I am looking for a book detailing an overview of Western/European history. Is Norman Davies’s book EUROPE a good start? I checked the book list and couldn’t find anything regarding this particular request nor Davies’s book. Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

I read this passage from Chapter 2 of The End of Policing by professor of sociology, Alex S. Vitale:

America’s changing economic realities have played a central role in this process as well. Christian Parenti has shown how the federal government crashed the economy in the 1970s to stem the rise of workers’ power, leaving millions out of work and creating a new, mostly African American permanent underclass largely excluded from the formal economy. [39] In response, government mobilized at all levels to manage this new “surplus population” through intensive policing and mass incarceration. The policing of poor and nonwhite communities became much more intense. As unemployment, poverty, and homelessness increased, government, police, and prosecutors worked together to criminalize huge swaths of the population aided by ideologies like the broken-windows theory and the superpredator myth.

[39] Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2000).

I couldn't find any other information on the internet about this claim. I've ordered Lockdown America to find out more, but it will take a week to arrive.

Why is Edward the First (hammer of the scots) referred to as such when technically Edward the Confessor is the first king of England by that name?

Good afternoon. I'm currently studying the third Seminole war and more specifically Seminole Camps in central FL Fort Meade area. Has any one studied this much and if so is there any good literature I can get my hands on. Or a map would be amazing....I'm familiar with Oponay and his ranch along Lake Hancock . Just trying to learn as much as I can about this history. Thanks for your time.

I've mostly seen them talked about through films, which are notoriously unreliable sources of information.

What are the real facts behind them?

I’m rewatching Ken Burns Civil War, the episode exploring the Battle of Gettysburg and they mention 23 year old General George Custer. How was it possible being a 23 year old General?

To my understanding, the Golden Bull of 1356 determined that there will be 7 electors. So how did succession work in the HRE before? Did they just pass from father to son like other hereditary countries do? Or do they still do some sort of elections and it just happened that the throne got passed in the same dynasty (Ottonian, Salian, Hohenstafen)

From certain passages in the Desert Christians by William Harmless, I got a striking sense of the bleakness and despair which hangs around late antiquity. Something about that fascinates me. I would read Gibbon’s decline and fall, but it seems a little antiquated, but I’m not interested in something like Peter Brown’s work on the subject, which I’ve heard downplays the real pathos involved in the decay of the empire. Basically, everything I’ve heard about is is something along the lines of: hey, you know those so-called dark ages? They weren’t so dark after all! And that’s fine, but I can’t believe that there was literally no retrogression involved.

I guess I’m looking for something which provides a good picture of everyday life in the collapsing empire, as it happened.

I'm curious who conquered the area of Blackpool after the Roman Empire fell. Part of my family is from there and it would be really cool to know some history of the area.

I was aware that WWII had the biggest overall casualties compared to WWI (mostly Russia/China I think), which is unsurprising given the bigger scale and length of the conflict, but I was surprised to find out that military casualties for the UK in the first were around 900k and somewhere around 300k for the second.

This may be a really simple question, but doesn’t seem obvious to me, as in both wars we were ‘throwing everything we had’, I had expected the figures to be much higher in WWII.

Is it down to the type of warfare, not being so reliant on troop numbers in WWII, problems with the numbers, or perhaps the UK just wasn’t able field the same manpower/resources as before?

Thanks!

There are many types of named Japanese sword designs. Most of them are curved and designed for drawing cuts. I know that very early swords like the chokuo where straight but tachis, uchigatanas and katanas are all famously curved.

Meanwhile the rest of the world saw a huge variety of blades designed for many purposes, and before they mostly disappeared European swords seem to focus more and more on thrusting. As far as I know Japanese sword-crafting didn't have this focus on thrusting attacks like you see in longswords, estocs, sidewords, rapiers, etc. Europe still had curved swords but they were for cavalry.

So were katanas et al mostly curved because they weren't actually used very often and were mostly decorative and ceremonial? Or where they curved because they were seldom used on foot? Or were they curved because armor protection didn't necessitate thrusting weapons? Perhaps a little of all of that?

When looking for paintings of Joan of Arc her appearance seems to be all over the place other than that she's depicted as white and rather slim, but her hair color, facial features and height seem to vary. There also doesn't seem to be a contemporaneous painting of her, so I was wondering, what do we know about how Joan of Arc actually looked like?

Much like what the title says, what did Northerners generally think of Robert E. Lee during and immediately after the end of the Civil War? I understand that for many now adays, Lee is held to a higher esteem than most Confederate leaders, but im curious if that is a newer view, or one that has been held for some time.

I am writing a story where the MC is a slave in the American revolution and i plan to have a romance between him and a woman meets while he is stationed in a village as a slave soldier trying to earn freedom and i really need to know what would happen if they had a child or if it was found out they were dating or intimate in a way(This is a copy and paste someone suggested to ask this question on here instead and i don't wanna rewrite this)