Went on an excellent tour of York minster (would thoroughly recommend) and was told this story. Couldn't find anything on Google about the baby, would be fascinated to know anything about this.

This narrative is seemingly useful for dawah and would hardly be questioned by premodern Islamic historians. Also, do we have surviving non-Islamic Arabian sources to present their perspective?

The wreck of K-129 was found at approximately 20,000 ft. The crush depth of most submarines is in the 5,000 ft range at maximum. Yet the wreck of K-129 was supposedly observed and photographed by the submarine USS Halibut.

This is of course all coming from Wikipedia. So is the wiki article just wrong, or was there some special observation sub used?

Are they in storage somewhere? Would the technology in those sections still be significant enough today that it has to be contained in secret?

I'm thinking of someone like today's Elon Musk or yesterday's Howard Hughes - someone with a lot of resources and an interest in technology. Did the US Government ever consider the possibility that these people could amass the resources to privately develop a nuclear weapon? And did they put any controls in place to prevent it?

Was the amount of money spent to develop nuclear weapons even possible for a private citizen to own?

His reasoning is that the grain imports that are coming in are for the in general population instead of adult males. And that it makes no sense for rations to only come in for adult males because the rest of the city would starve. He also states that the 46,000 apartment number is actually for total number of units, not buildings themselves, because 46,000 apartment buildings would cover every inch of the city. So with this information in hand, it seems very unlikely that Rome reached even half the population that is commonly thrown out there.

He also claims that Londinium peaked at 7,000 people and Constantinople never went above 100,000 until after 1500. Which are also numbers far below what is commonly estimated. What are the arguments for cities like Rome having a million or so residents when given this info?

After being freed from Mongol rule, Muscovy didn't have a large economy nor population and was surrounded by states of equal strength such as Novgorod.
Despite this, over the years they were able to somehow gain a much bigger population (with the population of Siberia being rather small so I guess it didn't contribute much to this statistic once colonised) and economy in order to finally establish the Russian Empire and become a major European power.
How did they achieve this?
And on a side note, why is the Russian population so big, despite being historically rather small, having 6 million in 1500 compared to then Castile's 7 million or France's 15 million?

There was no banks, do they stack all of their coins to a room? And how thieves can’t steal the money?

Thank you!

Most available books are monographs published between the 1920s and 1970s by Romanian authors later translated into English, which all echo a strong state-approved communist version of history and aren't all that useful as secondary literature. I know there are several anthologies dealing with (eastern) european countries and the collapse of their political systems (mostly), but unsure which have decent material on Romania in particular.

I recently got interested in medieval armor/weaponry, and one of the places I’m interested in is Ireland. However, it’s hard for me to find what’s actually historically accurate, and what’s overdramatized. So, historically, what did medieval Irish warriors/knights look like? Also what weapons did they use? Thanks!

Would the German Emperor talk to the President of France respectfully like to the Queen of Great Britain or more like to the Prime Ministre? And vice versa, would the republican leader have to accept monarchistic conceitedness due to republics being so outnumbered by monarchies back then? And how did contracts between monarchies "by the grace of God" and republics work?

Attn military historians— I have a very specific question for you.

My grandfather fought in World War II in europe (American Army, from NY). He didnt like to talk very much about the war, and all he ever said about what he did was that he “climbed telephone poles”. We even have a picture if him at the top of a telephone pole in uniform. I think he implied he was hanging communication wires...but I can’t imagine that that was all he ever did...

Anyway, I’m wondering if that description rings any bells? Does it indicate the specific kind of soldier or kind of work he did? If so, what kinds of activities did soldiers like that do? What units were they usually a part of? What sorts of missions were they generally engaged in? Were they likely exposed to combat? And if there were soldiers devoted entirely to this telephone pole task, what was the purpose?

Given the nature of the city I would assume Tenochtitlan would have been largely wood and thatch buildings, and rural villages I would also assume would be similar, or built from whatever was on hand. But would some place like Texcoco, Caracol or Cholula have been filled with wooden structures too? Or would they have used something more like brick and stone, maybe covered in adobe or plaster? All my attempts to look for what their day-to-day structures look like just give me the temple complexes or modern day rural native villages, nothing about what your regular Joe Schmoe might have lived in if he lived in a city.

The other day I was brooding about a fantasy serial i recently watched, arguing with myself that in an ill attempt to be "woke" they cast what would look more a New York average crowd than a north European Middle Age setting. The reason behind my lament was that regions and states should have been rather homogeneous since isolation should have brought to quasi-incest in hamlets and villages rather than marrying "outside" and inter ethnic promiscuity, thus fixing what we now could call types (which is how we could be able to recognize a German from a Spanish at a first glance and that would have worked fine until WWII).

But then I got myself thinking: was it really the case? At the verge of the Western Roman collapse, Rome itself should have been a hub of people from all over the Known World, thus including Abissinians and Numidians, and Levantine people, and lots of those "barbarian" people that were accepted as foederates and that maneuvered the last emperors as puppets. And we have people from Scandinavia and people from the Iranian regions, and they invade pretty much everywhere in the Western Roman Empire. So to speak, we have waves of both very fair hair/skinned AND very brown hair/skin tribes spreading everywhere in places where maybe there wasn't much homogeneity to begin with (because of slavery and commerce)..? I mean if i think to a "spaniard" type the first thing that comes to mind is not your typical Vandal or Visigoth...

​

Is this the case? Was the high Middle Ages in Western Europe a melting pot of faces and races that somehow normalized and got fixed maybe only much later? Or were they homogeneous like I expected them to be in my fantasy serial?

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan shared some similarities leading up to and during WWII. Both had strong ethno nationalist sentiment, both had massive militaries and became pseudo-military states, both had expansionist foreign policy (lebensraum/co-prosperity,) both engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Germany and Japan's entwining as Axis powers seems different from that of Italy and Germany. Obviously their geographic distance and the composition of wartime fronts kept them from fighting side by side in either theater. Also, Hitler considered the Japanese to only be "honorary" mensch.

Why were they allies?

Did they have much equipment, tech, or intelligence exchange? Did they exchange officers at any level? Did they engage in domestic diplomacy beyond being allies? Did they share food or material resources ( e.g. Japan's desperate need for oil?)

Aside from the failed Japanese campaigns in eastern Russia the Aleutian archipelago, what did Japan do for Germany and vice versa?

The black death, for instance, is said to have killed 1/3 of the population of Europe. Do we for example see cities decrease in size by a third for a while?

What was the Soviet’s idea of “the far off distant year of 1999” like?

I was listening to erb Tesla vs Edison and the last line directed at Edison "it's a shocking real story of a banker and you And if the people knew you stopped me from making power free They would curse the con Edison with every utility " I understand that the banker is reffering to JP Morgan who refused Tesla more funding after the initial 150k was not enough to build the wardenclyffe tower but did Edison have anything to do with its downfall?

In WWII footage you see artillery fire several rounds without them adjusting their aim.

Is this because of accuracy or is it simply a tactic?

For example, assuming the target is 3 km away, would the precision of shells be fine, but the shells are likely to land in a radius of say 50 m within the target's area and therefore not be too accurate, hence firing multiple?

Or, if you're trying to fire at a front, why do they do not, for example, adjust the aim by half a degree to presumably cover more area?