In WW2, the Axis powers created numerous puppet states out of the nations they conquered, such as Vichy France, Free India, and the Lokot Republic. Now, the Axis powers were not the only ones to create these puppet states during the war. Britain forcibly set up pro-Allies regimes in Iran and Iraq, and the Soviet Union carved out over a dozen new socialist republic from the areas they "liberated." However, the bulk of the puppet states created in the war were made by the Axis.

My question is, why did the Axis build up so many puppet states rather than just officially absorbing the conquered land into their territory? Additionally, what did the Axis powers plan to do with the puppet states after the war? Would they be dependently "independent" indefinitely, or were their plans to absorb these puppets into the German/Japanese/Italian governments after the war?

I was always under the impression that the allies had effectively done a hard reset of the German legal and political system and recreated Germany effectively from the ground up constitutionally. But recently in the Böhmermann affair Erdogan made a lawsuit against a German poet using some ancient law that predates ww2. So did some laws survive the occupation. To what extent did the allies govern Germany in accordance with its pre-war legal and constitutional systems. Was there an attempt to do things legally by German standards or did they simply restart the whole government.

Why, despite being clearly inferior to the US in almost every aspect, why was the Portuguese anti insurgency efforts in Africa far more effective than the US campaign in Vietnam?

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I have heard this claim in my AP world history class, and that this was done due to its 'ridiculous health benefits' (sic), in order to keep the Native populations subservient. is there any grain (no pun intended) of truth to this? if so, what were the effects?

I know overall European settlers were quite bad to the native Americans, but it was often taught in grade school that the pilgrims were friendly to their native neighbors.

Please note: this question is about the study of history more so than a question about history. I think you are the correct the place to ask, nonetheless.

Undergrad psychology student here. Anytime my instructors talk about one of the sciences "fathers", they love to talk about the difference in time and how that changed how a given person viewed the world. Not one of them has mentioned how the fact that all of these guys (okay, a sparse few females are also discussed, history wasn't kind to female thinkers) are German, Austrian, or American has shaped our science.

My questions are thus: does history ever look at the social differences between locations alongside the changes wrought by time? Or is this seeming avoidance of human geography something specific to psychology or even just my departments instructors?

Additionally - what are some of the earliest depictions of the apocalypse or the collapse of human civilization?

Going by a quick Wiki search, Georg Ernst Stahl was the first to use the term phlogiston in 1703, but Lavoisier's experiments rendered phlogiston theory inviable by the 1780s. This seems like a pretty brief lifecycle for a scientific concept, especially one that's so distinct from its predecessors and successors. How did other thinkers respond to the idea of phlogiston? What was its relation to classical elemental theory? What questions was phlogiston proposed to answer? Did phlogiston theory continue to be referenced after Lavoisier developed more modern theories of combustion?

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I was listening to Hamilton the musical and it got me thinking. I know from a post in here that duels often didn't actually end in someone dying but what stopped someone slightly unhinged from challenging all the people they didn't like and killing them until they died themselves? For example, if we extrapolate to the modern day, what if someone were to challenge all the wall street banks to duel and try and get as many as they could until they lost one. Why did no one from the English side of the revolutionary war not challenge George Washington? Wasn't it really disgraceful and Dishonorable to turn down a challenge?

Clearly the nation at the time was fine with presidents serving more than 2 terms. But then how did this amendment pass?

I believe the story was about Crazy Horse. Essentially, his warriors lay behind a hill, at the bottom of which were a line of Army soldiers. One man rode his horse across the top of the hill, and the soldiers fired on him. Once they stopped to reload their muskets, his warriors attacked.

I wish I remembered more details but I saw it some time ago and it’s been bugging me ever since that I can’t find other references to that phrase or tactic.!

Thanks.

edit: my title sucks. Sorry

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I was reading about the political path of Indonesian president Sukarno and the article mentioned that he would use the political influence of Indonesian Communist Party as a power to counter Islamist parties, and that he generally considered political islam to be his enemy.

This made me wonder of the place that political Islam has in muslim countries. What is its history? How influential was Islamism in Muslim countries? Did Muslim Empires of the past, such as Ottomans and Abbasids, had to deal with pressure from Islamic fundamentalists? What is their role in shaping the politics of modern muslim states?