almost seemed to undermine their goals... and helped their enemies the Turks.

Please don’t recommend the Babinger biography or Crowley 1453 book as I am already familiar with those titles.

Obviously I know the Blues and Greens from their prominence in the later Eastern Roman Empire and their involvement in Justinian's Nika Riots. But how far back would rival teams have worn these colors? Were they widespread throughout the Hellenistic world? In the game, you meet them at a hippodrome outside of Alexandria. Did they have regional franchises, or might they have traveled around and had supporters in many different cities? And would they have head political clout during this period, assuming they did exist?

Obviously video games take a lot of artistic license, but I'm curious if it's at least historically plausible.

I have a simple question, that likely does not have a simple answer.

Hedgehogs are rather bold as far as wild animals are considered. They go where they want, and when they encounter another animal they don’t really run. They rely on their spines to be a (rather formidable) defense. Problem is spines aren’t a formidable defense when a foraging human can just pick the hedgehog up and carry it home to butcher it.

So my question stands: If some of the various cultures of Europe regularly ate hedgehog, who did? Why has the practice not survived to the present day as guinea pig cultivation has in Peru? If eating hedgehog was frowned upon, why?

Thanks for any help!

These were the elections of John Quincy Adams vs Andrew Jackson (1824), Samuel Tilden vs Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), and Grover Cleveland vs Benjamin Harrison (1888), and I would like to know if there was any significant movements, if any at all to abolish or at the very least, reform of the electoral college by the disgruntled voters of the losing candidate.

The elections of Al Gore vs George W. Bush (2000) and Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump (2016) also resulted in one of these cases but I already know what happened in these events.

I realize that this is a question that casts a pretty wide net (at the least, all of human civilization), but I'm interested in any culture's perspective at any point in history.

Did beer/wine/other beverages just 'go bad' at random? Why didn't it all go bad? Some brewers have been creating their same beer or wine for hundreds of years without lapse in quality.

How was this explained? How effective was quality control?

Thank you in advance!

Germany had supply line issues because of the fact that they were getting so long during Operation Barbarossa. Why didn’t the Allies experience this?

Let's suppose that everything went right for the japanese. Luck is on their side, they sink both Yorktown and Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea, then both Enterprise and Hornet at Midway. Pushing on, they win the Guadalcanal capaign and...

What would it have taken to bring the USA to the negotiation table? Would capturing Hawaii cut it? Total dominance of the pacific? Was it just impossble?

The Germanic tribes were the ones constantly fighting the roman empire and sacked Rome several times but later became seemingly obsessed with becoming the Romans as in the Holy Roman Empire. How did this shift happen?

One of the Japanese main goal in World War 2 was to acquire land as its economy was suffering due to minimal natural resources and inability to contend with Western goods. As a result they entered the war, aiming to acquire land. So, did attacking Pearl Harbor assist them in acquiring land?

Although the Lionheart was, apparently, known to be a pretty good warrior, he seems to have been a pretty terrible King, spending almost no time actually in England, and much more concerned with the Crusades or goings-on in France. The main contribution he seems to have made to England as King was draining the treasury to pay for his ransom.

Yet he is a romanticized figure beyond any other medieval King of England, and perhaps beyond any King regardless of time period. Why did this come about!?