According to my understanding, Charles Darwin was the first one to propose that inbreeding cause problems for the offspring’s health but didn’t quite “prove it”, however when this phenomena was first proposed, understood, or proven. Did it caused a reaction from the “well connected” European monarchies or from elsewhere? The ones that often would “keep things in the family”? Was there outrage to the idea? An attempt to deny it? A grim realization? Or anything on the matter?

Hitler and Churchill were both very much anti-socialistic. They also respected each other's ethnicity, and finally, the British could appreciate and understand the German's need for colonialism/imperialism. After all, the British conquered so much foreign territory in South Asia and elsewhere.

So why didn't the Nazis forge an alliance with the British given their similarities?

At the end of the 19th century, the new great powers such as the United States and Germany were trying to make up for the delay in the colonial race against the already consolidated colonial powers, England and France.

So they had as target of their plans and attention the colonies of the Spanish empire such as the Philippines, Cuba Puerto Rico and Guaam but meanwhile the Dutch with a colonial empire as large as the Spanish with the Dutch Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and mainly the Dutch East Indies what is now Indonesia was not even the target of attempts to take the Dutch colonies while the Spanish had their territories taken by the United States and Germany even planned to invade the United States to take the Spanish colonies,

While the Dutch being Germany's neighbors, even with territory as large as Indonesia were not even considered a target for US and German colonial expansion

Surely the Japanese army had some sort of documentation as to where a given soldier was sent, right?

Was it assumed that the holdouts didn't return home because they were killed in action? Did they not have any sort of process to confirm a soldier returned home, or to confirm he was killed?

Hope I'm okay to ask this here, sorry if not.

I've started selling asset packs for Unreal Engine and I'm working on some Aztec weapons. I'm doing my research to find out about them and get some idea of what they looked like. Other than the macuahuitl and tepoztopilli every source seems to contradict the previous one so I'm struggling to work out what the different weapons were called and what they look like.

I'm mostly looking for resources I can use to do my research, that said, any information about Aztec weaponry would be good. A few things specifically I'm looking for are;

• What materials were used? I know obsidian and oak but surely they used other types of stone too given how fragile obsidian is? for example, as far as I can tell they had agricultural "axe like" tools but the ones made of bronze were used as currency, not practically and while obsidian is sharp, wouldn't it be effectively useless at cutting down a tree?
• what's the difference between a huitzauhqui and macuahuitl? I see the huitzauhqui described as a club and the macuahuitl more like a sword but the only couple of pictures I've been able to find show them as looking almost identical?
• What were the different weapons used called? I'd like a solid jumping off point for researching into this

​

As I mentioned, I'm mostly looking for resources I can use, but any other information would be useful

Thanks for any help.

Edit: Title should be “in what ways”.

I've been reading At Days Close by Ekirch and he often cites fictional works as evidence. Is this common in the field of history? For example, he cited the passage from Jane Austen's Sandition about gas lamps "doing more for the prevention of crime than any single body in England..."

I'm a scientist and, for my field, this would be a wildly inappropriate source to cite as evidence of the claim that gas lamps lowered crime rates.

He also cites passages from Shakespeare and Chaucer as if they are evidence that things from those passages happened in daily life. But Shakespeare also wrote about fairies. It seems inappropriate to cite Shakespeare as evidence that people were galavanting about with fairies.

Is this kind of citation normal in this field, or is Ekirch a historian that I should be cautious of?

Side note, the book is an enjoyable read either way. I'm just unsure of whether I'm meant to regard this book as a piece of serious historical writing, or a fun guess at what historical nighttime might have been like.

Yesterday I was listening to an audiobook about early European history, and there was a comment that the pandemic of the Black Death resulted in a huge increase in the remunerative relative value of most basic trades and occupations; and, consequently, of an improved average quality of life for the survivors. Interestingly, it was also suggested that this effect may have been accentuated because of the prior effects of the first economic crisis of European capitalism, in 1343. I had never previously heard of this, but I Googled a bit to discover information such as this: “Florentine wealth and power had masked the weaknesses in the city's economic and political position. The façade crumbled in 1342. Neither appeals to the pope and Naples for financial and military assistance, nor threats to seek Ghibelline support, achieved any positive results … The new regime which emerged from the political disorders of 1343 inherited a bleak legacy. From her position as the leading Guelf power of Tuscany, Florence had sunk to a lowly state.”

Does rapid population decline, in itself, cause a levelling of social status? (whether caused by famine, pandemic, climate change or war). Was prior population decline part of the reason for the emergence of individualistic humanism, the Italian Renaissance etc?

I am very sorry if this is not the subreddit to post this question in.

Q)

So, in RTS games such as HOI 4 after a battle divisions are magically reinforced by a set percentage every ~10 hours. So, how were divisions reinforced after battling in WW2 in real life? I believe divisions were rotated for rest and reformations, but how would that happen? If one of your battalions in the division has lost 20% of its men you can't just throw random men from different training centers into it, correct? If you did that, would you need to retrain them to work as a team? However, I believe they were already trained to be a team back on training grounds so wouldn't that just be weakening another fresh division/battalion???

Did it differ significantly depending on the country??

​

I tried a basic google search and subreddit search and couldn't really find anything at all. Maybe it is not called reinforcement?

Even today, it seems very hard to make up one's mind about Soviet conventional* forces and their ability to stand toe to toe with Western forces, although the spectre of 50,000 Soviet tanks rolling across the North European Plain was worrisome. But was it realistic, or was the threat overstated?

*I'm leaving nuclear forces out of this, because MAD was and is certainly real.

Edit: I realize now I should have said "Warsaw Pact" and not "USSR".

Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!

If you are:

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this thread is for you ALL!

Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!

We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.

For this round, let’s look at: Linguistics! I say potato, you say dirt apple. It's time to celebrate all things linguistics. Know a cool story about that time someone misread or misheard a key word or term? Know an interesting detail about overlap between languages or words? Or, do you just want to share cool stuff about language? Unstuck your fingers and spill those wordy secrets!

Honey is yummy. And you hear people talking about honey as a sweetener back in the day, or used for medicinal or ritual purposes. But was honey a treat for the working man, or was it reserved for the wealthy? Could anyone head down to the market and get one of those little squeeze bottles shaped like a bear - or was honey reserved for rich guys who had apiaries on their villa?

I don't really have a time period or location more specific than antiquity, sorry. I'm just curious about honey.

I understand that at some point in the 20th century the French reputation for military prowess underwent something of a stark reversal, from being one of the, if not the most, respected military forces to having a very unearned reputation for surrender and, potentially, cowardice. I’d guess this was a result of the unfortunate brunt of the fighting France suffered in WW1 and 2, but when did this idea become commonplace?

Was it a very post-war attitude, when the victors were looking back with rose-tinted glasses at the events of the war, or would troops deployed on D-Day have potentially had this sort of attitude about the French?

Recently I watched the movie "Kingdom of Heaven", where Baldwin IV., due to his lepracy wears a mask covering his deformed face. In the series "Knightfall" the knights of the order of St. Lacarus, also mostly lepers, wear masks and in the stategy game "Crusader Kings III" characters who suffered face deformations due to battle injuries wear masks. Are this masks historical? I did some own research lookimg up sources and encyclopedia articles about Baldwin IV., Lepracy, the order of St. Lacarus and masks in medieval times in general, but I did not find any evidrnce of masks covering face deformations. But if anyone has any references that I missed, I would be glad for a response.