Hi Historians! This semester I am writing my History capstone for my BA in history and I’m not entirely pleased with the source list on my schools website because most of it revolves are pre-20th century United States, and I was hoping to do a topic that does not involve the US. So, what are some great online historical databases that I can look around in? I’m not exactly sure what I’m hoping to do for a topic yet, but I do know I don’t want it to be focused on the US. Thank you for any and all help.

While today a Yankee can mean any New Englander, the meaning of Yankee has varied over time. In the 18th century, it referred to residents of New England descended from English settlers. In Washington Irving's story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Ichabod Crane, a Connecticut Yankee, competes with the unmistakably dutch Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt for the affection of Katrina Van Tassel in the Hudson Valley locale of Tarry Town.

What sort of social dynamic actually existed between the Dutch inhabitants of the Hudson Valley and the more widely dominant English culture? Did this impact society and politics in the colonial period, revolutionary war, and in the early United States?

Obviously RADAR played a big part too but did mass produced British aircraft give Britain air superiority?

Is anyone interested in a SubChat for this AskHistorians? I think there could be some great, informative discussions there.

Hello there! I have always been passionate about history. I graduated with my B.A. in August and have received acceptance into my acceptance letter to my school's M.A. History with an emphasis in military history. My thesis plans are something to do with Ancient Chinese military tactics. My plan afterward is to move on to a PhD program and hopefully either teach college or move into museum/research. My parents are extremely against this and instead want me to either go back to school for Information Technology or take a job on the line at a local factory. Is my dream of being a historian as terrible as it seems? I am a first generation college student from a very rural area.

Today every other movie is a bad adaptation of the story told by Shakespeare. But was it original or had that particular sort of theme already been explored?

I want to learn all that I can about ancient Norse culture and was hoping some of the people here could recommend historically accurate and factual books. Thanks.

With the recent hurricane in the Carolinas I began thinking of the native tribes living around areas that are often hit by big hurricane storms. Would they have any idea that one storm is going to be bigger then another? How would they prepare and where would they go, I can only assume caves?

"Communist China" denoting anything before and including Deng Xiaoping's tenure

Not just Hui, but Uyghurs, Bai, Miao, etc.

(reposted for this week's theme)

I'm doing research for a novel, so my apologies if the question sounds odd.

Let's say a group of people (refugees from somewhere) makes their way through the territory of the Despotate of Epirus. They find a remote piece of land and decide to squat on it. The general question is, what happens next?

What I THINK would happen next is, eventually they will come to the attention of the civil authorities. (I believe Despotate of Epirus kept the Byzantine themata/district system, so I'm guessing the "civil authority" in question would be the kephale of the local katepanikion. Am I correct in that?)

If I am, what is likely to happen next? Would the kephale demand taxes, would he demand military service under the pronoia system, or would he simply tell the refugees to move on? I don't think #3 is likely -- the land would be laying fallow otherwise, which is a waste -- but I don't know.

Would the racial composition of the refugees (Greeks vs Franks) make a difference? I know Theodore Komnenos Doukas had Frankish mercenaries in his armies, but I don't know how he felt about Franks in general.

The book was published in 1942 and, by all indicators, was meant to be contemporary. There is no mention of the war, however. So, let's date it to the late 30's. I am not sure if the Vichy Government treated Algerians differently.

Edit: I only mentioned The Stranger because it made me wonder about the Legal system's position on white-on-arab crimes at the time. I realize that, in the context of the book, he is more so on trial for not following societal norms.

However, I a quick google search confirms that Algeria was absorbed into France as a Department. Were there special laws that governed Algeria? Did they make special mention of race? Did they explicitly elevate white people, degrade all others, or both?

It seems weird to me that a lot of entities used the title for a long time after Rome fell (Kaiser, Czar), but the ones that were most closely related to the roman empire didn't.

I would also be interested in reading about what a battle might have looked like during this period.

So in Imperial Russia, Salic laws weren't around hence you had regnant tsarinas like Catherine the Great.

Paul I was the one who changed the rules of succession that dictated that only sons could inherit the throne whereas (to my understanding) before any reigning tsar/tsarina could name whoever in the Romanov family to be the heir.

Prior to Alexei being born, there was the massive pressure on Nicholas II's wife Alexandra to give birth to a son, more so when the first 4 children were girls. With Alexei's ill health, there was always a chance he could die young before becoming tsar.

Since Nicholas had absolute power, couldn't he have just changed the succession laws to something what Britain had to ensure that someone who was a descendant of Nicholas could inherit the throne?

The youngest US president was JFK, inaugurated in 1960 aged 43. His youthfulness and vigour was a major reason for why he received support.

Hitler was just one year older than JFK when he became Chancellor of Germany. Was Hitler, and the Nazi movement by extent, considered to be youthful?

Of course "vikings" from Scandinavia have settled in Britain, in a rather "illegal" way. How would one move from, let's say the British Isles to the Frankish kingdom? I don't believe they could just move to the other kingdom and start cultivating the land

I ask this because so many Soviets seem to love him even now. I have talked to people from Russia to Azerbaijan, from Georgia to Kazakhstan and the majority seems to respect him. This made me starts to wonder, is it possible that he was misrepresented to malign the Soviet Union?

Was the world a globe? Was it flat? A dome? Did it have an edge?

Was it all one huge sea like the Pacific or did they know where there large continental landmasses?

What contact did they have with the land masses around them, around the Pacific ring of fire for instance?

Especially interested in the beliefs, myths and legends of what the world was like within the cultures of Polynesia and the Pacific predating European exploration and colonialism.

My understanding is the term Moor was used to refer to the native Berber inhabitants of North Africa, as well as latter the Muslim inhabitants of Iberia and some Mediterranean islands (and I believe also as a catch all for Arabs in general, though I'm not sure of the definition of Arab in any sense other than linguistic, and I doubt medieval Europeans were either).

None of the populations of these areas today (bar maybe some from the southern most reaches of the Maghreb) are what we would describe as "black" (i.e. Sub-Saharan). Yet many depictions of "Moors" in art resemble that of a black person, for example the "Moorish Head" on the flag of Sardinia, the painting "Two Moors" by Rembrandt or the titular protagonist in Shakespeare's "Othello".

Why is this? Was it that the population of the Umayyad Caliphate and its succesor states had a considerable population from Sub-Saharan Africa? Or that European artists believed the "darker skinned" populations of the Muslim World (which I assume they had little first hand experience of, though I could be wrong) were all black? Or was there simply a romanticism attached to black skin in the medieval European zeitgeist? Or perhaps something completely different?

I've heard someone say that when Spain was a colonial empire, instead of delegating authority to people within it's colonies, they would rule them directly from Madrid- and pretty much, treating them horribly by dividing the locals into a racial caste system, stealing the colonies' wealth and bringing them back to Europe without letting said wealth flow into the local economy, giving the colonials no say in how the colony was run and instead, making decisions for them, etc and that this abuse resulted in the poor state of former Spanish colonial states like 90% of Latin America.

My question is how and why did this mismanagement actually lead to the poor state of Latin America and other former Spanish colonies?

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