Bertrand Russell's book on Western Philosophy, and Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way seem to suggest this was the case. But I don't recall them going into detail so I'm hoping the folks here may be able to assist my understanding.

There tons of stories about samurais and ninjas and other warriors killing themselves in a number of situations, but what about regular people?

Researching for a story about a lobbyist for private atomic industries beginning on Earth Day and ending around Three Mile Island.

Any examples you can provide pertaining to specific companies/products/services would be incredible. I know that globally proliferation emerged in a big way but I’m trying to focus on industries in the domestic US.

Also whatever resources you might suggest is welcome.

Thank you kindly for your input

Some go as far as saying it contained documents about prototypes for steam engines or inventions way ahead of its time and we would be ~100 years ahead of it hadn’t burned

Other say that not so much

Hi there, so as per the title, I'm wondering if there were any of those "dude this thing, the internet, it's gonna change everything, you'll be able to do this, that, blah blah blah" people out there?

Since the 33 year anniversary is today, I was wondering what the protestors wanted? I know many were students, but did they want a capitalist western style democracy? Government reform like the Soviet Union? Or something more specific? What were their goals?

I've seen the Northman a few weeks ago (I won't make any particular spoiler), and in one scene the head of an enemy is chopped off and then put near his backside.

A friend of mine said vikings used to do this in order to avoid evil spirits to raise from the dead body, but in another work (Vikings tv series), so in other circumstances, a character explains that this action was done to vilify the victim.

So I ask, which of these hyphotesis could be the most realistic, in your opinion?

I read Shirer's Berlin Diary and Rise & Fall of the 3rd Reich several years ago. Shirer's explanation for why France fell to the Nazis so soon has the ring of truth to me more than others, but I'm one of these amateurs who has read a few books rather than some people in here with proper expertise.

IIRC he acknowledges some practical matters like the Maginot line not being long enough when Belgium fell and Nazis could go around it, forests that France did not think tanks could get thru, but German tanks had improved. Gas stations on main roads = tanks have fuel nearby unlike 1918. OK. That's certainly part of it. He spends much more time and ink on cultural rot. He characterized the French military as half sympathetic with communists/Stalin [still Hitler's ally] and half sympathetic with fascism. He also mentioned that the French military upper management was a bit of a gerontocracy. The typical French general, or a realistic characterization, was 75 years old and still had a grudge about grievances his grandfather, also a general, had against the English from the 19th Century. Meanwhile, the typical Nazi general was in his upper 40's, physically fit, got there on merit and hard work, ate the same food as his men, and had less of a feudal nobleman aristocrat vs. a sullen peasant relationship with his fighting men than the French.

Shirer is a journalist writing history and not a tenure-track historian, but he was there and tells a good story. My spidey sense is that this cultural type of reason is (1) difficult to measure and directly observe, (2) no longer fashionable after 7 decades of red scares among academics and knee-jerk pro and anti political correctness. Counting tanks and recording the average age of generals is more concrete, so we are inclined to give it more weight, but my gut says Shirer is onto something.

Anyhoo, France & WW2 has been addressed lots of times here, but please address Shirer's take on it if possible.

Over the course of the history of the Varangian Guard, they consistently adopted Byzantine Greek equipment for shields, armour, and lighter weapons but continued to use the two-handed Dane Axes throughout the period of the Varangians in the Eastern Roman Empire. Why did they keep the axe? And on the other hand, if the big axes were vastly superior, why didn’t others adopt the axes?

I know Im just some ignorant fool asking a most likely stupid question and I may have just come across misinformation. However, I will be that fool and still ask until I understand.

While looking into the meaning of egyptian hieroglyphs I've come across a few inconsistencies that concern me a little bit.

For example:

• adding vowels where there supposedly arent vowels(this may just be to pronounce them?)

• converting the heiroglyph into the english alphabet(?) And then translating the meaning(I could just be sorely misinformed on this)

-And the big one that gets me is the flat squiggly lines[waves?], where they each have different number of points.(i.e. some of them have 4 top points and 3 bottom points, some have 6:5, some have over 10, etc.) It seems those lines have a very specific purpose, but I'm seeing them being copied down incorrectly. Idk it just seems like a big deal if its not being copied correctly.

