Taking a world history class this semester. Earlier on in the semester when bringing up the topic of the Dark Ages and Classical literature, among a few other things I've been meaning to talk to her about, my professor states that there were no surviving classical texts in Europe because they were considered pagan texts and burned. The texts, she says, only started to come back during the Renaissance when they received copies from the Islamic world.

Now I've known about the Middle East's contribution to the preservation of Classical literature, but I've always read (though not from a dedicated source, I don't recall) about the efforts of medieval monks in copying and preserving the old texts. Is that just an overblown narrative? What history books discuss this preservation in detail? I'm pretty sure the whole burning for religious reasons is pretty suspect, but I haven't had the chance to talk to her about this yet.

Pop culture has a kind of fetish for having their prostitutes in stories from 1400-1600 die of STDs. It would have been difficult to trace syphilis or HIV as the specific cause of death because they take so long (no less than five years) to show life-threatening symptoms and often people go many years without showing any signs. What sexually transmitted diseases could be blamed for such quick, notable deaths, specifically among promiscuous people such as prostitutes? Were there any people walking around asymptomatic, unknowingly carrying diseases such as this? Was it common knowledge to avoid others who'd survived a brief fever after their last sexual contact?

I've been reading about WWI recently and trench warfare sounds absolutely terrible. Even going to the bathroom was a difficult task. Yet, in all the pictures I see of the time, the soldiers managed to stay clean shaven (presumably so they could wear gas masks when necessary). How were the soldiers able to do this? I don't even know how they'd be able to get a hold of a semi-clean razor to be able to shave. Did they just use bayonets?

It was very expensive to take a trench.

It was comparatively much cheaper to defend a trench.

Why did the belligerents not simply "sit it out" and let the other side come to their meat grinder?

Just put some prisoners of war in a big cart with a roof and start mining through the stone and mortar. The materials for a siege tower would still be higher than just a low profile cart with a thick protected roof. The engineering knowledge and quality of materials for siege weapons like a catapult seems so expensive and unreliable. People didn't use battering rams when mining stone. Why didn't people use the tool made for breaking stone, a pickaxe?

As a German, who was never really taught about american history beyond Columbus, i often times find myself lacking information about large parts of your history. The colonial age and the following civil war recently grabbed my attention. I'd appreciate any kind of input.

I'm wondering if those ancient stories were still told in the land where they originated into the Middle Ages, or if they fell out of favor or were suppressed by the Christian Byzantines.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the Imperial Japanese Navy began growing bit before WW1 but was not really active in naval combats enough to be considered a threat, so why were they put along the most advanced navies in the world when then they were dependent on them for the development of their own navy? Edit:grammar

I've heard the idea that the modern idea of a map wasn't really used untill recently. I was wondering if people at the time of the Roman empire would be able to recognize the general shape of Italy or Greece. If so would this knowledge be widely known?

For example, I read that North Korea actually had a bigger GDP than the South at the point of their partition, which is obviously not the case today. Does this mean that the North had historically been more economically important before the division?

The Turn Of The Screw was first published in serial form, which seems to have been typical for late 19th century literature but is hard for me to wrap my brain around now given the novella's ambiguous and unsettling themes. Occasionally in discussions of the novella you'll run into people asserting that 19th century readers couldn't possibly have grasped elements like the main character as an unreliable narrator, or various forms of psychological subtext, but this seems like it's selling contemporary readers short -- what were contemporary responses to the novel like? Either public responses in a critical context or private responses -- were there objections to the novel's content? Was it seen as a continuation of a preexisting literary tradition in ghost stories, or something novel?

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When does it get hard to get around using the english we speak now?

In our time, when we are confronted with social issues such as issues relating to LGBT rights, of course, there's going to be some prejudiced arguments against pushing forward with a certain social issue, but sometimes, some arguments are put forward that are not bigoted, but at the same time, not in favour of pushing forward with a social issue.

With that being said, during the 1800s, what were some non-racist arguments against freeing African-Americans from slavery?