I will try my best to focus my thoughts into the single question above, but here's what is confusing me about the Bronze Age:

Bronze is an alloy of two metals, two metals that are relatively rare (at least compared to the successor metal of iron).

In order to make bronze you have to get the ratio just right, you can't just throw in a 1:1 mix of copper and tin into your smeltery and call it a day.

Bronze is weaker than iron.

So why is it that even though iron was more common than copper and tin, stronger than bronze, simpler to produce (i.e. only needing to source one metal for your forge), yet we still had a roughly 2000 year span of time where bronze was king?

I know iron has a higher melting point than copper and tin, but is that pretty much the reason why it took so long to switch to iron? Because we couldn't make our fires hot enough?

New movie from Predator franchise, "Prey", is settled in 1719 America and almost all characters are from Comanche tribe, there is also full Comanche dubbing. I know next to nothing about Comanche culture and history, so I am curious, while I fully realize that "Prey" is action movie, not documentary, exactly how accurate is it?

Reading was an important part of daily life in medieval monasteries but what exactly did they read? Did most monasteries have copies of the first encyclopedia-like works such as Pliny's Natural History and Isidore's Etymologiae? I'm very curious which works medieval monks study for general knowledge of the time.

The Jutes have always remained a mystery to me, I know that they supposedly settled in Kent, the isle of Wight, and Hampshire, but what actually happened to them, and why are they not genetically detectable in the modern English population (or at least we just haven't found that signature yet). Were they just overpowered by the Angles and Saxons? So maybe they got absorbed into the population at the time?

With the state of the Japanese navy wouldn’t it have been possible to just surround the island and wait for all troops onshore to be to weak to fight?

What would happen to Christians, that aren’t Catholics or mainstream Protestants, and instead have entire separate beliefs? Would they be persecuted because they’re not considered Christian/Atheist, or entirely because of how they respected the regime? Like what happened to Quakers, Amish/Mennonites, Unitarian-Universalists, or Mormons?

To clarify more, I want to know if it was part of the overall plan, to let Germany be on the offensive, or if an offensive "just didn't happen".

Hello everyone hope you're all doing well!

I was watching Gunsmoke of all things, I know not an accurate retelling of the west, but it did prompt a question; Was the wild west Era as vicious as they say?

And if not does know why it was depicted as being so violent, like what was it derived from?

I'm assuming there's some grain of truth to some of the stories.

Thank you to everyone in advance who takes the time to read this and answer, have a wonderful day! 😁

In the "Sinners, Saints & Spies" panel at the 1st AH conference we were told there were other more interesting purveyors of the oldest profession than Julia Bulette in Virginia City, she was just more famous because of the way she died. Let's hear more about them and how they became known.

So I'm in highschool, I have a friend who moved to America from Thailand in 2020, he roughly knows English but he is still pretty capable of communicating with people in English, anyway one day in wold history class me and him were both learning about WW2, I was curious as to what role his home country played in it, but when i asked he kind got a little worried, as if he thought i woulnt aprove of it or something, so i kinda just left it alone, well im still kinda curious. What role did Thailand play in WW2, and why would he have been weary to tell me?

I am writing a novel set in the late 19th Century, and a portion of the book takes place on a whaling vessel. Although I have found a lot of information and sources about what whaling was like during the Age of Sail, I cannot find much in-depth information about how the industry evolved after the advent of steamships. I am particularly interested in the methods for hunting & processing whales, the size, speed, & layout of the ships used (& whether there were hybrid sail/steam at first), and the organizational structure, culture, & daily life of the crew (how pay was calculated, what professional specialists were aboard, how long could a ship stay at sea, what did they eat, & how did they treat wounds etc.)

I’ve recently been watching re-enactments and other media about the 30 years war. and I noticed that other than some more famous and distinguished units many did not have a uniform just random clothing and some armor. Were a large amount of units made up of mercenaries or did the nations not have material to make uniforms or is there another reason?

