Today, many Muslims seem to take the major narrators such as Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim as pretty much fact, as well as the Sunan narrations. From a historian's perspective, is there any reliability to these hadith? Are they simply folk tales with little basis, are they a questionable mix of real stories with later inventions, or truly reliable?

Polish people commonly have blond hair and blue eyes. They look quite fair to Germans and/or Aryans in some regard. A whole bunch of other Slavs like Czechs and Slovaks, or Ukrainians, also tend to have some amount of blonde hair and blue eyes. How did this cope with the image of sub-humans?
Although I would say the same of Russians, they tended to be displayed as Mongolian-Asiatic hordes coming to conquer Europe. But they too have some amount of blondeness and blue eyes. How did the Germans cope with the image of Slavs with Aryan features?

I was wondering if there are any books that specifically describe (in detail) the concentration camps and the death camps in the Holocaust. I’ve read books about and told by Holocaust survivors, but have never seen a thorough and well detailed book that describes the horror of the camps. I am very interested in the camps and their horrific nature, and a detailed book that talks about that, I feel would be a good read.

In one of my classes they sad as a funfact that in the french palaces high class people would just stand in the corner to attend their needs. I knew about the bad hygiene around the XVIII century but this was a new level for me. Would that be possible? Also women had the big dresses but men in pants still felt like that’s just fine? I wouldn’t be too surprised but still. Thank you!

Everything I find on this ex-country is either extremely anti-USSR (eg. little black book) or overly pro-USSR (eg. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism). Things that take a more neutral approach tend to just focus on the politics and why the leaders acted the way they did.

I found Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR quite interesting, though it didn't go into history quite as deeply as I'd hoped. Other, deeper books tend to focus on one particular point (almost always the revolution itself)

I know it's impossible to get a totally neutral perspective, I'm really just looking for something that's more nuanced.

My family are from Northern Portugal, and I look more French than Portuguese. I also have little bits of DNA from the British Isles, Italy, and France/Germany.

I want to eat like my ancestors did to see how it would affect my health. What would have been common foods during the middle ages? What about during the visigothic era? And how did the Roman's eat during their time? I've heard of Roman's using extended fasting as a treatment for different mental and physical illnesses. Was bread always a staple? What about red wine?

I've been surprised recently to come across a few serious scholars conflating the Normans and Vikings or using the terms interchangeably. For example, Richard Pipes' Russia Under the Old Regime uses 'Norman' to refer to refer to the Varangians. I don't have the book anymore so I don't have an exact quote, but I believe Felipe Fernandez-Armesto listed Sicily and Antioch as areas of Viking influence as well, which as far as I can tell could only refer to the Norman conquest of Sicily and Bohemond of Taranto.

Is/was this sort of thing common in writing about the Vikings and Normans? And is it accurate history? My understanding had been that, by the time you get toe the various Norman conquests, their connection to the Vikings was pretty tenuous.

Sounds like conspiracy stuff, yet I can't find anything about it except niche sources with info that seems to agree with it.

Obviously War of the Worlds was neither the first nor the last invasion novel written, but while the premise was quite generic for an invasion novel the particulars are so extreme and, well, alien, that it seems (to me at least) that subsequent invasion novels might have taken cues and shaken up their own formulae beyond the old Battle of Dorking-style 'foreign power invades and overrun us' narrative. I'm aware of P.G. Wodehouse's The Swoop lampooning the genre entirely in 1908, but was he just an exception?

I've been watching the entire run of Downton Abbey with my wife for the first time, and I'm fascinated by the historical questions it raises, in the setting and in the writing of the different characters. So I have quite a few questions I am hoping I can get answered here.

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There's a funny quote from Season 2, Episode 8 that is somewhat confusing. For those who haven't seen the show, an older dowager compares the marriage of one of her grand-daughters to that of marrying a Hapsburg. It's odd, because it implies that such a marriage is marrying down, when I had thought that marrying into the Hapsburgs would have been a step up for almost anyoune throughout the existence of the Hapsburg empire. So I am confused. Here's the quote:

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Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham :

"I used to think Mary's beau was a mésalliance, but compared to this he's positively a Hapsburg."

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In this case, her grand-daughter Sybil is marrying a chauffeur, a definite step down... Why would a member of the English aristocracy in the early 1900's look down upon the Hapsburgs in such a way that comparing a marriage into that family would have been viewed as a step down? More accurately, why might a show-writer on a show that purports to be somewhat historically accurate write a line such as that?

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In short, what was the view of the Hapsburgs by the English aristocracy from a social mobility standpoint...in the 1920's and even before?

I was thinking about this while musing, as one does, about the original Star Wars trilogy. But my question isn't specifically about the history of that canon, but the broader concept of something being "canon" in popular culture.

When did this start? Was it something that started specifically with Star Wars, or Star Trek? Or does it have an older history in, say, Golden Age science fiction or pulp fiction (like were there ever debates as to whether Cthulu Mythos stories not written by Lovecraft were "canon")? Is it more-or-less a science fiction phenomenon? I feel like it is because I'm not familiar with discussions of, say, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea being "canon" with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, but are there non sci-fi cultural examples?

