I'm writing a short story and want to make my portrayal of the period at least somewhat accurate. My understanding is that, despite having doubtful historicity, King Arthur would have 'lived' around the 5th to 8th centuries. Given that most of the later aristocratic hierarchy in the UK was modeled after the continental feudal states, I am assuming that England in this period had a different social structure. What were the broad social classes during this period? (Is it as simple as royal, noble, serf?)

Secondly, I'm specifically interested in different titles that noblepersons would have used. I presume that there weren't a lot of marquises or viscounts in early medieval England. What titles were used at this point and how did they function?

In brief, what was terms properly describe the social classes and noble ranks in 5th to 8th century England?

Thank you!

It is often claimed that 8 million people died in the mines of Potosí, though this is generally regarded as an exaggeration. The historian David Stannard has also claimed that the average life expectancy of workers in Potosí or similar mines was three to four months. I was wondering if anyone has any more information on the conditions of these mines or could assess the accuracy of these claims?

There's many dramatised portrayals of military leaders challenging their opponents to single combat in place of a full-on battle - from Game of Thrones to recent films like Outlaw King and The King - but are there any examples of this actually happening? Why wouldn't the opposing forces just go to battle anyway, regardless of the fight's outcome?

Specifically, I am curious if, in the words of a commenter on r/law, there is any substance to the idea that there was a reluctance to sort by ideology caused directly by the scars of internecine violence in the civil war

Interested to know if people still had swordfights in the 1750's? In the New World? In Europe? If so what was the nature of them? What sorts of swords? Mainly rapiers?

Appreciate it.

I have been watching the Marvel show Ms. Marvel, which is about an American-Pakistani superheroine, and so far the show has had a sideplot about the India-Pakistan partition of 1947. As a German I know almost nothing about said partition.

The latest episode shows a scene of thousands of people fleeing per train to Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, supposedly from India. The trains are very overcrowded.

I then read the Wikipedia article about the partition and it says in the beginning:

The partition displaced between 10 and 20 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming calamity in the newly-constituted dominions.[2][3][4][5] It is often described as one of the largest refugee crises in history. There was large-scale violence, with estimates of the loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million.[1][a] The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that affects their relationship to this day.

But I don't quite understand. Why were there people fleeing? Did the partition include a clause that expelled all Muslim people from India? That cannot be it, because there are still a lot of Muslim people in India. So, if people weren't expelled, then why were they fleeing? Or was there now strong suppression of their rights and religion, which caused them to flee?

And how did this cause the deaths of several hundred thousand to two million people?

From what i know about the region Czechia was prior part of the Austrian Empire and prior to that part of the Holy Roman Empire. Both would suggest that they had more in common than differentiated them. The nation existed just a few years since the end of WW1. From my point of view their history and situation seems similar to the one of Austria. Yet one wanted to join Germany and the other didnt. What were the differences between the two that lead to this?

I am thinking of this in contrast to the Yuan, which was only proclaimed after many years of warfare rather than in preparation for invasion.

I’m reading Simone De Beauvoir’s “Second Sex.” In the first volume, she lays out a theory for the development of patriarchal societies from more egalitarian or matrilineal ones. Some of her arguments consist of using examples of modern tribes to suggest the behavior of ancient tribes in other parts of the world. Here’s one particular quote where she does that,

At this stage [early agricultural revolution] . . . children and crops still seem like supernatural gifts. . . Such beliefs are still alive today among numerous Indian, Australian, and Polynesian tribes

This method seems a little off to me. Isn’t it kind of racist or colonialist to think of these tribes in the 20th century as some kind of window into tribes of the distant past? After all, the tribes have been around a long time and I’m sure their culture has developed just as much as ours over the intervening millennia, though in different ways. I hear people do this kind of thing a lot and it doesn’t seem right. Do historians still do this? Why or why not?

Shelley v. Kraemer was a landmark 1948 supreme court case on the equal protections clause in between Plessy and Brown. The case was based on a private contract of purchase where an African-American family purchased a home in St. Louis but was subject to a covenant preventing "people of the Negro or Mongolian Race" from occupying the property. Was Mongolian a stand in for any asian ethnicity, and if so why was that word chosen and how did it come to be?

What exactly does it mean for someone like Alexander to “found a city”? Particularly in light of the fact that he was in a middle of a ten year, continent spanning campaign? A city needs building, inhabitants, commerce, etc. all of which takes a while to build and establish. Why would people just move to a random spot that he declared to be Alexandria on the X? What would be there on the site of those cities already and what did he add? Why did he even feel the need to establish new cities, instead of taking over the existing ones?

I'm really excited to dive into both because I'm fascinated by ancient Greek mythology/history but I'm having trouble picking which translation of both of these works to get. I'd like to feel like I'm reading an epic novel since I'm usually more into novelistic fiction than poetry but I heard that the most popular prose translation out there by WHD Rouse loses a lot of the depth and impact of the original material. I see on Amazon that the penguin deluxe Robert Fagles translation is at the very top, should I get those?

They got support from multiple countries yet where still forced to join Indonasia.

Why couldn’t they just settle next to them? Surely the vast amount of the country was unused at the time. What’s the benefit of deliberately antagonising the natives? They could have co-operated.

I have heard/read many times that part of the Nazi justification for Lebensraum was the alleged racial inferiority of Slavic people.

But how much of a factor was the perceived “inferiority” of communism vis a vis fascism both as ideology and as political system? If so, how strong was this factor relative to racism?

Thanks

Roosters seem unreliable, and someone has to be reliable enough to ring the church bells if they were around.