From what I’ve heard it was for warmth, however I have not done actual research on the subject. Additionally, was clothing just worn in certain climates or cultures based on cultural practices or was clothing seen in cultures all around the world?

It seems like it would have been much more appropriate to tell that sort of thing to a girl’s father. During that time was it normal to consult the mother of the girl you wish to marry instead of the father?

They’re both Oxford World History editions and I assume they are talking about wheat or is corn a term for crops in general? Why this word? Thanks!

Mary Beard holds that the amount of first-hand, written information we have from Rome, from 100 BCE onwards, is enormous. I never realised that we had so much contemporary data from Rome.

In addition to the question in the title, how can we be sure that the Roman written elements reproductions we have access to today are faithful to the originals? Moreover, do we actually have access, today, to original, non-stone based Roman written documents?

Mary Beard wrote that, in the case of literature, philosophy, etc, much of this got to our hands today thanks to Medieval monks and Islamic scholars. That I can understand - but what about the private letters and even shopping lists she mentioned in SPQR - a History of Ancient Rome?

Thanks

Edit:

Bonus question - all this data, some of it relating to seriously mundane matters, kind of implies a relatively literate society: how literate was ancient Rome (the city, at least)?

Early 20th century communist/socialist authors in the West, such as Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck, speak admiringly of the Soviet Union in their writings. The earliest major socialist detractor I can think of was Orwell, but his anti-Soviet views didn't seem to have gotten much traction in Western communist circles. Even today many communists downplay Soviet failures, but even so very few would claim to be proponents of its system. So when did most Western communists really begin to turn on the Soviet Union and other communist states?

Why do we have them? How did they become so engrained in suburban life? Were they always such a status symbol?

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Western Europe was a "forgotten hole" most of the time before renaissance, with possibly the only major empire being the Roman empire.

Things changed when they started exploring and colonizing far away lands which later put Europe and the West as planetary leaders.

At the time, many (china, arabs...) had the logistics to do what w. europeans did. Why were only Europeans interested in colonizing far lands and what did spark this behavior?

So we’ve all heard the story of the cotton gin being responsible for the boom in space population after the invention of the cotton gin but how was that possible after the Act that outlawed the importation of Slaves? Was smuggling that efficient?

I have been listening to some documentaries about the Falklands War and it got me thinking -- what reasons did the US have for not joining in on the side of the British? The US is a traditional ally of Britain and I would have thought that the US would have jumped in -- especially given the fairly close relationship between Reagan and Thatcher and Reagan's fairly "muscular" foreign policy. Were there domestic political concerns? Or was it just not really asked for by the British strongly enough?

Acre is definitely the most remote state of Brazil and, until 1902, was part of Bolivia, which is much closer. Then there was a revolution apparently and it became part of Brazil. How did that happen?

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He also slightly expands on this claim in the next section, "Marita's Bargain".

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Ah, the classic film cliche, fire arrows. Every side firing little arrow laser beams, particularly at night because setting a fire is so much easier when it is colder. /s

Anyway, we all probably roll our eyes when we see fire arrows being used in pitch battles or by defenders in sieges, but are there any actual examples of fire arrows used in real Medieval combat? If so, do we know how effective they were?