I understand that the Norse presence in North America was very limited, but they did have some contact with natives, in both trade and conflict. Was there no transmission of diseases?

Putin was famously a KGB agent but he obviously has no intention of bringing communism back to Russia. Was he ever a dedicated communist or did he secretly belong to some other political ideology at the time? (The same goes for Dugin, who got his start roughly around the same time as Putin, but also doesn't seem interested in communism.)

In the West, we've kind of been taught to think of the USSR as this monolith of communists, but even as far back as the 1950's you had American fascists like Francis Parker Yockey making secret trips into Russia for hazy political reasons. What groups might he have been meeting with?

I'm just trying to better understand how we got to where we are today, as the politics coming out of Russia now seems to more closely align with the politics being espoused by White Russians and American Fascists in the early 20th century than it does with communism.

Hi all -- FTP, so please forgive any incorrect formatting, but this question has been on my mind for years and I never found a good place to ask it until I stumbled onto this sub a few days ago. Thanks in advance!

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Given how hard it's been to get the world onto the metric system for distance, weights, and temperature, I'm shocked at how universally we all seem to measure time in the same way. Years, months, and days have "real" phenomena setting them, so I see where those would come from. But what about weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds?

• When did the world start using standard measurements for time?
• Which culture do our current units for time come from?
• What kind of units for time did other ancient cultures use?
  • In particular, when the Bible discusses time, it seems to use our units (e.g., Matthew 20:12: "worked only one hour"; Luke 23:44: "it was now about noon, and darkness came over the land until three in the afternoon"). Did the West impose our units during the translation process, did we already share a unit of time, or did we get our units of time from Mesopotamia in the first place?

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For some reason OP deleted their question which was answered. Pro-tip, don't do that. Its a dick move.

It seems like Iron age began 2000 years after the copper age... And there was the intermediate age of bronze... If iron is tremendously more abundant than copper...and certainly more than the tin alloy component of bronze...why the long delay in between? Was it the problem of achieving the high melting point of Iron?... Iron=2800 v Copper=2000? Thanks for your response.

Many articles state the machine's capabilities, IO methods, and various statistics, but they never seem to mention how.. Step 1:Get a fancy computer Step 2: ??? Step 3: Computer accurately predicted an election.

From what I've read the only thing we know for certain is that the tetragrammaton is YHWH. The general consensus among scholars is that the most accurate pronunciation of the tetragrammaton is Yahweh, correct?

We usually hear the spices were very expensive, but what would they be worth in modern terms?

I would like to know more about medieval Venice and Genoa--particularly daily life, the port, and trade--between the years 1000 and 1500. What books would you recommend in English? Thank you.

At what point does land typically become considered belonging to a group and not stolen? For instance, we often hear about the US stealing land from Mexico but not Mexico stealing land from Spain or Spain from the Natives. Do we still consider this stolen and this is all land stolen?

I'm doing a whole lot of research into Medieval times for a book I'm writing, and many of the books I'm reading mention Knight Bachelor or Knight Banneret. I'm very unsure what the sognificant difference is. I know that knight-errant seems to be the closest to "hedge knights" in A Song of Ice and Fire, and that the young William Marshall is a good example of a knight errant, but I can't find any explanation for bachelor and banneret that have helped me so far. I would greatly appreciate some help in the matter. :)

You know, the "I'm the emperor and I want dumplings" guy. He had five seizures the first time they slept together. Can't have been an easy marriage.

Did artists filter portraits or do skin issues arise from the modern diet and/or more noticeable from societal expectations?

It’s always seemed peculiar to me that Presley went from being the image of cool to being associated with velvet artwork and trailer park culture, to the point that even Graceland is seen as a trashy roadside attraction.

What caused this cultural shift? Why didn’t it happen with someone like Michael Jackson or The Beatles?

I've always been fascinated by the island of Sakhalin north of Japan. Looking on a map it seems like the natural next step for the Japanese after conquering Hokkaido. (Honshu --> Hokkaido --> Karafuto?)

So why is it that the Russians and Japanese lay claim on the island around the same time? Why was Sakhalin ignored by Asian powers?