If something of a follow-up question might be permitted, who was demanding the population transfers in the first place?

Is it even "Islamic"? Concealment during hot days, especially for a religion which comes from Arabia simply makes sense.

I've heard people online describe it as Africa's Holodomor. Is this accurate?

How much was the 60-70s FBI actually concerned with public figures potentially undermining the state as opposed to just rooting around in, say, the supposed sexual improprieties of Civil Rights figures, celebrities, and the like for Hoover's blackmail dossier? "Parallel construction" in a mid 20th century sense I guess, without the facade of legality? On that topic, J Edgar Hoover's abuse of power and investment in blackmail material is well-known, but what about the organization as a whole?

Thank you!

I would love a comprehensive answer to this question updated post pandemic. I teach high school students, and this is becoming a frequent question, or at least it's paraphrased from questions I've received. Every book I've ever read starts "actual history" (which I know is written, but the little kid in me can't separate how close archeology and history are tied) with Mesopotamia because Cuneiform took off in the city-states, but that was so recent in the span of human history. Africa is the cradle of our species, and I remain unconvinced that somehow it took traveling across an entire continent to develop writing systems, codes and laws, mediums of exchange, etc. Anyway, enough ranting. I'm also very open to anything more I can learn about ancient African history, as well as anything precolonial. Thank you!

My immediate guess would be Hebrew due to its lack of day-to-day use in the intermediate time (maybe leading to less linguistic drift?), But what about Arabic? Farsi? Mandarin? Hindi? Greek?

Bonus question: what language is mutually intelligible with its past counterpart the farthest back that we know of?

This is inspired by civilization type games, where to make game mechanics work, different types of cavalry get stronger as the game goes on. However, looking at descriptions of equipment, it seems like cavalry didn't change much from pre-gunpowder fighting to gunpowder fighting, they carried spears/swords, varying amount of armor (obviously leaving out horse archers/javalin throwers, and such), the early modern ones can carry pistols being the big difference. Impression is that cavalry didn't change that much, but still had a useful role because of how the other weapons worked.

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Is this accurate, or did cavalry improve in ways I don't know about during this time?

I’m assuming that even by the 1800s, there were still remote Native American tribes that never met white settlers. I’m curious when the last first encounter might have occurred.

In Good-Bye to All That, Robert Graves talks about his time at Oxford right after the Great War. He says that “The Anglo-Saxon lecturer was candid about his subject: it was, he said, a language of purely linguistic interest, and hardly a line of Anglo-Saxon poetry extant possessed the slightest literary merit. I disagreed. I thought of Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith going for a promenade to Holofernes’s stuff-tent; and Brunanburgh with its bayonet-and-cosh fighting-all this came far closer to most of us that the drawing-room and deer-park atmosphere of the eighteenth century.”

I realize this is before Tolkien started teaching at Oxford, and before he started pointing out the value of early works like Beowulf. My question is: What was the pre-Tolkien view of poetry that Graves (and the young Tolkien) would have been taught? What was “literary merit” at this point, and why did Anglo-Saxon poetry not have it?

I am curious. Did any informal (or even codified?) shorthands/abbreviations develop in the era of the telegraph to reduce character counts? Internet abbreviations were invented for convenience, ofc, mostly bc ppl r 2 lazy 2 type. But when messages were priced by length and also required a human to manually type out the code, brevity must have been an even more valued trait.

Are there survivng examples or glossaries or other evidence of telegraph shorthand?

I'm studying the relationship between Rome and Eastern civilizations right now. And the search for academic books for relations with China and Parthia went very smoothly, but not so much in India ...

Romano-Indian is terra incognita for me... So any help?

Also for a more general question, why does it take so long for folklore and mythology to be written down?

This is something I hear thrown around a lot and even one of my old professors mentioned it offhand, but I've never been able to track down where it actually comes from. Is this something we actually know for certain or just an assumption?

Arabia seems like an odd choice for a conquest to me, especially when compared to other unconquered lands on Alexander's borders. It's dry, arid, sparsely populated, and doesn't seem to have much in terms of resources or wealth.

What was his goal for such an invasion?

I often see in (non-academic, progressive cirlces) a general claim that the ancient world was more accepting of LGBT people. By 'more accepting', I mean more tolerant than the dominant mainstream which was the reason homosexual intercourse was outlawed for a time (In Israel it was outlawed until around the 90's, if I remember correctly). By 'ancient', I mean either pre-industrial or pre-Christian civilization. Since these aren't academic discussions, these terms can change meanings depending on contexts.

Of course, I'm aware my question doesn't have a black-n-white answer, so feel free to elaborate or modify it!

I just finished The Plantagenets by Dan Jones, and I really appreciated the digestible but well written description of each of the Plantagenet Kings. Does anyone know a book like that on the French Capetian Dynasty? Thanks!

My view of the Pearl Harbour attack was that while it was a tactical victory, it was inconsequential on the strategic scale, as vital infrastructure was left for the US to repair and continue the use of Pearl Harbour throughout the war. Why did the Japanese operation not include a land invasion to take Pearl Harbour completely?