Anyways, if it isnt obvious already, I'm really just looking into this as a hobby. I havent really looked enough to find actual books that broach on this topic yet. So as a bonus, if you have suggestions for books on this topic, I'd appreciate it if you let me know.

I am a musician, and the 18th-century composer Johann Sebastian Bach is known for having spent time at Café Zimmermann in Leipzig, and for his "coffee cantata" in which a woman declares her love for coffee (in cheeky comparison with her beau).

But how did they make coffee before electricity-powered machines? Was it just ground roasted beans soaked in fire-heated water? Or were there machines that produced pressure like modern espresso machines but with manual pumps? I know that air pressure for Bach's organs was produced using big bellows, could it have been a mechanism like that?

I get that dwarves and the basic outline of them come from Scandinavian folklore, but there's also a lot of stuff that don't seem to be clearly based on it, but are also ubiquitous throughout fantasy media.

• Angular, intricate architecture and material culture

• Deeply-ingrained clan and/or caste distinctions

• Relatively high level of technology and mechanisation, sometimes to the disfavour of magic

• Grumpy, stubborn personalities

• Harsh, guttal language dominated by velar consonants

• Tendency towards Scottish/Northern accents in English

• Runic alphabets

Where did these come from? Are they based loosely on traditional Dwarven attributes, or created wholecloth?

I'm reading Herodotus for the first time, and he claims that three entities (Persians, Greeks, Phoenicians) all mentioned accounts, however differing, of the kidnapping of Io, Europea, Medea, Helen.

I'm familiar with these myths, and it makes sense to me that the Greeks would regard these myths as historical, at the very least the Trojan War they would.

What stands out to me is that Herodotus spoke with Phoenicians and Persians who ALSO made reference to these GREEK myths, as if they were historical

How could this be? Did these barbarians hear the Illiad? Were these myths based in history? Has Herodotus simply made things up?

And as a follow up question, how could the Persians possibly cite these myths as a source of animosity between them and the Greeks, when these events would have happened ~900BC or prior, and the Persian Empire wasn't created until 400 years later?

I asked this in a discord but I felt like the question wasn't really answered ... do we have any way of knowing a real answer to this?

This is going to bother me forever if I don't get an answer haha, I would love to hear all your thoughts on it ...

Thank you very much in advance.

Several posts on this sub have asked for the “best” books on on the Byzantine Empire—typically from the perspective of a student or aspiring historian.

I’m asking from a bit of a different lens:

Can you think of a book on Byzantine that is:

— Gripping — Engaging — Narrative, or has narrative aspects — Possibly biographical

I’m a layperson, not a historian or student of history in any real sense, but have recently discovered a keen interest in western classical history presented through a narrative perspective by absolutely lovvvving Philip Freeman’s biographical works on Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Hannibal. They were complete page turners, while still feeling balanced and factual.

At this point, learning about the Byzantine Empire seems like the somewhat chronological next step.

I realize there’s a ~1000 year history here. Any period—or a high level overview of the whole empire—is of interest as long as the book is entertaining, and not simply a dry factual work.

Thank you!

It's mentioned constantly in pop culture telling of history and seems to basically be used as a truism to explain the decline of empires. From my perspective its use seems to depend entirely on the user's idiosyncratic collection of perceived social ills. It seems so broad, non-specific, and opinion-based that any specific useful meaning that could be derived from its use is lost.

My question is: does this term have any practical application in the modern field?

It seems obvious looking back that the military would figure out how powerful aircraft launched from naval vessels would be, but a quick Wikipedia puts the first naval launched aircrafts, and even first use of them in war, surprisingly soon after heaveier-than-air flight was even demonstrated.

Given the degree that war-faring sea-vessels would need serious infrastructure changes to adapt to carry and land airplanes, and the fact that early combat airplanes had serious drawbacks, how did these guys convince the bureaucratic nightmare that is the US military to invest in such technologies? My understanding is that combat airplanes in the first couple of centuries were, yes, effective at carrying light bombs but that what they carried was nothing compared to the artillery a naval vessel could carry, and that additionally such airplanes had zero ability to counter other planes or even harm an armored ship. Basically why bother keeping a couple planes on board in place of another massive cannon? Was it just that they the planes were beneficial as scouts and as their combat proficiency improved naval ships made more and more space for them until we ended up with full-on aircraft carriers?