When I say German Confederation/EU-like organization for Yugoslavia, what I mean is that you would have many countries (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, etc) and "Yugoslavia" would be a mutual agreement between them consisting of things like free movement of people/goods, mutual defense pact, customs union, these kinds of things.

Given the many differences between the peoples of Yugoslavia, I was wondering if anyone thought of not uniting it into a multiethnic country.

I know that after Yugoslavia formation, many parties defended the country be a federation instead of a centralized government, but a federation is still a single country.

I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination, and I want to learn about the history of Japan. "The Making of Modern Japan" seems to be a definitive book on the subject that everyone recommends, but it only goes from the 1600s onwards, and I want to start from the beginning. It turns out that my options are pretty limited, with George Sansom's book being one of them, but that one definitely reads like it was written by someone born in the 19th century England, and an almost complete lack of any visual aids (like maps and whatnot) doesn't help either.

This leaves me with the only other option - The Cambridge History of Japan, which is extremely long and rather scary-looking for someone as unprofessional as me. So what should I do? Should I stick to Sansom's book (which gets the job done so far), switch to the Cambridge book, or are there other alternatives that I'm not aware of?

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I'm confused on how exactly a general during the American Revolution "fought." From what I understand, he retreated many times early in the war. How did he not get captured, injured or killed?

So what i mean is why didn’t soldiers counter the trenches by simply digging closer and closer to the enemy trench until they broke through?

Okay, so I just watched the Tudors series and while I initially watched it for Anne Boleyn, i liked all the six wives. But one question intrigues me. I don't understand why it was such a taboo for Katherine Howard to have previous lovers before her marriage to the King. Surely, Henry had a string of mistresses even before and during his marriages, so why was it that only Katherine suffered the brunt?

So this is a bit broad I know. But say for instance, in WWII, the US navy had naval superiority, right? But the Pacific Ocean is huge, why couldn’t the Japanese navy slip past? Before radar, how did navies find one another at all?

I kinda had a shower thought and this also came about listening to Steve Barry's Cotton Malone's book "The Emperor's Tomb" in which one of the character in the book linked Mao's policies to that of the First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi. How much truth is there for this? Did the Chinese population, at the time, realized the similarities as well? When did this connection start coming to light for historians, if it did?

Some of the policies that Mao implemented were almost an exact copy of what Qin Shi Huangdi did when he became Emperor.

1. the Burning of books that does not fit into their notion of history where Mao burned books that not only did not fit into his notion of history but books from the past like he was "cleansing" the country of its own history similar to what the First Emperor of China did. He also burn books that were did not fit with most of those books being Confucius text.
2. The implementation of a new system of government. Mao did the same replacing the old system of government with his own version of Communism, which is better known as Maoism. Qin Shi Huangdi also did the same, replacing the old system with his own, legalism.
3. Attacks on intellectuals. I'm not sure if this happened during the Qin Dynasty with Qin Shi Huangdi but Mao certainly did it. It's now famously known as the Cultural Revolution (I could be wrong and this could have started before the Cultural Revolution) where children of wealthy background were sent to live in villages.

This is all I can think of off the top of my head. I could be wrong on some of these events.

You often hear that Spanish colonialism was more brutal than British, or that disease is what did for most Native Americans in North America. But the more I read about the plight of Native Americans in the US, the more it seems active extermination played a way bigger role in their decline than is commonly acknowledged by Britain or America.

After all, there is a large percentage of native and mixed race inhabitants in many South American countries. They would have surely faced the same problem of disease resistance.

So what were the differences in the situations? Why are native peoples a large part of modern South America but a tiny minority in North America?

We see depections of machine guns jamming in someones hand, was this often a probelm for the guns inside fighter planes ?

We're they primarily managed through charities or through the government?

Who funded them?

Who could access them?

Just saw Frozen II and the presence of a black military officer of Arrendell immediately took me out of the movie. And considering the themes of the evil white men terrorizing indigenous people, it felt very calculated to make one of the good guys black.

Which isn’t to say black characters are bad, but I would not expect white people in Moana, so... i know Arrendell is fictional, but Ftozen ostensibly is set in a fictitious Norway. We can deduce the time period from two data points (apart from clothing): a character mentions reading a new book by “a Danish author” with a mermaid on the cover. Clearly this is meant to be a nod to Hans Christian Andersen. Secondly, at the end of the film we see a photograph (and it’s considered new). Now, if we take it as actually Andersen’s book, that puts it in the 1830s. That’s a flashback, and present day is 34 years after the mist falls, so the movie is set some time in the 1860s or 1870s.

Given early photography, mid-1860s seems reasonable to me. If we go with this date, would there be black people in Norway at the time, and treated more or less as equals?

While it is clear that the South fought the Civil War expressly for the defense of the institution of slavery, may it be said that the North was emphatically preoccupied with liberating the slaves as their chief goal? Or was eliminating slavery the North’s best way of stifling Southern power? I find it hard to believe in a time of such widespread racism—in the North and South—that the chief interest of Northern politicians in fighting the war was to liberate the people they continued to oppress well into the latter half of the 20th century. Since many of the issues leading up to the Civil War often involved whether a new state admitted to the Union would be a slave state or not, could the North’s motives in the Civil War be framed as a matter of asserting its federal dominance over the South?

This is a dump of questions about East Asia that suddenly came to me, so please forgive me.

• How did East Asian countries end up adopting Chinese writing as their de facto?
• How did China end up with a common language even back when they were split kingdoms?
• How come China, which seems to be known for their warring kingdoms, not have conquered Korea even though they are next to each other and there doesn't seem to be any physical barriers like mountains or desert?
• Vietnam seems to have adapted Chinese writing at one point. How come countries like Burma and Thailand didn't?
• What caused the writing of South East Asian countries to be so different even when they are next to each other? At least in Europe they have common roots.
• Do Mongolians share any cultural and literary traits with any other culture?

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My hometown had its highest population in the 1860s, but by 1870 it had dropped to under 800 (a drop of approximately 70%). While there were a number of people from my town who fought in the Civil War there was not nearly that amount of loss. I’m kind of stumped as to what would have caused such a large change.

Was this common to see in New England after the Civil War?

Hi!

I´m new to this reddit, my first post and glad that I finally took little time to create an account.

**I wonder, if you are interested in the larger overview of history or scale it down to we say a country like France during the early modern period (the 1492-1789), how would you go about and learn about the subject, remember it and understand it?**Because I often find myself, reading and forgetting without a clear roadmap where different events are located.(I understand this is a long period of time and both "remembering" likewise "understanding" it is subjective, however I mean it in a overview way with greater detail and nuance than pre-university courses would teach one.)

I´m interested in history the developments contrasts and continuities of it, and especially history of ideas. Other things of interests is political, cultural, and history of economics.I´ve read a little Big history, Homo Sapiens by Yuval and The Silk Roads Peter Frankopan - which, especially the latter were great. However they were a little too wide-spanning.

I´m grateful for your responses and pardon me if this isn´t the correct subreddit for these sort of questions.