I ask because Celtic human sacrifice in ancient Britain is somewhat controversial in popular history. My impression is that historians used to assume it happened because the Romans said so, revisionist historians decided it was Roman+Christian propaganda, and now it's taken a bit more seriously because sites of ritual execution have been found. But how can historians and archeologists tell the difference between "we must sacrifice a person to please the gods" and "the Gods demand we execute this person who committed murder", when both are likely to have been killed in a ritual manner?

With such a globalized world, that would never happen today. What caused it to happen in the first place?

I want to know about true history about assassin's and templar. Thank you

When I say the Koreas it is only from 1st hand experience. I am not trying to single the Koreas out I have not travelled through any more of the continent and can't say how dogs are treated.

I've read about how immensely influential China was to countries like Japan and Korea, and it makes me wonder if China had any outside influences. I know Buddhism from India was huge, but aside from that, it would seem that China remained unchanged and uninterested in other cultures. What are some examples in history, ancient or modern, where China was influenced by another nation, be it language or otherwise?

Preferably non-academic, I am looking for a leisure book (on the same lines as Guns, Germs, and Steel) that covers the emergence of Islam and its spread, the caliphate that grew alongside, its internal politics and the creation of different sects of Islam and its effects on the Arab/Islamic world.

People have "bloodlines," or adopt one another as family through mixing blood in "blood pacts." I can see why blood is symbolic of life and life force, but why is blood so often treated as though ancient peoples had some knowledge of genetics? Do umbilical cords bleed excessively?

I understand somewhat the desires and fears that led the Muslim League into wanting a separate country for Indian's Muslims. However, I don't understand how they thought that being seperated by over a thousand miles by a possible hostile nation was going to make it work out. Why not just separate into the three countries and make sure you have a solid ally on the other side of a potential enemy?

I’ve just been thinking of how it went from a place that had things like the Salem Witch Trials and stringent rules to now being a bastion of liberalism?

Similar to how we now can experience jet-lag from traveling across timezones, did peoples of old ever travel so much their internal clocks got out of sync?

I'm a high school physics teacher. I love it. And part of the fun is seeing how the history of science meshes with why things are done a certain way. Where do unit names come from, who decides it, why is the speed of light 'c'? All these things help my students feel connected to the act of "Doing Science" and not just rote memorization or problems.

So, that comes to my conundrum. I cannot find a well sourced explanation of 'p' for momentum. I see several stories, but no sources. It might have come from the Latin petere (Why? No one ever says...). It might be simple random choice (I mean, i guess?) or it might be something else. And I'm not even sure where to start with something like this. So, I come to you, Historians. Does anyone know why momentum is 'p' and where the heck crazy variables names like that come from?

I am currently an undergraduate in history, planning to graduate next fall. This means that I am currently looking at options for after graduation, ranging from graduate school (I already know the problems with that route, which is why I am asking this) to writing outside of academia. Despite my uncertainty, I am absolutely certain that I want to be able to do history somehow, by which I mean researching and writing, actively contributing to scholarship in some form or another. I am absolutely in love with and dedicated to the idea of ‘doing’ history, not just reading and learning about it.

What I want to know is the feasibility of doing this outside of academia: is graduate school and a career in teaching/research the only feasible way of publishing respectable history? To what extent does my ability to be published depend on having an academic title/position rather than the content of my work, and to what extent could the content of my work conceivably meet academic standards with only an undergraduate education, even with a good understanding of the principals of research and historiography, is that feasible?

The state of Manipur appears to be an anomaly in the Northeast of India where an indigenous group is majority Hindu. How is this the case?

The Italian regime was clearly guilty of war crimes (mustard gas in Abyssinia), crimes against humanity (concentration camps in the Balkans, massacres of Abyssinian and Libyan civilians) and crimes against peace, yet none were ever put on trial. This is in stark contrast to other Axis nations, such as Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, where all together thousands of suspected war criminals were put on trial. albeit with a low number of convictions. The one thing these countries all have in common is that they fell under Soviet occupation. Would there have been similar war crime trials in Italy had it been under Soviet occupation? Why were the Western Allies so uninterested in prosecuting Italian war criminals?

In the Bible, antichrists are simply false preachers lead by Satan. So where does the above belief come from? It's prevalent in pop-culture depictions of Satanic cults, such as the film Rosemary's Baby.

I'm quite skeptical of the idea that a historian would consider supernatural explanations since, to my mind, they have no explanatory power.
Any help is much appreciated. Thank you.