The Holy Roman Empire was dominated by the Habsburgs, and the United Arab Emirates is de facto ruled by Abu Dhabi's monarchs. If so, then what factors contributed to maintain that electoral stability? How did it not fall into hegemony?

While I understand the building of single-storied buildings, I'm curious as to how they constructed the higher up buildings that took a few stories. How did they get the walls and roofs up there?

My wife and I were looking over a hotel restaurant menu from the late 1800's, and remarked at how odd and unusual some of the menu items were. We don't really see mutton anywhere now, for example, except for in select restaurants. Although, when looking at the recipe, it seemed genuinely amazing.

Then it had us thinking: since we have access to so much food in the United States, I wonder if we could recreate a few fun recipes from history. Unfortunately, it does not seem as if the literature on historical recipes is abundant. Most information pertaining to food seems to be quite general, such as "Romans ate breads and dates for breakfast." Is there anything more specific that I could replicate myself?

Due to how information is so widespread, and martial artists have taken to MMA because of its versatility and adaption of many techniques, is it fair to say the modern professional fighter is more deadly than any ancient warrior?

For example, I know the Greeks had their own form of wrestling, Pankratos, but would this have been as effective to a modern fighter who is not only exposed to high level grappling, but striking as well? And that these methods are more effective than those in antiquity because of the open communication and freedom of information we have today?

This of course involves hand to hand combat scenarios, and not the likes of sword, spear, or shield.

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I feel like bayonets were useful obviously, but they were always short. Why weren’t there 20 inch sword blades attached to muskets?

For instance there was no way to test for arsenic poisoning until 1836. which I would think call into doubt the number of poisonings before the test was employed.

I do a lot of bushcraft and own a number of knives. Simply having a knife slip from a piece of wood onto a rock will greatly damage it; it will either roll the edge (dulling it) or in extreme cases chip it. The thought of slamming two of my knives together with the force of a sword fight makes me cringe - the amount of damage it would cause would be unrepairable.

My questions are as follows. In real history, is this kind of swordfighting remotely realistic, or were shields normally used to block? If this kind of Hollywood swordfighting did happen, wouldn't the swords have been damaged to the point where they were useless, or at least extremely dull?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

In modern times we have many examples of fans being upset at remakes, reboots, sequels, and prequels of highly influential films and franchises.

Is this entirely a new phenomenon? Or has this always been going on? Did theatre of ancient Greece have remakes and sequel stories that people hated?

I hope I don't offend too many Belgian users with that question, but what I mean is that Belgium is separated into two regions-Wallonia and Flanders. The former speaks French and the latter speaks Dutch and there is conflict between the two regions. Some people in Flanders even supposedly want to leave Belgium and join the Netherlands.

If they don't speak the same language and if members of the population don't even want to be in the same country as the other, then why does Belgium exist? What is the story behind the nation of Belgium?

(Feel free to correct my possibly inaccurate understanding of the situation. I don't know much about Belgian politics)

A lot of contemporary political movements have a supporter base that's either predominantly younger or older people. Was this also the case in Germany? Was resistance mostly from one of these age demographics?

We can know what medieval music sounds like and other various time periods but do we know what ancient Romans would have listen to and sang? I'd also be interested in any music from any ancient civilization.

Borrowing it from the library only allows me to have it a shorter time than necessary to fully digest it and i want to make my own notes if necessary. I want to build my personal library too! Ive heard of the Penguin, Oxford, B&N and Lamdmark edition. Im not sure how to compare them or what to look for so I thought Id ask for recommendations on what to do

I have never understood how a sparsely-populated Island chain and its adjacent peninsula managed to establish perhaps the world's most significant intellectual tradition. Why were the older, more established Near Eastern empires and more populous, better-fed tribal peoples of Europe apparently unable to make similar intellectual advances?

I'm currently on volume II of Clay Blair's discussion of the U-boat war (which, aside from being rather defensive about America and Canada, and pretty scathing about the Brits, is excellent) and it seems for the first 3-4 years of the war the Germans were reading all convoy and a lot of naval traffic without great fanfare.

It seems that the British theoretical and American technological innovations are given more weight, is this just a case of history being written by the winners?

Blair himself doesn't seem to go into too much detail, I assume because of the breadth of his scope.

Probably sound like a idiot, but: If knights had suits of armor made of forged metal, would swords really do anything? Is it really that easy for arrows to pierce said armor?

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Hi Everyone,

I hope that this is ok to post this here - I need some advice in this area and would really appreciate some feedback from professional historians.

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I am from the UK and my background is almost completely within archaeology. I have a undergraduate degree in archaeology (although I did take some modules on ancient Greece and Rome), and a Masters in Mycenaean and Minoan archaeology. I learnt Classical Latin at university and am fairly good with languages. I work as an archaeologist in England and have been doing this for 5 years.

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Archaeology is a good job and I am privileged to work within the profession, but in my opinion there are significant problems (which I won't go into) with it that make me unwilling to devote my professional life to it. My real love has always been history.

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My real passion is in history, and I would like to change the course of my career and start a PhD in a historical subject with the ultimate aim of being an academic. However, as I have not studied history I am a bit lost as to where to begin in terms of a research question. I do not know any area of history well enough to identify a gap in the current research where I can produce some independent work. This isn't helped by the fact that I have such broad interest in different historical areas which means I sometimes lack focus. My primary areas of interest are the Feudal revolution in Europe and the different ways different states developed, the politics and wars of 18th century Europe, French revolution, WW1, WW2, medieval England/Britain.... Ancient Greece and Rome... But really anything.

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A second Masters is not really an option, due to the (extortionate!) cost within the UK. I could consider within an EU country as some are very cheap (or free), but this for me would be a Plan B as I'm not getting any younger.

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So, my questions are:

• what are the main gaps/unanswered questions within current scholarship that I could start to look at to formulate a research proposal, preferably connected with my interests listed above?
• what problems if any do you see me facing in making this transition?

Thank you very much for reading this and considering my questions

And escaped to Argentina.