Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, d'Holbach, Helvetius, d'Alembert,La Mettrie, Montesquieu. All of these men, collectively known as Les Philosophes ("The Philosophers") were part of the Age of Enlightenment, The Age of Reason. I was listening to a radio program recently about the French Revolution, and one of the scholars being interviewed said "One thinks of the damage that Voltaire and Rousseau and Diderot and the philosophes and the Encyclopedists unleashed during that terrible period." Is he correct? Can we really blame the great intellectuals of the Eighteenth Century for the Reign of Terror and countless other atrocities committed under the banner of liberte, egalite, fraternite?

P.S. This question is not meant to be a political questions, although I realize that the French Revolution is still a divisive issue.

As part of the Third Crusade, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa arrived at Constantinople with a significantly large army in 1185. At the time, the city was under the rule of Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelos (who would have only recently assumed power).

As far as I can tell, this is the first (and only?) time a reigning Holy Roman Emperor visited the city during Byzantine times (Barbarossa had been there once before in a previous crusade, but that's before he was crowned emperor).

With the two empires constantly competing over which was the legitimate Roman Empire, did anything interesting transpire between the two emperors Barbarossa and Isaac? Do we know anything about any potential meetings? Had Byzantine-Holy Roman relations changed significantly since the days of Charlemagne at this point or was there still a mutual distaste over the use of the imperial title?

Started doing some research in Norse Mythology and there is an abundance of information. Not only texts from that time, but symbols, theories, modern interpretations, etc. I also found out that Norse Mythology can be categorized as North Germanic Paganism/Mythology which got me excited to learn about the other subtypes. Wikipedia states that along side North Germanic Mythology, there is Continental Germanic Mythology and Anglo-Saxon Mythology. But it seems like there is very little in the way of known info on Anglo-Saxon Mythology and even less regarding continental. I’m curious what circumstances or historical reasons lead to North Germanic being better preserved and known about today. My ancestors would probably be considered Continental Germanic in regards to geography so I would like to know more about their Mythology and folklore but can’t seem to find much.

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Also, why did Lincoln pick Johnson as his VP? Was it PR for the South after the war (since Lincoln didn't plan on getting shot)?

In the Western tradition the distinction between Imperial and Royal stylings is one that isn't guided by hard and fast rules, but instead is indicative of a multitude of political considerations involving how a Head of State's authority intends to be viewed, often related to a desire to make or deny a connection to Rome and the Orthodox Church.

So, in the process of encountering Asian powers, at some point Europeans had to determine if the words used for Heads of State should be rendered as imperial or royal. Why was Tennō determined to mean Emperor and not King?

Couldn’t people repopulate the city after the worst aftershocks of the Mongol invasions? Why did the centre of the Islamic world move to Egypt, Turkey and Iran? Wasn’t it still a potentially fertile city being between the Tigris and Euphrates?

If Virginia was a Confederate state during the civil war, how did Washington even allow that to happen, and why didn't the government move to Philadelphia or even New York until the end of the war?

(Deja vu alert: Submitted ~2 weeks ago but no answers, so I'm giving it another go.)

I’ve looked for a little while but it seems like most of them are sympathetic to the boxers’ cause, while I’d really prefer one that’s written from the allied perspective and perhaps slightly biased in favor of the great powers

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I put (why) in brackets as Making... is obviously not a contemporary bit of scholarship and so it could be that he's wrong; he doesn't provide much in the way of evidence for this claim. Nonetheless, I was curious: while it was well known that some artisan professions were more or less prominent in radical movements, was it the case that shoemakers were? And if so, was there something about this profession at the turn of the 19th century that would make it so?

I realise of course that the beer from back then wasn't nearly as strong as today's beer. And infant mortality in general was higher due to many other reasons. But would the back then normal and average alcohol consumption still have made a difference? Were people even aware of a connection between alcohol and problems with pregnancy /infants?

Some sources like Aelfic’s colloquy seem to describe a monastery style school where students learn from a master, while in Precepts it seems some were taught by their parents.

How much would a high school aged child in this period actually learn in an academic sense? Would this learning still focus mainly on the religious aspects and what careers would be available for a studious child?

If they were taught by their parents, would this be enough to get them an apprenticeship at a later age or was official schooling required for that?

Aelfic’s colloquy and Precepts also describe some forms of corporeal punishment like beatings. How poorly could a child expect to be treated while being educated?

Are there any sources on the education a girl might recieve in this period, assuming her parents allowed it?

Hey, so I had a teacher tell me as an argument against collectivisation that in the USSR there was only one shoe size and one model for everybody, the problem is that I can't find any source about it on the internet, anyone has more info ?

Edit: shoe size*

While reading the book - "From the ruins of empire" by Pankaj Mishra, I came across the following passage :-

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In Damascus, Mustafa Kemal, a young Ottoman soldier later known as Atatürk (1881–1938), was ecstatic. Desperate to reform and strengthen the Ottoman Empire against Western threats, Kemal had, like many Turks, taken Japan as a model, and now felt vindicated. Reading the newspapers in his provincial town, the sixteen-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), later India’s first prime minister, had excitedly followed the early stages of Japan’s war with Russia, fantasizing about his own role in ‘Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thralldom of Europe’. The news from Tsushima reached him as he was travelling on a train from Dover to his English public school, Harrow; it immediately put him in ‘high good humour’. The Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) was also in London when he heard the news and was similarly exultant. Returning by ship to China in late 1905, Sun was congratulated by Arab port workers at the Suez Canal who thought that he was Japanese.

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Is it an exaggeration or did the Japanese victory against Russians did spark positive feelings in Asians?

I just watched a short video about gun trucks in Vietnam on the Smithsonian's youtube channel. In the video they describe why and how gun trucks were built and they claim that the M60 was the only machine gun which soldiers were authorized to install on them.

However, soldiers preferred the M2 or the minigun so they found "alternative ways" to obtain them and then these "irregularly" armed gun trucks were used to protect convoys driving around the country.

I assume a high number of Army officers must have seen these gun trucks and that these officers were aware of the regulations regarding M2s and miniguns.

How come these gun trucks were still allowed to exist? Were there any consequences for using unauthorized weapons in this particular situation? And in general?