Let's say I want to send a letter from Britain to someone in one of the British North American colonies around 1750.

Do I simply put a stamp on a letter, put it in a postbox and let Royal Mail pick it up by horse-and-cart to take to their depot? Who delivered post back then?

Once the postal delivery service had the letter, how would they sort it for delivery to North America? Would they hold on to it until they had enough letters to warrant paying for a ship to take them all? Or were merchant ships in the business of delivering mail as a side job? How long would it take before my letter even left Britain? And how long would its journey at sea take?

Once it arrived in North America, was there a centralised service that collected and delivered post in the mid C18th or would it be delivered to some sort of depot and the recipient would have to check every week or so to see if anything had arrived for them?

Would sending letters from Britain to North America be affordable for people at this time? Was it the case that letters often never arrived or arrived so late as to make their news severely outdated?

I've got a lot of questions arising from the one I've used as a title.

Thank you in advance for anyone who may have a contribution.

Edit: In case context is important, lets say I am a small business owner. I don't have any political or military connections, or any direct trade with the new world. But I'm doing reasonably well financially and have a relative in North America that I want to keep in contact with.

What impact did the German efforts at Gallipoli have on the outcome? I've heard both that they were responsible for the victory and conversely had no effect at all.

I was reading about Stilicho (the Half-Vandal commander of Western Rome) and Alaric I, King of the Vandals. Apparently Alaric was seeking to move up in the Imperial Hierarchy and so he thought a good was to do this was to loote and pillage Italy and it's provinces. Strange thing is, this worked. After successive bouts of looting and raiding he first was appointed to a high ranking office in Illyricum, and then he succeeded Stilicho after the emperor had Stilicho killed for allegedly conspiring with Alaric, he then, after the sack of Rome by Alaric, appointed Alaric to Stilicho's position!

My question is just...how did it make any sense from a Roman perspective to engage in this kind of appeasement? Reading about all these positions given to barbarians, land granted to their people (through hospitality laws for soldiers which took directly from Roman citizens), and tribute paid to barbarian Kingdoms, it's no wonder Rome fell! How did nobody see the writing on the wall? Was their no Roman national pride by the time of the fall? How did the Roman military become composed of almost all non-Romans with questionable loyalty to Italy?

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I know that's a very broad question over a long period of time. Basically what I'm asking is, if the Peasants' Revolt was the beginning of the end of serfdom in England, what was the alternative? Were there any free people in the lower classes before 1381? What does 'freedom' mean in this context? Freedom of movement, freedom to work? Etc?

If more specifics are useful, how would unfree labour work, say, before the Norman invasion and afterward?

I've grown up reading classical historians like Tacitus, Livy, Josephus Flavius, Plutarch. They presented history in the form of stories of men and events. Unfortunately, modern academic history looks down on narratives. Most academic books are specialized, dry monographs mostly read by other academics. I may be wrong but it seems the baleful influence of the French Annales school or the school of the longee duree history has discredited narrative history and instead promoted this overspecialization. On the other hand, pop history written by journalists is often wrong or unreliable because often the authors do not even have a PhD and therefore are untrained in historical methods, unable to properly appraise sources or appreciate the wider context. I am trying to find academic historians who can write well and produce works of narrative history. Here are some examples so it's clear what I mean, I found the following books to be excellent narrative histories by professional historians:

• The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark

• Iron Kingdom - The Rise and Downfall of Prussia again by Christopher Clark

• Oxford History of the French Revolution by William Doyle

• Three Victories and a Defeat by Brendan Simms

• God’s War: A New History of the Crusades by Christopher Tyerman

• The Norman Conquest by Marc Morris (the latter doesn't have an academic appointment but has a PhD and at least to my unprofessional eye he's careful about appraising his sources)

I am not interested in social history or daily life stories, more in political or military history writ large and in proper context (masterfully done in the above works by Clark, Simms, Tyerman).

So given this are there any good narrative histories by academics that you read and can recommend? In particular, on the following topics:

*1) Roman Empire after AD 69

*2) English mediaeval history (1066-1485)

*3) British history in the "long 19th century" (1783-1914)

Of course, good narratives on other periods are welcome also.

He was a megalomaniac, of course, and absolutely nothing justifies what he did.

But I think he didn't invent hatred for Jews abruptly, just for madness. Maybe, I think, it was a cultural process, religious or something like that.

All I have are just assumptions, so I thought I'd share my doubt with you.

Thanks for reading!

From a geographical standpoint, it would be alot easier for the Chinese to find Australia before the English.
How did they not stumble across it first?
Is there any record of them finding it?

Soon after Pearl Harbour, and through much of The Pacific Campaign, I assume the US government had a plan for if or when they invade and conquer Japan? I'm guessing genocide was never considered, so what did the US government wish to do with the country if they had full control over its landmass, military and government?

Would they have annexed Japan and made it either a state or an overseas territory? Give parts of it to China (assuming China doesn't conquer parts of Japan itself) as a political move or would they have actually granted it full independence at some point?

And just to clarify, this question isn't what would have happened if the US conquered Japan but instead what the US WANTED to happen if they did it.

I grew up in the early 2000's, and the comedy my family watched at home was Seinfeld and Friends - stuff about people doing relatively ordinary people things, with the usual observational jokes that everyone could relate to. But I still remember my grandfather banging on endlessly about MASH, and learning that its finale is still the most watched episode of any television series ever was really surprising to me. What about that show could appeal to a whole third of the United States' population?

In the early Viking era of the British Isles, around 800, the Vikings were speaking Old Norse, while Old English was the dominant tongue among the people of southern Britain. These languages shared a common ancestor perhaps 500 years previous, but the Saxons on the mainland (before migration) were immediate neighbors of Proto-Norse speakers in Denmark, and the languages continued to influence each other until migration to Britain.

Given this very close relationship, were the Vikings able to speak with those they raided and eventually conquered? If there wasn't immediate intelligibility, am I right to assume that for one group to learn the other's language would've been very easy?

Historians of reddit; recently geological science has been discussing the topic of an cosmic impact crater discovered in Greenland that has the potential to date within' the Younger Dryas event. If true, this would raise global sea levels by hundreds of feet. What implications does this have on our current interpretation of history?

It seems to me that most people thought at the beginning of the war that it would be a short one, and seemingly (at least from a British perspective) we were pretty confident we could win. Why then was it the case that the Entente couldn't defeat Germany until 1918?

Was Nixon's impeachment fairly non partisan or where the votes and narratives partisan?

As in, the Mongol tradition of horseback archery goes back centuries, but was this tradition forgotten, with the modern versions displayed at Naadam festivals being a resurrected version, not something passed down generations?

Or maybe it evolved into other continuous traditions, through its relationships to Manchu archery, Chinese archery etc.

i know this is a very broad question but its the topic i decided to write about for school

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they probably have a common starting point, and because of the human psyche, structures (for example hierarchys). What im interested in is what that starting point is, for example the need for agriculture?.

I just really need a little knowledge to start researching and writing, all knowledge loosely connected to this topic is very appreciated :)