After reading some of Roberts' "The History of the World" I have become interested in Greek History.

I was wondering if "A History of the Archaic Greek World" by Jonathan M. Hall would be a good place to start?

Or is there a good book on Greece in the Bronze Age that you would recommend before delving into archaic Greece?

(I am a college student of mathematics, but enjoy reading in my spare time).

Why was marble prized so much in Ancient Greece and Rome? Why wasn't granite or other equivalents we know from today used or prized the same way?

I'm just thinking about Augustus's quote "I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble." Why wasn't it white granite or something else instead of marble?

Was it the aesthetics..? Stone properties..?

Hello everyone!

I've been looking for sources detailing the approximate numbers of inmates as well as the death toll of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. I'm not looking for the victim numbers of individual camps but more for a total number of this Nazi death machinery. As far as I read, the Jewish death toll can be estimated to be around 5,6 - 6,3 Million; ~1,1 Million of which were killed in Auschwitz alone. But how many people died in total in the concentration/death camps? Approximately how many of those were e.g. Sinti and Roma, homosexual, political prisoners, prisoners of war, etc.? I know that no concrete numbers exist and sometimes only vague estimates can be made. Any help is appreciated!

Disclaimer: I am NOT a Nazi or a Holocaust denialist. The Holocaust played a great part in my BA thesis and I want to use that information to teach others about the horrors that were these camps and to visualize to my students the scope of these atrocities.

You can often hear that they won. It certainly looks like Russia was humiliated by the mere fact that great European power was not able to crush a relatively small Asian one. But when I read about it in wikipedia the language is evasive. It says that the war ended in Japanese victory but the peace agreement seems relatively tame for me. Treaty of Portsmouth article also says that Japanese people felt cheated by the treaty.

So what's the extent of Japanese victory?

I have heard this claim a few times and find it really interesting and would love to learn some more about it. :)

It's grimly fascinating to me that people living on an island would find their own conditions so wretched that they would collectively voluntarily abandon the life they knew for one they didn't. It must have been miserable.

I have the questions in the title, but also am curious about the government's position. How did they view the St. Kildans before the evacuation--as a burden or merely as citizens like they would view any other citizens? Did they entice them to evacuate or provide for them in any way afterwards?

I also read that some families would return to visit. Do we know anything about the nature of these returns? How long they were, what they did there, etc. Like, did these families view it as a poignant visit of a time gone by, or did they spend some extended time living there engaging in economic activity?

The Western Front in WWI was dominated by attempts to break through the German lines, with all sorts of innovations and offensives. Why was never any attempt to flank the quagmire by landing forces behind the lines? The Entente had absolute naval superiority after Jutland, couldn't they have just chosen any stretch of Belgian or German coastline and landed soldiers there, supported by fire from sea?

Whether splashy individual cases that made all the papers (or monastic chronicles...one of them...) or government policy, for today's Tuesday Trivia let's talk about some of history's abduction cases.

AS the title states i have wondered about this, we have heard before the saying "that guy is worth his salt" and other ways of expressing that salt was a item that would be valued. So if you are Genghis Khan and you are salting the earth of your recent defeated enemies, what would be the cost of this, and how would he have gather enough salt to make this a tactic? thank you

When pointing out mistakes in a historical movie that claims to be based on a true story (not inspired by), how do you respond to "it's just a movie, get over it"? I don't know how to say what I mean without effectively sounding like a self-righteous dick. How can you explain that it's ok to point out historical flaws and in some ways can be quite important like helping to stop the spread of misinformation?

edit: I'm not aiming to 'shit' on movies through historical inaccuracies and I also never let inaccuracies hurt the value of a film. I have no problem whatsoever suspending my disbelief to enjoy a well paced, acted, interesting, etc historically inaccurate film. For example, I really enjoy both Lone Survivor and American Sniper as films, but they're far from accurate films even if they claim to be. I'm merely aiming to dispel the "historical" parts of such films, as I feel that even in both these examples being more accurate would have improved both films.

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The question is inspired from playing the pseudohistorical game World of Warships, which is in itself derived from the game World of Tanks, and has retained some mechanics.

In both games armor angling (angling your armor at incoming fire) is a factor, which I know from reading old WW2 armored warfare manuals absolutely was taught to tankers in order to increase absolute armor thickness and to encourage bounces of armor piercing ammunition.

Was the same doctrine ever used for battleships and cruisers?

Did the language change enough from the founding of the Roman Republic to the fall of the Empire to still be understandable?

This seems crazy to me but there are new york times stories on it. I'd never heard about this.

After a new update to CoD: WW2, I have been left wondering if there were any personal shields used in WW2? I can't find anything from google, so i decided to ask here. I know soviet sappers wore armour plates, maybe someone used shields?

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What were Mussolini and Hitler’s idea for dividing up land and co-existing immediately after ww2 if they won? I know Nazi Germany was planning on eventually annexing Fascist Italy, but they would need time to recuperate and plan after the war.

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