They had years to prepare, and this is the most debatable question when it comes to 'WHY' Germans didn't beat British.
British had a bigger fleet, they could just sink anyone who comes over.

Also, why was Buddhism, despite being a foreign religion, gain much more ground in Japan?

I am a commoner who has been arrested and charged with heresy during the Spanish Inquisition. If I just go along with what they're saying and confess and renounce Satan will they let me go, or would I be killed for confessing in the first place?

I understand that the pride of the British navy was sunk during the Battle of the Denmark Strait when she engaged the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. What I would like to know is how the British people reacted to the loss of one of their most powerful warships. Were they sad, vengeful, disheartened or something of a mix?

It's not that uncommon to come across a book, movie, or argument online where a "May-December marriage" (i.e., significant age difference between the partners) takes place. However, in the United States and Europe were they really as common as people thing, or did most people tend to marry fairly close to their own age? Or was this something that was a result of the mortality rate?

So I've been reading up on non-decimal currencies and was wondering why they were invented. Was this because mathematics wasn't advanced enough to create a decimal system or did it have something to do with how the coins' value was construed (i/e as a fraction of set amount of silver or gold?).

The topic of immigration into the Ottoman Empire has been discussed quite a bit but my question is, for those who were non muslim subjects of the Ottomans, were you freely allowed to leave the Empire? My understanding was that unless you were enslaved, you could choose to leave, you were not held against your will in the Empire, any insight?

The amount of things the Song Dynasty gave to us is mind-boggling: Tea, printing, paper money, gunpowder, the compass, etc etc etc. The Song also gave witness to an explosion of creativity in art, music, literature, theater, and much more. With all this, why were they so militarily weak during their rule? After all, it's ironic as beside gunpower, the weapons of war they invented also included rockets, landmines, flamethrowers, and so much more and they definitely did not lack the numbers to have a large army... Just what is the reason that the Song dynasty was so bad at uniting the China proper and being constantly invaded even at its height?

I'm not interested in their colonial history. Looking for anything relatively accessible but particularly on how the countries were formed.

Many modern Christian denominations put a great emphasis on eschatology, so I'm interested in contemporary academic interpretations of the Book of Revelation: historical context, Persian influences, Nero Redivivus legend etc. But I see that it's just a single example of a whole literary genre reflecting the developments in Judaism during the Hellenistic era, so I'd like to learn more about these as well.

I would like to know if things such as denying the amount of victims of the Holodomor (among others) or even disgregarding it as "capitalist propaganda" (such as Ludo Martens) are actually taken seriously or just regarded as blatant pseudohistory such as Holocaust denialism among scholars.

The same would go for the rest of the 100 million deaths supposedly caused by communism in the 20th century, numbers popularized by Robert Conquest and WR Hearst among others. Are those numbers actually accepted as valid among historians?

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I want to know if anyone here can suggest me some journal articles and book chapters that talk about the situation of corvée labor (unpaid and unfree labor) in Southeast Asia. Was it widespread? Were there differences in the labor situation between territories under European control and free non-colonized states like Thailand?

This is my first post here so if I'm doing anything wrong, please advise so I can correct it now and prevent it in the future.

Stories are rife with various methods of surrender, some more recurring than others. It makes me curious as to what would and would not work. First of all, I see several mentions--in fantasy books like ASOIAF, as well in a mid 19th century book I found--about knights (or, presumably, any soldier on such a battlefield) offering their gauntlet as a token of surrender. Is that accurate, and was it just any piece of armor, like "look, I'm removing my defenses, please don't kill me"? And while I know highborn warfighters and wealthy knights and such would be given more priority for ransom, but what's the likelihood some regular pikeman that was nobody before he was impressed into service could shout "I yield" and actually be spared?

Rome reached its ancient population peak of 1.2 million in around 300 AD. Since then until modernity the population numbers consistently fell. At the worst times the city was supposed to only have a mere 20.000 inhabitants.

So my two questions are the following. How this did drain happen? Did the population simply abandon the city and move to the countryside? And then the titular question of how Rome was perceived as a city. Old infrastructure and monuments were still standing to a degree. Was it something to be mourned, to be awed at?

Can anyone tell me the characteristics of the hittite architecture. I want to know what the buildings were made out of and what kind of furniture they had (if any).

I thought it’d make great sense if the Romans and later Byzantines led an Alexander the Great inspired conquest of the Parthian and later Sassanian empire.