In addition to the practicalities involved, I'm wondering about the political and socioeconomical aspects of these events, and the interrelations between the wealthy families who employed composers and musicians. If I'm not being specific enough, let me know and I'll try to elaborate my question.

Wikipedia has some poorly sourced claims about French atrocities during the Malagasy Uprising.

The colonial authorities sought to fight on the physical and psychological fronts and engaged in a variety of terror tactics designed to demoralize the population. The French military force carried out mass execution, torture, war rape, torching of entire villages, collective punishment and other atrocities such as throwing live Malagasy prisoners out of an airplane (death flights).

Can anybody give me more information about the validity and scale of these atrocities?

Given that Argentina received millions of Italian immigrants starting roughly in the same time frame as most of the Italian immigration to the U.S., and taking into account that most of the present Argentine population is of Italian descent, did any Mafia-related activities migrate to or develop in Argentina as well?

If not, why would that be so and the difference between what happened in America.

I’m speaking for the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. They’ve been strong for a long time, but they couldn’t come close to inventing any of the modern important technologies that Western European White people are known for. Also they didn’t manage to colonize as many places. Why is this? Was the culture holding them back?

Hello sub, this is my first question here, wish me luck ;)

I was reading a book by Colette Beaune this week. She is a well-respected French historian specialized in 15th century French history. The book in question (Colette Beaune, Jeanne d’Arc. Vérités et légendes, Paris, Perrin, 2008) is a watered-down version of a scientific biography she published in 2004, and as such doesn't have as many footnotes as her other works.

One claim she makes in the book, which struck me as odd, was that "25% of women giving birth to their first child died in childbirth". This number struck me as excessively high. In the book's context, it refers to the first third of 15th century France, during the Hundred Years War.

This statistic is cited in two occasions, the first one regarding the fact that Joan of Arc attributed some of the voices she heard to Saint Margaret, and the second one regarding the fact that Joan saw her older sister die as she was giving birth, and that the event traumatized her.

Searching this subreddit, I've come across several well documented responses by u/sunagainstgold which argues for much lower rates, citing Roger Schofield's 1986 study, which puts this figure at 1-2% before 1600 in England and Sweden.

My question would therefore be : did Colette Beaune made a mistake in her book (by an order of magnitude of 10)? Or could this be a case where French historiography has developped a consensus which is vastly different from that of Anglo-Saxon historiography? Some French historians have a tendency of insulating themselves from historical production from other (neighbouring) countries.

A lot of people probably ask you what could have the Axis powers done to win WW2. But I'm wondering what disastrous mistakes the Allies could have done to lose the war, in your opinion.

I noticed that Englishmen and their armies of this period are often depicted as physically weak and maybe even malnourished in comparison to the robust Viking and Norman invaders. They're shown as lacking unit cohesion and as being easily steamrolled by armies with high morale. How much of this can be explained by England simply not being a united nation at the time, thus individual lords lacked large pools of manpower to fend off concentrated invasions? Or were English defenders really that disorganized/weak?

Especially city-states that were surrounded by countries that are historically known for unification wars, or annexations, or colonizations, imperialisms, invasions, etc.

On top of my head:

San Marino, Andorra, Singapore, Brunei, Qatar, Monaco, Liechtenstein, Bahrain, Kuwait...

I just watched a video about Italy's history and how it went through a unification war, and I was like... so did they just ignore that one small city...? And how it was conquered by foreign empires, and so did those empires ignore San Marino and only conquered the Italian region?

I know they managed to survive through different reasons, I want to know about them all.

I was reading some old British texts and was struck by how euphemistically the writers refer to sex. It's always "laid with" or "spent a night" or in a lot of cases it's entirely skipped over and they just talk about some child that came out of nowhere. Online Etymology Dictionary says that "sex" referred the gender binary and is derived from "sexual intercourse," which was a euphemism that arrived in the 1700s. Was sex just conflated with marriage?

From all accounts it was a blood bath, at least for the initial waves of attack. Did the soldiers in the front lines know what that mission curtailed, and how were they chosen? The commanders knew what they were asking their men to do as the beaches were heavily fortified by German soldiers. This strategy of sending in human bodies to neutralize an enemy position would never be used today. Why was this tactical strategy of mass carnage justified back then?

Hitler was like any Nationalistic leader. He wanted the best for Germany. After all that Germany went through because of the treaty of Versailles. He did what he did for the wellness of the Germans(except the holocaust). So why did he target Jews and if the holocaust didn't occur would his image today be better than what it is today?

I know, both are very important and are like pillars on which civilization does stand. But which is the more important one, and on what basis?

I stayed in Edinburgh, Scotland for a few days last year. While there I climbed Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano near Holyrood Palace. The wikipedia entry to Arthur's Seat says that in 1884 famous mountain climber Émile Rey visited Edinburgh to climb the mountain and, "local tradition stating that before doing so he estimated it would take much of the day to reach the top."

​

Don't get me wrong, it's not a brisk walk up the mountain, but it's really not that difficult. It took me maybe an hour and a half to get to the top. I would imagine that in 1884, people didn't have the same amount of free time, so the trails might not have been marked as well, and the various steps wouldn't have been built yet. But even without those thing, I don't think it would have taken much longer to reach the top.

​

My questions are:

1. Did Émile Rey climb the much steeper cliff face side of the mountain, which seems like it would take a very long time to climb, or
2. Did Émile Rey and other mountain climbers of the time take a long time to climb mountains because they were taking notes of the wildlife and vegetation, making sketches of the various landscapes, etc, or,
3. Was Émile Rey very mistaken on the actual size of the mountain and way overestimated the time required, and local tradition is poking fun of the famous Italian mountain climber who though it would take much of the day to reach the top of a big hill?

I’ve read the Crusaders assimilated into the native cultures of the Levant, wearing turbans and jellabiyas while also issuing Arabic coinage. Did they ever form a distinct hybridized culture in their new holdings?

I'm sure everyones seen a movie where 2 champions or heroes square off against each other in trial by combat during the middle of a battle where everyone just kind of stops the killing for 5 minutes to watch.

Did these really happen during the middle of battles in the thick of everything?

How come the ships that arrived from Europe didn't bring rats and fleas carrying yersinia pestis? Or if they did, why wasn't there a black plague outbreak in the colonies?