So one of the dictums of American history I’ve always been taught is that it took the unifying effect of the civil war for Americans to see their country as one nation rather than an alliance of states. I was always taught the examples that Americans from this period referred to it as “these United States” rather than “the United States” or that if asked an American living in the post revolutionary era would consider themselves as principally a” Pennsylvanian, Virginian, South Carolinian or New Yorker etc” rather than an “American”. This makes sense for the thirteen colonies whose existence long preceded the Declaration of Independence or the constitution. But how did this work for new states admitted after the revolution but before the civil war. How could the people of a state like Wisconsin claim an identity separate to the main American national identity when their state only existed first as a territory demarcated by the federal government then a political entity which only existed as a state when it was recognised and admitted by the US government? I assume that the pre-existing culture of the indigenous people or of any other former colonial power in the region like France would have been marginalised in the new culture built by people who only inhabited that region because they came to settle from the original colonies further east. Obviously in the over a hundred years since this period plenty of the admitted states such as Ohio have developed their own clear cultural identities based in institution ranging from college football rivalries to pride in their industrial heritage. But how did people understand what it meant to be a citizen of a state like Tennessee when no Tennessean culture existed before it was made a state?

Recently there was a question asking why Chicago's media industry was so much smaller than NYC and LA.

If you were to make an argument that Chicago's media industry isn't much smaller than NYC's (I honestly don't know if it is, just using it as an example), could you use sources and evidence from within the last 20 years to prove that the question's premise itself is false in an attempt to answer it?

When it comes to the Bible(both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament), we have an entire field of critical biblical scholarship. There is source criticism, form criticism, tradition criticism and redaction criticism.

Is there any similar field for critical Buddhist scholarship? I'm primarily looking for historical criticism into the Buddhist scriptures. As in coming up with rough time periods for when the various scriptures were written, identifying any conflicting ideas among the different scriptures and positing theories about how the scriptures came to be(sorta like the Documentary Hypothesis for the Hebrew Bible) Also, who are the top scholars in such fields and what books can one use to read up on this kind of scholarship(if it exists)?

I am curious about life on American WWII naval ships. Did they have air conditioner? I can’t imagine being in one of those ships in the Pacific without AC. What other interesting facts are there about WWII naval ship life?

So far, I haven't seen any sources from that time period that mention and have commentary on the Mediterranean.

I'm reading GRRM's Fire & Blood and hearing about how the entire Gardener family was extinguished in a single battle struck me as odd. Why was no one left at behind to continue the line just in case? Did this happen in real life as well?

Travellers -- indigenous hereditary itinerant groups -- are thought of as quintessentially Irish nowadays thanks to the filmcraft of Guy Ritchie. But some of these groups in the UK originate in various regions of Britain. On mainland Europe, one finds:

• A small number of Norwegian Travellers
• the Yenische people of the southern German speaking world, whom DNA tests confirm are actually of Scottish origin
• the Quinquineros of Spain
• A now-assimilated former group of Dutch Travellers who used to live and travel by canal boats, whom I've seen references to in literature

Were Traveller peoples once much more widespread, to the point of being ubiquitous, across Europe? Could one find, for example, present day people in Italy or Poland whose ancestors led a very similar lifestyle? I ask because such groups seem to have remained primarily in Europe's relative hinterlands, which makes me think they are a tiny remaining fragment of what was once a much more prevalent societal phenomenon. When did this phenomenon become less prevalent? That is to say, how far back in history would one have to go to find a time when a native Traveller population could be found in nearly every corner of Europe?

I realize this might not be the best sub for this question, since traditionally, from my understanding, Travellers keep no history and see themselves as having no need for history -- all is ephemeral for them except family ties -- and in turn, most European historians have returned the favor and written these peoples out of the historical record.

Also, what is the causal relationship between the presence of indigenous Traveller populations in Europe and the presence of Roma bands, who are not indigenous to Europe? Did Traveller peoples develop in imitation of the newly arrived Roma in the early middle ages? Or was it the other way -- did Roma find an economic niche in their new home in Europe by taking well trodden paths established by much older indigenous groups who lived a similar lifestyle?

Hi all,

advanced PhD student here. I am currently writing up and a fear that I have been developing for quite a while is that I might overlook something in the scholarly literature and not mention it in my literature review or, more importantly, make a similar point without acknowledging that I am not the first one to make it. I do not so much fear that I might overlook a big work/trend/idea in the scholarship, but rather a minor point made in some obscure publication.

Naturally, I am trying to do my literature research as diligently as possible, but as I am working across different languages and admittedly do not have the time to read every work cover to cover, I have the feeling that I am almost bound to overlook something (either a work entirely or something said in a book where I happen to not have read that bit of the book). I do not have a concrete example, but still the fear that someone might point this out and accuse me of not having acknowledged the work of others.

At the same time, I know that a certain "grumbling" among scholars that "this is not new really" or "someone/I has/have made that point before" is pretty common. Also, somewhat ironically, it seems to be fine for scholars to not read/take into account work that is written in a language they supposedly cant read. In my case, without being too specific, I work on the history of the British empire in South America and there has been a whole generation of mostly British scholars who worked on the topic but only used British sources and completely ignored the scholarship written in Portuguese/Spanish. For some reason, this seems to be okay.

I would be really interested what others think about this.

Are there records of that name appearing frequently in the region or elsewhere for that matter?

Are there any accounts? Did they know what the scale of the assault was?