The munitions - weapons, muskets, cannons, bullets, cannonballs, etc. - used by the Colonists during the American Revolutionary war, how were they sourced?

Were they manufactured in the colonies? Were they originally British munitions that were lost, stolen, or otherwise acquired by the Colonists? Where they sourced from American allies before and during the war? Maybe all of the above and then some?

In order to give greater context, I'll explain what prompts my question. One of the claims that Second Amendment zealots like to use is the notion that an armed public could somehow rise up overnight and either fend off the nations military or otherwise be a capable enough force to mutiny just how the colonists did. And while I understand the thought process behind this argument, I feel like the logistics of carrying out such a task in modern times is, well, a pipe dream. When I think about it, I find it hard to believe that an unorganized public could realistically pull down their 2nd Amendment acquired rifle off the wall and then compete with a modern standing army in terms of the munitions needed to successfully revolt militarily. I'm wondering if that truly is how the colonists did it, or if, in some sense the colonists ended up using British supplied munitions against the British.

Note that I'm not asking about the Second Amendment matters in particular, that was just what made me want to ask about the historical context of how the colonists obtained munitions to wage war.

Hopefully that question makes sense. Thanks in advance for any discussion.

I imagine their lives were much more physically demanding than today so they’d be naturally more fit than us. But for example the military did they train physically other than tactics and combat?

I know that Kings and Queens in Europe moved around in their kingdoms living in one estate of the nobility for a certain time frame. I know this happened for a good few centuries as most kings did not have just one settled estate, and they lived with higher nobility. When did this mobility stop? I always believed this stopped with the palace of Versailles being used as a more permanent location with the nobility moving into the palace for a certain time in order for the king to watch over them secretly. Did this cease of mobility start with Versailles? Or before that?

I will say I MIGHT have the state wrong, it could've been Iowa. But I've searched for both states histories on roads and I cannot find anything to say either state's first roads were built by private citizens independent of the government. I feel like he is just making this up to try and prove my semi-pro government stance wrong. If someone could help enlighten me on the history of paved roads in America, that would be swell.

Watching Peaky Blinders. One of the main characters told someone to stop drinking a liquid meant to calm him down. He said it was the same thing that was given to the British soldiers in the trenches to stop them masturbating.

Is there any truth in this? Was anything given to British soldiers?

I've heard it said that the relationship was more like an agreement to stay out each countries attempts to conquer and just simple trading, but that interpretation doesn't sit well with me. The Nazi's were obviously raging racists and at least at the very top wanted to dominate the whole planet, but admittedly mostly Europe. The Nazi's never even tried to have and maintain such a strong bond with any other nation, not even with white ones who were much more vital to winning the war, and as far as I know they never planned to betray Japan either. if Japan was successful in taking over the southeast Asia and especially China the Nazi's plans would always be impeded. The Nazi ideology should make all of this impossible but even behind closed doors their were high ranking Nazi's who gushed about how amazing the Japanese are, and since it was classified those words could not even be used for propaganda.

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On the other hand The Japanese didn't care at all about The Nazi's goals and in fact must have known if Japan succeeded then the Nazi's would eventually have to turn of them, due to their stated ideology and goals. Since the Nazi's were almost completely focused on Europe I doubt they ever spent much of their military resources on the Japanese efforts, along with the colossal amount of resources Japan must have reaped from razing China, I don't understand their reasoning for the're relationship with the Nazi's either. They too behind closed doors had military members gushing about the Nazi's. So can somone please help me make sense of this? I realize I'm oversimplifying the details of all of this but honestly my post is already too long.

I get that "fugitive slave act BAD" but personally I think it was a necessary evil to pass the compromise. Additionally, I've heard that one criticism of him is that he wasn't a president who would take the necessary big duck actions and was too neutral and was trying to hard to be a people pleaser, but goddamn the man was trying his best.

Obviously, they wouldn't just give up their land, and the great powers can't just officially have the land.

What was the backstory behind the partition? How did the commonwealth get wiped out of existence
just by 3 great powers?

I was watching Roman Empire on Netflix. In season 1 episode 2 (minute 14:41) it's stated that in 37 AD Caligula fell seriously ill. His illness is called "cerebral fever" and the documentary portrays it as a comatose state. It's also said that it took Caligula three months to wake up and finally recover.

How did he survive three months in a coma at a time when modern artificial nutrition techniques were not available?

I know that disagreement on the nature of God was behind lots of conflicts during these times, but I have not heard of a group that have outright doubted or denied the existence of God. So are there records of atheism, of groups or individuals, during the Middle Ages?

Hi there.

Any historians out there that are gathering source material digitally in an organised, searchable way for future use?

Can anyone recommend any software for use on Windows 10 PC, Mac or iOS that offers a good set of tools to help researchers gather various source material together in one place and organise it effectively so it can be rapidly searched and sorted?

I need it to accept photos, scanned documents and writing. But also would like it to let me add a webpage and include a snippet with a link to the original source.

Must allow annotation to be applied not just to each piece of content overall, but to sections of it. I.e add a note to a sentence found on the third paragraph of a scanned page.

Also needs to allow me to add titles, descriptions etc to each item.

Plus it must offer a tagging and/or categorisation system so content can be organised or grouped around similar themes.

And it would need to have a decent working search tool built in.

The applications I’ve found via several Google searches haven’t really turned up anything that looks suitable. And what I have found appears to be quite old and without any current development/ updates going on. It would be good to find an app that is quite current so it conforms to modern usability requirements and will definitely work on at lease one of the platforms I listed above.

Any advice or pointers would be welcome!! Thanks for your time!