The argument goes like this.

The Population of the Americas was decimated by old world diseases, then a series of climate causes famines in the 1500s-1600s, then again dying the little ice age, with many populations reversing to Hunter-gatherers, other turning to nomadism and others more land intensive farming, resulting in auch lower population and population density. While the European Population close to it's highest population density ever in the 1500s-1600s and then with the industrial revolution in the 1700s definitely in it's highest population density ever, with a total population about or greater than Africa's, the 2nd largest continent.

With this we see a Population density and total population dynamic between the Ameridians and European Colonizers, comparable to like African Hunter Gatherers to Bantu, European Hunter-gatherer to Anatolian Farmer or Neolithic European farmer to Indo-Europeans; And seeing the massive population replacement there, which most schoolars don't attribute to Genocide or invasion, most of the change of majority population in the Americas, is basically the same process.

That from the on the field analysis, the fairly large Haudenoshonee state is speculated to have had a Population about equal to that of Iroquios in great lakes reservations who occupy a space orders of magnitudes smaller.

How true is this argument?.

For example, would an ancient Latin speaker tell me that their nouns were masculine or feminine? Or more to the point, when did we start discussing this fairly common linguistic feature in gendered terms?

Europe as a cultural term referred the Latin Catholic lands, and excluded places such as the Byzantine Empire, and the Muslim world.

But was this also a geographic definition? Did they believe that Greece and much of the Balkans was actually outside of geographic Europe?

If so, what did they consider these lands to be? Asia?

What is meant by ‘survivorship bias’ is that the socialist experiments that were likely to survive were ones that resisted imperial and capitalist suppression—a manifold of CIA/western interferences like Mosaddegh in Iran or Sankara in Burkina Faso—meaning that they would likely hinder dissent and act controlling as a means to an end (The end being a democratic one); thusly, their perceived penchant for being authoritarian is consequent of them passing the test, or is a western perspective that they were or are authoritarian due to something inhered in the doctrine of the liberation of the proletariat?

Of course, as this is a nuanced topic, transcendence of the either-or construction is encouraged.

Also, I mean socialist as in their purported goals, not their actual state of affairs, which could be referred to as state capitalist.

Oftentimes when we read about a drug crisis (eg. the eighties crack era), the facts had been greatly exaggerated, sometimes for political reasons, or the drugs were a scapegoat for other problems. So I've always been somewhat sceptical of the official (i.e. CCP-approved) version of the Opium Wars and how they led to China's downfall. Considering everything that's been written about opioid addiction from a modern, clinical perspective, it's hard to imagine something as relatively mild as opium weakening China to such an extent that it led to mass narco-mania and the Century of Humiliation.

Are there any reliable reports or data on how bad opium addiction was in 18th-early 20th century China, versus merely casual use (not everyone who takes opium will slip into a dysfunctional spiral)? How much of China's problems can be directly pinned on corruption and foreign meddling, consequences of the opium trade, versus the effects of opium itself? Could it be said the Opium Wars were really about other interests (i.e. the British wanted to get in China for trade/empire, the Chinese wouldn't let them) but telling this horrible story of addiction was an easier way to rile up the masses?

I just watched the new Hulu movie Prey and the lead character, a Comanche woman in the early 1700s has a well trained dog. As the main title asks, when was the earliest account of domesticated dogs in North America? If so, in what capacity where they used (hunting, guarding, etc?).

Apologies if this is a better question for anthropology.

I do not know If this is the correct space to pose this question, if not, please accept my apologies beforehand.

I ask this not only in regards to native-english speakers but I have noticed that several European school systems share this, or even in books by renamed scholars the American continent is referred as "The Americas"

I wonder since when this name is being use, since it took me by surprise that The difference between the American continent, North, South, Central*, Insular, Hispano and Iberoamerica are not widely known. Also why there has not been an "official" correction?