Also why was Egypt the only Kingdom capable of surviving the collapse and why didn’t they fall like the Hittites and Assyrians?

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I read a newspaper article saying Kennedy was the last President to skip laying a wreath at Arlington on Veteran's Day. I tried searching for what happened on this day, coming up blank, but I do see videos of Kennedy at Arlington in 1961 and 1963. I take it he was sick or maybe something to do with the Cuban Missile Crisis although that ended about two weeks prior to Veteran's Day?

I've heard that the Romans never took control of Ireland, though I am fascinated to know what the Romans actually saw of either Ireland or its people.

My grandfather who passed away way before my mom's memory served in Ww2. Recently when cleaning out the basement I saved his badges before throwing them out. Problem is that my mom said he worked as a resupply man in the European theatre for the US army air force, but the badges I found was a 9th fighter division and a mechanics trade badge and a American flag with a white boarder(none of which are resupply). Any information would be helpful because I've spent days searching government records and nothings matching up.

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There are pirate costumes, pirate rides, and multiple children's movies involving pirates. However, historically aren't they quite violent and dangerous?

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I realized I had read about persistence hunting, but mostly in Africa and thousands of years ago. I imagine snares and traps may have been common, as well as fishing, but I have no idea if/how bigger game were hunted. Were they really talented archers/spear throwers? I know that gathering made up the larger amount of their diet, but how much hunting actually happened? I'm especially interested in groups who lived primarily away from the coasts, like the Plains Indians (that's what we called them in school, not sure if it's the preferred term).

Thanks!

Reading through medieval Old and Middle English, it seems like there was never a lack of cultural development, at least in the British Isles, and many great medieval philosophers in Europe were Christian. I understand the Catholic Church was opposed to scientific discovery that contradicted orthodoxy, but it seems like their opposition never halted progress. It seems to me that the continued worship of incorrect Aristotelian ideas, such as a geocentric universe, was more of a stunting factor. Of course, the Church backed those beliefs, but again, that didn’t stop those later in history from questioning them.

Furthermore, one of the only reasons we have some great Greco-Roman works is because of Christian monasteries, and medieval Arabic societies were killing it in science and mathematics, with Islam being extremely prevalent in those societies. Muslim cultural and scientific success leads me to believe you cannot blame Christianity for Europe’s problems, but rather, the fall of the Roman Empire was so monumental in European societies that it took a while to put the pieces back together.

tl;dr: how much blame can be placed on Christianity for Europe’s post-Roman Empire woes?

If this isn't the right place for this, feel free to redirect me. Why doesn't the USMC use a rank structure similar to the Navy? Admiral vs. General? Ensign vs. Lieutenant? Petty Officer vs. Sergeant?

Some characters in the show claim their noble family goes all the way back to the early medieval period. Today most people can’t speak past their great grand parents. So what kind of meticulous record keeping did they have that would prove you had such old noble blood?

I've tried to research this myself, but it has given little fruit. I have seen a particular list of things repeated here and there, which I shall try to duplicate for the purposes of specificity, but the point of the question is that I believe Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes were all distinguishable in the Early Middle Ages but cannot find very many specific things detailing quite how and why.

So, what makes them distinct? What are the underlying causes for this? Are the rural, mountainous, tribal communities of Norway more geared towards nature-oriented Vanir? Are the Danes more organized into larger kingdoms because of the relative ease of their terrain? Were Danes really going around everywhere, or is this just conflating all Northmen with one another by the continentals?

I realize this question may sound silly due to projecting modern cultural identities backwards, but this is the way I've seen it divided traditionally - and I can't imagine that there didn't exist regional customs between these roughly-modern-border groups.

A rough list of points I'd like an answer to address:

• Were the Norwegians more geared towards the Vanir? Why?

• Were Norwegians more famous as warriors and berserkers? Why?

• Were Swedes overrepresented in the Varangian Guard?

• Did Danes wear a Norman fringe? What did the Norwegians wear? Swedes?

• Were long mustaches and short beards, like with Harald Hardrada, a common thing in Norway? What about Denmark and Sweden?

• Were Norwegians more likely to settle elsewhere, but Danes more likely to be politically involved? Why?

• Although I've heard it said the standard Viking weapon was a spear, and a sword for the noble, I've heard that Norway has produced many more battle axes on the archaeological record than others. Did Norwegian warriors use axes more commonly? Is it related to an old timber industry/a logger lifestyle?

• Why does Sweden have so many runestones, nearly ten times more than both Denmark and Norway combined? Why aren't there many (or any?) runestones in places like pre-Christian Saxony and Frisia?

• Why does Norway have so many stave churches compared to the rest of Scandinavia?

• Are stave churches a holdover from pre-Christian architecture, and if so are they applicable to non-Scandinavian Germanic cultures like the Ingvaeones?

• Did the Ingvaeonic groups (Old Saxons, Frisians, Angles) have a particular connection to North Germanic (Norse) societies/cultures not shared by other Germanic groups like the Franks/Dutch and the Germans? If true, was this at all connected to the late holdout of Germanic folk religion in Saxony?

These are just about all of the ones I've been forced to think about. Information beyond these is welcome, as is only answering chunks of the list instead of the whole thing. Thank you for your input!

Obviously, I've been fed the answer that "the technology wasn't around before," but I'd like to know some specifics behind that technology. The Vikings seemed to have a coastline of ice to follow from Greenland to Newfoundland, but the Spanish-funded voyages that did it centuries later were on open water for weeks, so right now, I'm suspecting that the biggest "technology" in question was reliable celestial navigation developed from advanced astronomy developed by the Islamic caliphates during their golden age, and that the second-biggest would've been some kind of preservative or other other bit of nutritional chemistry that would've kept food lasting long enough for their voyage. I also figure that the financial state of the world's powers played a role too, that the monarchies of Spain/Portugal/France et. al. would not have had the money to fund these voyages during the Middle Ages.

Then again, since people were hyped up on religious dogma and tolerant with living short, unpredictable lives at the time I'm imagining that the manual labor to go on these voyages would've been far cheaper during the Middle Ages? And why do we never hear about any attempts from the Roman Empire to sail West out of (their colony of) Spain, when they already had a rough idea of the world's circumference and more stable coffers than the fiefdoms & monarchies of the middle ages did?

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Did the unpredictability of there being *no* land West of Europe just spook sailors away from it that whole tme? Was there really no single, suicidal sailor who just stocked up six week's worth of food and pointed their boat in one direction before Columbus?

I feel like the big tragedy with natives was their immune system. Had diseases not wiped them out, it's likely the United States would be much more native American.

So my question is, was there any realistic way they could have avoided this fate? Or was it a cruel fate sewed by genetic predetermination?

Why is it that for e.g the coat of arms/flag of Normandy, the norwegian, swedish and danish coat of arms feature lions on them, since lions aren't native to europe?

I'm curious to see how Cold War era events where covered in Soviet newspapers (and TV broadcasts too for that matter) at the time. Anyone know of an archive or source with English translations of old Soviet news material?

I'm asking this because I've been told so many versions that I don't know what to believe in anymore. I've heard that the Portuguese helped China with handling pirates and were rewarded with Macao as a trading post/colony. I've also heard the Portuguese were granted Macao because the Chinese empire was afraid of getting attacked by their superior naval army. And many other versions.

I'm curious if there is any evidence to suggest that the Norse introduced diseases from Eurasia to Native American populations in the same way that later waves of Europeans famously did. It seems likely that they would have, given that there was at least sporadic contact in parts of Canada and long-term contact between the Dorset and other Native American groups and the Norse in Greenland, but I have never read anything about this. Thanks!