The bulk of Russia's eastern territories was aquired during the 17th and early 18th century. This kind of blows my mind. We're talking about roughly half a continent, a territory more than four times larger than the Roman Empire during it's peak.

How did they manage to control and hold onto such vast and hostile land in a time before the railway and the telegraph? And equally as important: What was their motivation to expand so far east? What did they hope/expect to gain?

In South and Central America we have large, city building empires with complex system of governments. But in North America the majority of Natives (at least ones we learn about in school) appeared to remain tribal and nomadic. If you look at the geography of the regions things don’t make much sense. Large cities such as Cuzco and Tenochtitlan were built in heavily jungled areas. Not really a place you’d want to build a city. North America is arguably much better suited, geographically speaking, for building cities and road networks and courier systems. So why is it that a majority of Native built cities are located in Central and South America while there are almost none in North America?

The atomic bomb is often talked about as an entirely separate weapon of awesome destruction, rather than as the ultimate extension of the strategic and terror bombing used throughout World War II. Discussions about the use of the bomb and whether it was justified often center on how powerful it was and the immense destruction it caused, not always with an understanding of the strategic bombing practiced throughout the war.

But was the devastation inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki really different than the destruction of cities by conventional firebombs, like Dresden or Tokyo? Did leaders at the time view the bomb as an extension of strategic bombing, or as something in a class of its own?

Sorry if this question is to broad. I know very little about Ethiopian history but I’ve heard that in the second half of the nineteenth century Ethiopia went from being divided up between warlords to expanding its territory and being the only major African country to avoid being colonized. How did this happen?

I’ve always wondered this. Before modern technology with IV bags and treatment for Comas, how did they used to deal with them? Did people who go into comas usually die and how were they looked after?

I read a lot about Admirals transferring their flag, but what does it actually mean?

Looking at Europe, most countries' largest cities are also their capitals.

But with the United States, often the largest and most well known cities are not their respective states' capital. I think most Europeans like me were rather surprised when they first learned that NYC is not in fact the capital of New York State, and Los Angeles is not the capital of California, and they've never heard of those states' actual capitals Albany and Sacramento.

And looking at other American States, that seems to be a rather common thing: Seattle is not the capital of Washington, Miami is not the capital of Florida, Portland not the capital of Oregon, Houston not the capital of Texas and so on. There are exceptions of course, like Nashville in Tennessee or Providence in Rhode Island. But for the most part I think the first pattern applies: largest city ≠ state capital.

Is there an explanation for this?

I could very well be posting this to the wrong sub reddit so I'm sorry if this is the case but I figured this might be the best shot. Recently a friend and I were developing some new characters, he's usually the idea guy and I do the drawing we bounce back and forth and have a good time with it casually. I've been in a rut lately and honestly haven't done a lot of practicing what I'm not good at and wanted to work on doing more scenery and background work for these 2 new characters and figured the best way to do that would be to search for historically accurate depictions of life/architecture during the Edo period of Japan (original I know but it's a common ground interest for us both). I'm definitely not coming up with helpful resources so far, either finding sites that are completely in Japanese or if they do happen to be in English they seem to revolve around art and paintings from that period which are lovely but not what I'm looking for. It's been years since I've done research like this having been out of school for as long as I have been so I could really use some recommendations for websites that may help! I'd love to collect books as well but I don't have the spare funds for things like that just yet so I'll have to rely on free to access sites for now. Thank you

As we all know, the Balkans, Danube valley, France, Spain, Ukraine and Italy had a good climate and Agricultural productivity. But these regions didn't see advanced civilizations like the Egyptians, Babylonians or the Indus Valley or China.

Was there any particular reason for this? It would have been very interesting to see highly advanced Native European Civilizations, along with other Bronze Age Civilizations. This would have shaped the history of North Africa and Middle East, also, in a different way. And there might be no nomadic Indo-Iranian migrations into South Asia and the Iran. They might have settled those regions with Agricultural colonies, as an expansion of their Civilization in the Pontic region.

I am also interested in a Baltic Danubian Civilization built by a United Native Northern and Southern European groups.

I’ve been reading Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher and several white men are supposed to have become chiefs in various Native American tribes. This seems a rogue suggestion to me so I was wondering whether there was any truth to it.

I know this is something that has probalby been asked a lot of times on this subredit, but what are your theories about the sea people who debastated the bronze age civilizations? I find fascinating the idea of a mass invasion of sea traveling migrating people who sudently apear and disapear on our records.

There are very few turf houses remaning in Iceland, even though everyone lived in turf houses in the past. Why were all these houses torn down?

In contrast, a lot more historic houses were preserved in the Faroe Islands (though these are typically wooden houses with a turf roof).

In the mid 1600's right before the proto-industrial revolution, the Netherlands were the most advanced economies in the planet in terms of agricultural productivity, urbanization, commercial sophistication, banking ect... why did they fail to industrialize compared to the British?

So the most recent number of Jews killed during the holocaust is approximately 6 million. But how did Nazis determine who was a Jew and who wasn’t? As I understand it, they used their own definitions of “Jew” which followed the Nuremberg Laws (which were based on pseudoscience). So my question is, when Historians estimate the amount of Jews killed, do they use Nazi documents as a source? If they do, does that mean a lot of people categorized as Jews (but who were not Jews) are being erroneously included in that 6 million figure? Or do historians take this into consideration? Obviously whatever the case, it wouldn’t change the 11 million people who died during the holocaust, but I’m curious about the process of making estimates.

Were there not moments where a crusader poured boiling oil over someone and thought “Oh shit that’s sorta inhumane” or a Mongol soldier looked at a massive pyramid of skulls and thought “Crap I‘m not too proud of that”. There seems to have been so much brutality in history, so did it really take until the 20th century for people to come up with things which were considered unacceptable?