Hi ! I would like to know what were the reason why the French didn’t constructed the maginot line at the Belgium border , therefore letting the north undefended by French troops while only half of the French borders was protected . I already know it’s a matter of diplomacy with Belgium but my history teachers wasn’t able to answer why a working agreement with Belgium wasn’t achieved to defend the 2 country . Thanx in advance for the answer ( sorry if there is a problem in my question , first post here and English is not my first language )

I mean, at the last days of the war the collapsing German government surely couldn't effectively inform all the soldiers to cease fire.

As I understand it, prior to the attack, there were 3 main naval powers employing aircraft carriers: Britain, the USA and Japan.

British doctrine was to use carrier borne aircraft as support for their battle groups. Battleships remained the core of the force while planes were used for reconnaissance, anti-submarine patrols and harassing enemy task forces. The aircraft were not intended to be the main strike force of the fleet. As far as I know, British carriers could not carry the same number of aircraft as their Japanese or American counterparts. They were also equipped with antiquated bi-planes rather than modern aircraft. Despite this, the effectiveness of aircraft attacking ships was demonstrated by the contributions to the hunt for the Bismarck and the attack on the Italian naval base at Taranto. This attack by a single carrier and 30 bi-planes put half the battleships of the Italian Navy out of commission for several months at least.

The Japanese approach seemed to be the reverse of the British. Carriers became the core of the fleet and battleships were relegated to escorting carriers and supporting land assaults with their big guns. Though numerically superior at the outset of conflict, the Japanese fleet was hopelessly outmatched in a protracted struggle with the USA. It seems that the combination of the British success at Taranto, the need for a crippling strike on the US Pacific Fleet and the visionary leaders available to the IJN led to aircraft carriers becoming the cutting edge of the Japanese Navy.

The USA was clearly interested in the use of aircraft carriers judging by the number and quality of the ships in service in 1941. After the attack, the USA appeared to follow the Japanese model of organising task forces around carriers. However, the attitude of the Navy regarding the use of these ships before the attack is a mystery to me. Was the US Navy operating under the British idea of using carriers to support traditional battle fleets? Or were they already leaning towards the idea of carriers becoming the dominant ships of the fleet and had this thought dramatically underlined in December 1941?

Talking about former Western Roman Empire territories.

Were they only from Germanic tribes or was there a continuity with the former ruling class?

I know some of the Germanic leaders married women from local noble families. However, ancestry records are a bit obscure in the first centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Did local men retain a noble status?

How proud was the nobility in Middle Ages about their warlike ancestors? Or did they downplay that?

I'm fascinated by the Battle of Hastings, and something that has always interested was the appearance ( uniforms, colors, armor, etc.) of people of different factions throughout history. Recently I've been trying to see differences and consistencies in artwork depicted battles like the one described, and seemingly Normans and Anglo Saxons are depicted exactly the same on the battlefield. Was there any one thing or collection of things to signify which banner you were loyal to? If so, was it obvious to everyone or was it difficult in battle to tell who was who?

Hello historians,

(repost of an earlier now-deleted post, reformulated the title in the form of a question)

I've got a piece of fiction slowly developing in my head, concerning the slow death of a friendship between two men in postwar Italy in the early 1950s. (Well, in the then Free State of Trieste, to be specific.) As I'm picturing them right now one is older, fortyish to the younger's late-twenties-to-thirtyish.

Thing is, neither of these characters saw combat during the war (which I find significant to their backgrounds and development as characters, considering the society-wide trauma the war inflicted.) My placeholder rationale is that the older one managed to weasel into some clerical paper-pushing job for his military service and the younger one's number just never came up before Italy surrendered. I've been doing research on the setting, the culture of the era, the political issues at play all around them, but one thing I'm stuck finding out is the crux of my question:

How realistic is it that both of them would have managed to avoid active duty, either in general or in the scenario I've imagined as my "placeholder"? I've never been much for specifically military history so I'm sort of blundering around in the dark here. How did conscription work - was it like in the US, waiting for your number to come up in the draft? Would a man in his thirties have been considered too old for active duty? Was it possible to do bureaucratic stuff instead of combat/field stuff upon conscription and if so, under what circumstances?

Location-specific caveat: Trieste WAS part of Italy during the war and only became a separate territory after Italy's surrender, but there may have been some arcane differences in administration I'm not yet aware of. If so, I welcome correction.

This is mostly just a fear-based procrastination method to avoid ACTUALLY writing this novel, but dammit, I want all the details perfectly researched before I consign the unwritten manuscript to the depths of my brain.

What was life like for Romanian Jews and other Romanians during the Holocaust? Seeing as Romania was part of the Axis forces, how were civilians treated?

There has been debates on whether the Vikings had actually come to the Americas. Due to how many indigenous tribes exsisted in North America at that time, is there a possiblity that they made contact with each other? If so, what happened during this exchange?

There has been Norse findings in L'Anse aux Meadows (Northern tip of Newfoundlands)

It's common consensus nowadays that the liberal democracies of the world have the French Revolution to thank for ideals such as liberty, equality and fraternity. But why does the French Revolution get so much more attention than the American one considering the fact that the former was largely a failure judging by the initial objectives?

This is doubly more curious by the twin facts that the American Revolution came up with these ideals way before the French one (14 years previously, to be exact) and actually succeeded in implementing them while the French Revolution quickly gave way to tyranny and a gradual restoration of the monarchy.

So shouldn't the French Revolution be considered to have been influenced by the American one (which it was, Marquis de Lafayette for example)? Shouldn't American Revolution then have been credited with introducing the ideas of equality and liberty?

It strikes me as odd that an event on the same magnitude as the holocaust such as the Holodomor, extermination of the kulaks and the other crimes of the Stalin regime go almost unmentioned in western history classes and books. It also is unfortunate that stalin is not treated with the same hatred as figures such as hitler dispute commiting mass horror, suffering and genocide. Why is this?

I've just finished "The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth (2004). Roth, who grew up in a Jewish family, imagines what it would have been like if a fascist president had been elected in 1941 in the US.

Being an auto fiction (a mix of true and fictional autobiography), the story depicts both historical facts, and imaginary events and personal experiences.

That's why I thought I would ask this question here, because I have no clue what it was truly like, socially, for an American-Jewish family to live in the US during the 30's. I feel like Roth is projecting the tensions between Whites and Black Americans on Christians and Jewish; am I wrong ?

I see it was diagnosed for the first time in 1975, but surely it was around before then and must have affected Native Americans, colonizers, and frontier cultures that slept and lived in nature.

Are there any recorded stories that in retrospect might have been explained by Lyme?

I'm also curious about when recycling collection was added in America and when trash compactors started to be used.

Thanks for your answers!

We have evidence of the human hand being used as a unit of measurement from antiquity - Egypt is what comes to mind but I’m sure there are other sources just as old, if not older.

What is our earliest documentary evidence for this unit of measurement being applied to horses? Was this solely a European phenomenon? Why has the hand persisted as the unit of measurement for horses?