I'm wondering if the US started with these dynasties pretty much from the beginning or if this is a relatively modern development.

By dynasty I mean a collection of close relatives that collected a certain amount of political influence like Kennedy or Bush.

The title basically sums it up. If I were a slave owner and wanted to free all my slaves, was that usually frowned up in society, or am I free to do what I want without "rocking the boat"?

WW2 is a huge taboo where i live, since most of the people here actually supported the Germans

I of course learned about the holocaust back in school, but i wanted to know more about other terrible stuff people did to each other

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I've read something I find kind of curious about concerning the atomic bombs. It's pretty well known that the reaction to the bombings was shockingly calm, among the survivors, with them and the authorities supposedly staying professional and orderly in the face of such unimaginable destruction, and as such is sometimes seen as representative of wider Japanese spirits and societal attitudes. However, I have also heard recently that in the wake of the surrender, especially in Nagasaki , there was a breakdown in order as disillusioned soldiers and police abandoned their posts and took the opportunity to engage in looting of the remains of the city, and that this was common in the country at this time.

In light of that I'm kind of curious as to what exactly Japanese society looked like as they organised their surrender and the occupation by American forces began, did the social structures that kept the country together through years of war in the face of certain destruction start to fray when the existential threats and national goals that might have helped bind people together passed by? Was there a major return of former soldiers from the overseas conquests, and did this cause any issues? How were Japanese authorities, either military or civilian, perceived by the population in light of having lost the war and having claimed for years it was a fight to the death or total destruction for the whole nation? Were shortages in food and fuel common and how were handled? Did Crime become rampant? I have heard that the Yakuza really became an institution post-war when they had lots of listless, demobbed soldiers to draw upon.

Sorry if this is a bit broad, but I hear a lot about the extreme positions Japan found itself in, especially at the end of the war, as well as people living under bombings, shortages and preparations for invasion in the last few months of 1945 that it recently struck me I don't really know anything about how the country reacted in the immediate aftermath to all of this.

I do not know what the technical term for them would be, but the especially big guns on a battleship, primary guns? The really big ones. I am sure that many battleships had anti aircraft guns on them, I do not mean those. The big guns on a battleship are/were ludicrously powerful and also potentially very accurate on fixed positions, but, they are not known for their great speed. Hitting a plane with one ever seems wildly unlikely BUT at the same time there have been a lot of planes and a lot of shots by battleships.

Has this incredibly unlikely thing ever happened?

After Executive Order 9279 was passed, and young men either had to wait for a notice or voluntarily induct, what sort of choices did they have in terms of branch and MOS?

If a young man wished to avoid a combat role, could they do anything, or were they stuck with whatever MOS was decided for them?

They wanted to end the war as fast as possible. Did they send Japan film of the Trinity bomb test? Why did it take 2 bombs to be dropped for Japan to surrender?

Or people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in general, we know in hindsight that the German military was a far bit better than the Austro-Hungarian, was this recognized by contemporary draftees who'd rather serve in the more modern of the two armies?

I am currently doing a project in which I study the history of a certain building and it's related association in my town. I have collected a number of relevant archival documents, and skimmed through them for highlights of information.

This weekend, I will be going through them more thoroughly, but will be doing this with help from others. Currently, the scans of the documents reside in a number of Google Drive folders. I make annotations and partly transcribe the texts in a separate Drive document. Then I aggregate the most relevant info from these annotations and collect them in another document, which is not organised by archival document, but by subject (e.g. persons, construction work, etc).

I was wondering if there is a more efficient way of organising this research. Specifically with regards to the annotations, it is quite annoying to have a couple of scans separately from a word processing document, as it is difficult to link specific words, sentences and findings to specific parts of the scan.

Can you recommend tools for archival annotation, and are there any that work online so they can be used for collaborative research? Any others tips would be very welcome as well. It's the first time I do archival research. :-) Thank you!

Often portrayed as the richest man in history, how did Musa I get to where he did? From what I've been able to read up on it seems most of his funds came through trade and/or gold but I struggle to understand how that makes him different from any other ruler who held dominion over any medium to large empires.

Was it simply a case of him becoming Mansa at a time when all this wealth was becoming available to the Malian Empire, or did he introduce changes which allowed him to amass so much wealth we are still discussing it to this day? Was he more thrifty than say the Caesars of Rome or the Pharaohs of Egypt and didn't have as much outgoings as those particular Empires to allow him to accumulate as much wealth?

Or maybe to be more specific did normal common people have gold coins? It's one thing for merchants and kings to have access to coins that would be like a 10,000 dollar bill or something but would a normal peasant be able to go to a baker and trade 2 gold coins for a loaf of bread or something? In Feudal systems did most people even really deal with money? It's a pretty common staple in lots of fantasy games roughly based on medieval Europe that you can generally paid for any random hero work for a purse of gold coins or something.

During WW2, Nazi Germany managed to drive all the way upto Leningrad. At the same time the Finns had the Continuation war, effectively putting the city under siege. In such a situation there would have been no safe harbour for the soviet ships in the Baltic. The only friendly piece of coastline would be in Leningrad which was under siege and the only neutral coast would be in Sweden. Where did all the ships go?

I've heard about lots of really crazy German war machines, the Amerika bomber that was supposed to bombard the East seaboard from France, a giant Elephant tank killer that looks more like some kind of anti-tank sniper rifle bunker than a modern MBT, prototype jet fighters, tanks with giant rocket boosted shells... and yet when I learn about the war I don't see all these crazy contraptions all over the place, their most produced tank was the Panzer IV and America alone made 20 times as many Shermans (and I'm sure there was even more T34s) plus the Luftwaffe was basically destroyed at least by the time America was in the war.

Why was German constantly trying to invent crazy new weapons when they weren't even holding the line with what they already had? Why not focus on just streamlining production of things like the Panzer IV or the Panther or rebuilding the Luftwaffe so the Allies didn't have air supremacy?

Maybe it just doesn’t look as cool in the movies to see a massive cloud on the beach and Germans randomly shooting into it. I haven’t read anything saying this either but admittedly I’ve only read into it a little. The pictures from D-day don’t seem to show any smoke clouds either except for the ones created by bombs going off.

I'm genuinely just curious and interested in the bombs used/developed during wars.

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