Student looking for help here, thought this was the subreddit with most experience in this field and hope this post is allowed. Is it a matter of having a solid understanding of how various events are interconnected or is it just muscle memory?

The Kingdom of Morocco formally recognized the United States in 1777. Why did they do this? What did Morocco have to gain from recognizing the United States so early? Did the fledgling United States benefit at all from this early recognition?

were they really enemies?

It hit me the other night the Ottoman Empire had access to the seas, albeit they may not have been a major nautical power (I don't exactly know)

I suppose the Spaniards may have tried to block the Straits of Gibraltar, but was there ever any talk of an Ottoman New World colony?

Only about 3% of people in Louisiana list French as a spoken language in the state, while that number is in the 90% range in Quebec.

Living in Canada, we see how strongly Quebecois protect their culture and language, so I am curious

Could you explain to me what the deal with Mandatory Palestine was? They made promises to the jews (Balfour declaration, etc) as well as to the arabs but only managed to increase the turmoil

I know that Anglo-Saxon combat was largely based in shield wall tactics, whereas a blend of cavalry and infantry/archers was customary for Norman armies at the time of Hastings. However, I'm struggling to find sources pertaining to the use of footmen who weren't archers in the Norman army.

Would they have used shield wall tactics as well? And post conquest, would the Anglo-Norman army have utilized shield walls? I know that they added dismounted knights to the infantry ranks and that infantry typically fought defensively, but don't know what tactic was utilized.

Prussia, its other German speaking allies, and Italy defeated Austria in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. No one came to Austria's aid other than France but it was too little too late. Fallout from the Austro-Prussian War led to Franco-Prussian War in 1870 which Prussia also won. With Austria and its only major ally defeated, it seemed like no one would or could stop Prussia's unification of the German speaking lands including Austria. So why did they let Austria remain independent?

Horse armor (barding) was apparently developed extensively in the ancient world. It was used by the feared cataphracts of the Sassanids, and later also Greek cataphracts.

So if barding was so common in the East for such a long time, why wasn’t it common in medieval Europe?

I know it became common in the late Middle Ages, but I haven’t seen any sources showing the normans or other European heavy cavalry of the early/high Middle Ages using barding in any form.

So in ancient and medieval times ladders were used to climb up walls during sieges. Who would go first? Going first seems like certain death. Was it really so, or does it sound more dangerous than it was?

I'm curious as to if there were forts or towns with previously Russian names that the Amercians renamed to sound more English. And if so, was there any backlash from the people?

I’m doing a paper on the differences in government, law and administration in the Assyrian Empire and the Achaemenid Persian empire so I was wondering if anyone knew any good primary sources for things like that

Alexander conquered huge amounts of land in the east but surely areas such as modern Afghanistan/Iran would have been of little economic value?

From my understanding, Alexander faced mutiny’s from soldiers wanting to return home so would it have not made sense to end his military campaigns in the middle east?

Why didn’t Alexander focus his attention on Europe after defeating the Perisan Empire?

We currently have the Greast Generation, Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, all of who were born in the 20th century, and Generation Z, who were born in the 21st century.

But did "generations" exist before that? Like were the 1700s divided into generations as well, and characteristics applied to each one? Or is this a relatively new concept in the world?

I understand that Islam is based off of a great deal of Abrahamic teachings and story, but were most Arabs (Particularly Mohammed and those around Mecca) following Judaism or Christianity and Islam just branched off? Just confused how Islam became Abrahamic, versus Christianity where Jesus was a Jew and branched off Judaism.

I have heard many historians and politican debate the Southern Strategy and how the two parties "switched". Is there any truth to this? Was this actually planned or was it just a coinsidence?

In the sci-fi series The Expanse, the main character James Holden, when talking about an alien "being", and how they cannot start to understand it, says something along the line of this: "When the european tallships first arrived in the new world, the natives literally couldn't see them coming. It was so out of their expieriences beforehand, their brains couldn't process what they saw amd simply blocked it out." Now my question is, is there any evidence to this claim? Any sources or native stories mentioning this? They just thought they appeared out of thin air? Or is it just a psychological phenomenon and they built this story around it, or is it entirely pulled out of the writers' side on which they sit?

Ok, long story short, but still not that short. My grand-grand-father, who was born in the region of current Lativia and served under Tsar, but was of German heritage has most likely died during the end of the second world war in 1945.

When the war started in 1939, he had lived in Danzig (Gdansk) where he found refuge after the 1917 revolutions took place in Russia. In 1939, he decided to flee the city upon the news of Nazis approaching, since his wife was Polish. They escaped to Riga as he had some family there. In 1940 the Soviet Union has de facto annexed the baltic states and he had to weight the evil of staying in the Stalinist Russia where given his loyalist heritage he would most likely be executed, against the evil of coming back to the Nazi State. He had chosen the latter and once again he was on the run (with his wife, daughter and three sons) back to Danzig. When they arrived in Reich my grandmother and her brothers were given careful official examination of their racial profile (sic!) and luckily for them, they were determined to be Aryan (my grandmother has blue eyes and very light blonde hair). The family was given some category of German Citizenship, but it meant that my grand-grand father had to be conscripted into Wehrmacht. He was sent to the Eastern Front after Operation Barbarossa took place.

There the memories of grandmother get somewhat unclear. She claims that he was a POW in the Soviet Union, but thanks to his native-like Russian was able to escape all the way from Siberia and get through the frontline back to Germany. Supposedly, he wrote down every detail of his master escape but his wife burnt it all up when the communist regime was established in Poland out of fear to be arrested (wow, it could have been a great read). My grandma recollects that the last time she had seen her father was during the Soviet siege of Danzig in 1945. She claims he got a very short military pass and was in the great rush because he was afraid he would be treated as AWOL if he is not back in his unit on time. That is the very last piece of information about my grand-grand-father that our family possesses.

My grandmother was 10 when her father disappeared, he was absent for most of her extremely stressful childhood. She does not know where and when he died. She is 85 now and I really feel the obligation to get some information about him before she passes away. I have read that the German Federal archive has some form that allows inquiring for specific people. Maybe some people in-here do have experience in gathering such information. Where should I start the search? Thanks in advance for any kind of help and for even reading this very post.