I'm reading a bit about how many different groups could possibly have visited the New World before Columbus (the Vikings, Indonesia, Japan, etc) with varying levels of quality of evidence to back those possibilities up. It's odd that I don't see much discussion of the possibility that someone from the New World visited elsewhere. Did anyone from the New World ever visit Europe or Africa or Asia or Oceania?

It is very perplexing to me, how a mob even as large as the one that stormed the Bastille was able to get inside. Wouldn't it simply have been a matter of raising the drawbridge? Was this not done, or did they have help on the inside, or is there some other explanation?

Thank you, you guys are the best.

It may not have been a technology quite like a nuclear bomb, but were there further plans for quickly winning the war if it had of carried over to 1919 or beyond?

The codpiece is one of the most baffling trends in fashion history to me. Its emphasis on masculinity and projection seems bizarre, not to mention impractical. How did these become an object of high fashion but burn out into ridicule shortly afterwards?

Why is it after WW2 Austria was released from German control when they voted and legally joined into Germany. Was it part of the pact after the war that all nations were to be released no matter how they became part of Germany?

Why was Israel seen as being worth a potentially-incredibly-damaging arms sale, when South Korea wasn't?

Specifically, would there be any qualifications or disqualifications to joining a conquistador expedition? For example, would they take any European recruits who wanted to join or only subjects of the Crown of Spain?

Also what could I expect to be my reward? Land? Gold? Would knights or other nobility join expecting larger rewards than an average soldier?

Hey there I’m really interested in food as a vehicle for culture, and lately I’ve been finding/reading about recipes and the way that people cooked during the Medieval period. While I was looking for a recipe for a sauce I came across this stuff called Garum which is impressively gross sounding but also impressive because the article compared it to an original ketchup- i.e., something that everybody loved and put on just about everything. That got me wondering what else everybody normally ate in Rome (specifically during the later portion of the empire, post Constantine, pre looting of Byzantium). I’m most interested in what the everyday folk would’ve been imbibing in, those crazy emperors definitely weren’t going out for Roman street food but I kind of want to try it😂

Pretty much exactly what I said. Did pirates speak gravelly and with sentence structure such as “it do be the west winds that are roaring”? Just had a epiphany and realized that I was not sure if the stereotype was in any way accurate.

My mother in law, bless her heart, is in love with the kilt. As her family name and heritage is directly tied to Robert the Bruce, she has always had a fascination with Scottish knights wearing tartan kilts, at least in court.

When I broke it to her that the kilt didn't come to popularity until a good 200 years after the death of Robert the Bruce, she insisted I needed better information.

What are the chances that William Wallace and the King of Scots wore kilts, at all, during the 14th century? If they didn't, why are their statues depicted with kilts?

The couple even had a public bedding ceremony (the only recorded one for a royal couple in 16th century Britain), which makes me even more curious as to why the marriage was never consummated. Was there a reaction from either royal family when they learned this news?

I am looking to diversify my bookshelf a bit and am seeking suggestions for historians that are not males of European descent. Some areas of interest are the dissolution of Yugoslavia, recent conflicts in the Caucasus, Indo-Pakistani relations, French Revolution, late Republican/early imperial Rome. Basically anything involving the ugliest manifestations of nationalism.

I'm reading a technical diving book called "Deco for Divers," by Mark Powell. In one section he writes the following:

Siebe Gorman...introduced the technique of using different concentrations of oxygen mixed with nitrogen. This was used to great effect by British commandos during World War Two who used oxygen-enriched air rebreathers. Their rebreathers used mixtures of 45-60% oxygen which had a greater maximum operating depth than their opponents whose pure oxygen rebreathers were limited to 6-10m. The British used this to their advantage and their simple but effective strategy was simply to pull their opponents to deeper depths until convulsions overwhelmed the enemy diver.

I find it hard to believe that enemy divers regularly ran into each other such that a regular strategy developed, but that's where my question lies. Did these encounters actually happen, and how would these engagements come about? What do we know about them?