I understand that the crew would likely be much smaller than the ship they would be boarding, but would they ever board those ships for provisions or ammunition for a deck gun? The merchant ships often did have merchant marines that had combat training in that case. So I was wondering if it was worth it to board the merchant ships as a U-Boat crew. Also, was surrender ever an available option for the sailors on those ships?

When I read about the Eastern Front in World War 2 it is the most maddening thing in the world how seemingly every possible source was screaming at Stalin that the Germans were about to attack and that they should prepare themselves right now to absorb and counter such a blow, but he seemed intent on writing off such information as some kind of conspiracy to trick the USSR into a war with the Nazis. It's so frustrating and seemingly illogical I wonder if it's quite the whole story sometimes.

It's one of those things that I've kind of assumed had very bad effects on the Soviet Union's ability to react to the invasion and might be one of the reasons for the shocking losses of men, materiel and territory in the first year of the invasion, but I also remember hearing the same thing about the military purges in the years leading up to the war and how recent historiography has shifted away from the notion that the purges were particularly damaging to the Red Army or account for much of why the Germans were able to advance so quickly. I wonder if the same thing applies to Stalin's response, or lack thereof.

So how badly did Stalin's refusal to believe the information given to him actually effect the initial Soviet war effort, and were there any major steps that could have been taken that seem like they could have significantly helped if he did believe a German attack was imminent? I know that a lot of his actions, ie the advance into Poland and the Baltics, as well as the Winter War, were undertaken specifically because he foresaw a German attack eventually and needed to shore up the main vectors of attack, has Stalin's overall refusal to believe that a German attack was about to come been overblown and that he may actually have taken some pretty major steps to deal with that eventuality?

I just find it all fascinating.

During lockdown I’ve been in Wikipedia wormholes surrounding the Egyptians, the Persians and the Greeks, but their history all seemed to to have started at roughly the same time frame. No longer than 3000 BCE ago.

I understand that ancient literature gets rarer the older it gets, but do we yet have any hypotheses as to what humans were up to before the classic societies began officially documenting?

It’s amazing to think how little time we’ve really been going on for.

I know the world ain't black and white — good and bad, but if we devise a gradient scale and put the likes of Mao, Stalin, and Hitler on one end and those of Jadwiga, Alexander, and Sejong on the other, then where would Napoleon fall on it?

The thing is, I learned in school that he was a prodigy in terms of leadership, tactics, and strategies, and that he fought for a noble cause; freedom, equality, and brotherhood.

Nevertheless, whenever I read about him, I often get the feeling that the author of whatever source I'm checking out has a negative disposition towards the old Bonaparte. He was, after all, persecuted twice, and in stories such as Monte Cristo it is made obvious that Bonapartism was considered highly malevolent by the powers that be — capital treason in fact.

So what gives? Am I seeing things, or is his benevolence severely questioned? Or am I just out of the loop on a certain consensus among historians?

I hope you can clarify this for me, guys. Cheers.

Hey, im not sure if this the right place to ask, but From December 2019 i start keeping records of what's happening on the covid 19, newspapers, news, pics around my college before lockdown, how the whole public opinion changed around the topic, my own feelings, i write dairies since I'm 11, im now 25, i still write, with grate details (musics, movies, major events, pics, and a lot). I googled many archives that we can upload anything to keep it for the future, im still working on that, but i wanted to ask you as an experts, what should I do besides that, any tips or 101 lead, im from a place that it rare to have internet access or data, and no one around is giving me any help, so what you suggest. Thank you and sorry for my if my English is bad.

We often read about the dismal circumstances in Western Europe during the Dark Ages. That people had no idea about the origins of crumbling Roman cities, and assumed that giants must have built them with magic, thousands of years earlier.

How come people lived in mud and shit and total ignorance, if only 1500km away there was a full-blown Roman Empire in Byzantium, retaining all of its advanced civilisation? Surely there were travellers both from Byzantium and from Western Europe visiting each other?

I think I’ve read about barbarian kings or their envoys visiting the Emperor in Byzantium to pay tribute. Surely they saw the advanced city and the technical marvels? Did no one think to bring some of that knowledge home and do something with it?

There must have been witnesses to the situation in all echelons that know what happened. And they would have told about it after the war. So how come historians are still debating whether it was 1) because of Logistics. The German army needed a 'halt&reorganize&resupply'. 2) Deliberately to let the BEF escape on purpose and make peace with Britain more likely. 3) Hitler actually liked the British. They were high on his race pecking order. 4) It was actually not possible for the Germans to attack and succeed for purely military reasons.

How can there be so many hypotheticals when hundreds of people knew the real circumstances?

After they left how well was it maintained? I know there were still tensions with Scotland so was it still maintained for border protection or was it abandoned?

During the late Republic and early Empire as far as I know plenty of recruits still came from Italy and other provinces that had been incorporated in the empire for quite some time. Why and how did this change to the point where the army was so dominated by Germans, both within the rank and file to high level commanders of dubious loyalty, that they could seriously threaten the Imperial government? What was the cause of Romans avoiding military service during this time period when in earlier centuries they were much more likely to join up?

Hi,

I've beem watching a lot of the YT channel Historia Civilis, and been learning a lot about Roman Republic politics. I know once a Roman was elected to the position of Quastor, Aedile, Praetor or even Consul he would be a senator for life. And I was wondering whether this also applied to Tribunes of the Plebs and Plebeian aediles, which were not technically magistrates, whatever that means, haha. Are there any other roles that could lead to Senate membership?

I have been looking for an answer for quite a while, but the internet seems to be quite vague to the composition of the Senate. The only thing I could find was a throwaway line on Wikipedia withour a source.