I’m asking cause when I read up on WW2 it says that Italy was a part of the Axis nations but that’s all my history book really went in depth to. Wanted to ask here cause I wanted to hear the info from real people.

For those who are curious, the Ever Victorious Army was an army that participated in fighting the Taiping Rebellion between 1860-1864. It was a Chinese force that was led by European/American officers. I have no idea if it was formed by the Qing government or grew organically from the foreign districts in Shanghai. From what limited information I know, the army only consisted of 5,000 men at it’s peak. This seems like a drop in the bucket in the scale of Chinese warfare where the number of combatants can often exceed 100,000 men. Some sources say that it essentially won the war and others do not mention it at all. So was the ‘ever victorious army’ really as important as it is made out to be, or is this opinion the result of romanticism/a Eurocentric worldview?

How many people are laid there? When were they placed? What are the requirements for soldiers to be laid to rest there? And finally, what is the ceremony like to place someone inside the Tomb?

Men are commonly depicted as wearing suits in shows about the era. Some pictures from this time depicted much of the same. How common was it to dress nice? Is this just result of the portrayal of rich white males?

A bit of context: I’m an American, so I’m a huge believer in the general good of people and things, governments are best when they govern least, yada yada yada. I also grew up with cats and knew people who had dogs, and one of the things I learned is that it you’re good to domesticated animals, they’re good to you. Also the deer in my area are about my size and we don’t seem to want to pummel the shit out of each other. However, I don’t live rurally so I don’t see bears, cougars etc.

What I don’t understand is that when an elephant is used historically, it’s taken from the herd, broken, sold, trained, whatever. OK, fair enough. But isn’t that a bit too much effort to train an animal to work with other animals when it already would?

I feel like if you were an industrious prince near the equator, you could hire men to figure out how to increase crop yields, tax grain and vegetables for human consumption, and habituate elephants to live year-round in the edges of your capital city. Keeping them out of the center will be another problem though, so I don’t know. But I feel like it would be very daunting for the enemy to besiege your city if it’s surrounded by wild elephants that grew comfortable with it.

Add to that, it seems like you would have to spend nothing on trainers or particular equipment. Just be judicious with what you have, and see dividends.

But clearly this didn’t happen. Why?

Did theatre critics exist in Shakespeare’s time? If so, what was considered good stage acting? Would it have resembled contemporary acting in any respect, or would it have been completely different?

I am puzzled by how Shakespeare’s plays would have been appreciated during his lifetime. On the one hand, they rely extensively on wordplay and poetic turn of phrase. On the other hand, the acoustics in an open-air theatre such as the Globe must have been terrible, and I have the impression that many members of the audience would have been less interested in the performance than in socializing, eating, or being seen. Under those kinds of conditions, what kind of performance would have been considered to be a high-quality one: would simply reciting the lines in fidelity to the script and loud enough to be heard be enough, or were actors expected to emote, occupy a character, and use techniques comparable to modern stage actors?

In World War 1, I know it was an enormous feat to gain small amounts of ground in WW1, and that great losses were required for the feat of gaining land, so what would you say is an acceptable ground gained:men lost ratio for WW1 generals?

1. Illyrians inhabited most of mainland Greece
2. Alexander the Great was Illyrian
3. Illyrians made up more than half of Alexander’s army

As i’m not that learned about ancient Greece i’m not sure if these are true. At first glance I think their false, but I want to be sure.

So I’m “watching” (more like skipping to the interesting scenes) the Thai lakorn/historical drama Sri Ayodhaya and in one episode, this one professor said that Ayutthaya was an incredibly wealthy and powerful kingdom and the city itself was also very well defended and wealthy too due to Ayutthaya being an extremely crucial and important trading city. In the latest episode, one other visiting professor also states that King Ekkathat commanded a large army and the city itself was very well defended.

