I know the Greeks believed Eclipses were punishments from gods to the kings. But what did Romans believe an eclipse was? Does it have something to do with Sol and Luna?

For example, with regards to Winston Churchill’s histories of the world wars, or Trotsky’s history of the Russian Revolution?

My dad was born in 1951 and therefore would have been in the 1970 draft lottery. When I was young i recall him telling a story that his number was #110 and that he lucked out because they only went up to number 108 that year. I decided to look this up recently and found that his draft number was in fact #110, BUT I also learned that the draft went up to #125 that year. My father is dead now and im curious about how he avoided service.. Other than failing a physical or a secret history of fleeing to Canada, both of which I believe are unlikely, does any have any further information about how the draft worked and how my father may have avoided service? Thank you!

I assume that by the Renaissance there would be plenty of Portuguese and Spanish merchants in Western Africa, but I wonder how likely it would be to see someone of European descent in, say, Mali during Mansa Musa's reign.

Today is tomorrow's yesterday.

This subreddit is fabulous and I enjoy reading your answers to questions on historical events.

But my question is about creating the history of the future.

Do professional historians create documents about current events with the intention that future historians will have reliable primary sources that explain what is happening today from the viewpoint of people living through it today?

For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic and the range of responses to it. Obviously there are a million newspaper articles and political speeches and health records that future historians will review and synthesize. But each of those is intended for today's audience.

Would a professional historian, knowing the types of information and documentation that is required by professional historians, create documents that are intended for an audience of future professional historians? Something like a time-capsules from today's historian intended to help explain our current events to a historian in the future.

Thanks for all your good work in this subreddit.

EDIT: I can't believe the number and variety of great responses I've had to my question.

I'm currently listening to a great history podcast which is currently covering a period about 1000 years ago. (Shout out to "The History of Byzantium" by Robin Pierson)

One of the difficulties of researching that time is the lack of reliable primary sources.

Based on the responses I've gotten, historians 1000 years from now will have the opposite problem - a wealth of resources available for review.

From what I know, the relationship between Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II was quite warm (judging by their telegrams) and they were relatives. Both of their countries were autocracies in which I imagine they held enough power over matters of state to shape foreign policy according to their personal beliefs, since Nicholas at least had the power to take personal command of his army one year into WW1.

Then there is the matter of the Crimean war from 50 years earlier and the enmity that caused between Russia on one side and Britain and France on the other. Why did Russia ally with France before WW1 broke out? War with Germany on France's side seems like an odd outcome considering the aforementioned.

Additional:

Being from Kent, I was surprised to learn that our county's mining union was so committed to the strike action between 1984-5 (considering the relatively small numbers of previously mining-dependent towns in the South East). It's not a piece of local history I've heard much of before.

Considering the small size of the 1984 union (roughly 2,000 according to wikipedia), what were the motivations of this commitment?

I understand from browsing that the Kent union may have had an openly communist bent in leadership & officials, and that they were successful in soliciting donations from sympathetic socialists in London. Is this the source of the willingness to keep striking (ie: they had the ideological commitment and the capability from the donations to keep paying their members and prolong the strike)?

As a milk white guy I realised moving to Australia was against two million years of evolution, bearly surviving walking to the mailbox without getting sunburnt.

How did early settlers protect against getting turned into lobsters before noon? Was there some kind of a trick, aside from wearing a sombrero, that has been lost some sunscreen became widely available?

I've been reading up on the Iliad and the Odyssey and one thing I found interesting was how often Homer got the Bronze Age wrong. He was telling the story a few hundreds years out from when it supposedly took place so certain things, especially combat, were a mish mosh of stuff from his era and the one in which it happened. Of course he wasn't a historian and there was really know way for the average person back then to know the ins and outs of an era hundreds of years past.

Seeing as certain religious or mythical texts cover eras long before they were actually codified, what are some examples of these types of errors? For example, were Jews writing the Scripture affected by their Babylonian context as they wrote about their long history? What anachronisms show up in the great works of religion and mythology?

I understand this question's a bit Euro-centric and that feudalism tends to prefer to what society was like post-Roman but how and why did humans find themselves in a society that was reigned by a monarchy and operated on a class system of warriors and farmers and serfs? I want to say it seems that such a system would exist before the Roman Empire but maybe on a much smaller scale.

What was the alternative? How did we go from hunter-gatherers to kingdoms being made? And why were kingdoms made, then expanded and battling others?

The Roman empire and the Chinese empire began at relatively the same time (25bc vs 220bc), yet the Chinese empire survived until the early 20th century. Some would argue it still exists today as the borders are largely the same.

The more I study the more complicated things get

There was a German army and there was a nazi political party. Was there a German army fighting on the battlefront who weren't part of the nazi ideals? Meaning they were fighting without being aware of the concentration camp system going on and were not interested in genocide of hitler's personal enemies?

I'm asking bc that's what was taught in school but I'm reading the betrayal of Anne frank and it's not adding up

ie. why are there no mongols in Iran, Ukraine, etc.

I think back to civilizations like Egyptians, Mayans, Greece, Rome, Medieval Europe eventually to Enlightenment era Europe, and think of how all of these groups had well-established periods of growth in architecture, art, math, science, etc.

Africa seems like a place full of biodiversity in all aspects of terrain, animals, peoples and vast in natural resources - it would make me expect to have learned about them somewhere in my education. The only group I've really learned of from Africa is the Egyptians, and I feel like they consider themselves part of the Middle East.

I expect some archeologists and anthropologists have discovered some sort of art and culture from ancient Africa somewhere and the technologies they developed to adapt to their environment, right?