If that’s the case, then how was it that Hongsawadee/Burma was able to sack and pillage Ayutthaya and burn it to the ground? I mean, shit, according to this one article/book that I read, people at the time saw the sacking of Ayutthaya as the literal apocalypse, and I could easily understand why. If I was Ayutthayan/Siamese and I was alive at the time and I saw Hongsawadee troops burn houses down and loot everything in sight (IIRC, some Hongsawadee soldiers even looted Buddha statues that were made of gold), I’d think that the world was ending, especially if I was led to believe up until that point that Ayutthaya was one of the greatest cities in the world that was forged by the Heavens or whatever.

So how was it that the Burmese were able to take and burn Ayutthaya to the ground? I heard that it was due to the political instability of the royal court of Ayutthaya along with incompetent rulers and power struggles/corruption but is that it?

I'd also be interested in other 'mahayana' developments beyond the sort of 'low Buddhaology to high Buddhaoloy', and any external influences on this, such as say Hellenism . I understand that this is a massive question, and I'd be happy to get a good answer about any aspect of it. Thanks a lot.

I am talking about the areas outside of the Arabian Peninsula (Levant, Mesopotamia etc.)

As far as I understand, Benjamin Huntsman still produced steel by putting iron with high carbon content with iron with low carbon content into a crucible, and heat them so the carbon content balance out to produce crucible steel.

His contribution, again as far as I understand, is that he use coke as fuel for the furnace, which help achieve high enough temperature for the material to melt completely.

Did I understand correctly? Is Benjamin Huntsman really considered an important figure in the history of steel making? Why?

I remember when I fired my M1 Garand without hearing protection I couldn’t hear right for at least a day. Then I wondered, how could soldiers in the past ever get anything done if they’d only hear the constant ringing of tinnitus? Was their any crude hearing protection or was deaf veterans commonplace.

I am supposing the use of the sling goes back to the neolithic or earlier. It kind makes sense for a region and has a lot of little stones lying around. And I can see where it could be useful in warfare when used by a skilled person against unarmored foes.

But, I would guess the bow/arrow would probably be more effective and damaging than a sling.

And, how effective could a sling be against an armored opponent? Even Persian light infantry had wicker shields and some kind of head gear that offered some protection. Greek armies were heavily armored. Roman soldiers were all armored with helmets and shield. Yet slings with lead shot was being used into the Roman period.

Why was this and how effective was the sling as a weapon?

The hookah is an ancient invention that predates the arrival of tobacco in the Old World, and as such, was quite possibly invented for use with cannabis and/or opium originally. China has been actively trading with the peoples of Central, Western, and Southern Asia since the hookah's invention, and doubtless had a steady stream of visitors along the Silk Road for centuries who were hookah smokers. So I have a hard time imagining that this invention was never brought to China before the modern era, especially seeing how addictive tobacco is, to say nothing of opium.

Moreover, China has a similar tea-drinking social culture as the Arab world, Persia, and India, which. All of these tea-drinking social settings, including China's, readily adopted tobacco smoking as soon as Europeans introduced tobacco to the Old World. In China this mostly takes the form of cigarettes, but in southern China I frequently saw people smoking water pipes made of bamboo. So the idea of using a water pipe to cool and concentrate tobacco smoke was not unknown to the Chinese.

It seems to me that the hookah should have long ago found a place in Chinese culture, and been fairly popular there at certain times and places. But this never happened, as far as I know. What historical factors might have hindered the spread of the hookah this far east?

From my understanding, Catholicism in the Netherlands was banned/perecuted after the Eighty Year's War, but today around 20% of the Netherlands' population is still Catholic (and was 40% in the 1960s). How did this large Catholic minority remain, a minority that other northern European Protestant countries don't have? Why didn't these Catholics flee to other Catholic countries like Belgium?

Mexican convervatives famously invited Maximilian of Habsburg to rule Mexico because they wanted an european monarch. Readding about this faction it seems obvious that for them there was no other valid source of authority.

I would like to understand better this worldview.

They must have known that there were plenty of countries not ruled by European Monarchs, like the Venetian Republic, the Ottoman Empire, Iran, China, Japan and more recently France and the United States, and yet they rejected all these examples while other factions championed them as examples.

Was that simply stubbornness or was there more to it?