I read the book a few years ago and found it fascinating, and i'm considering reading it again. But I would like to hear about how the content of the book stands up to scrutiny, especially from other historians or anthropologists. Are any of his analyses or main points of the book wrong or misguided?

From what I understand missionaries we're often the first wave of non-native speakers to learn Chinese or Japanese fluently. Usually it was to proselytize. I know that they also translated the Bible into Chinese as well, though I can't remember exactly one. What were the early struggles for these translators like? Did they just learned through trial and error? Was there a long periods of concentrated study in a university like setting? Or was it done over the course of their time spent in China interacting with the natives? Did they have any teachers?

[deleted]

[deleted]

[deleted]

For example are there any historical records on Umar ibn Al-Khattab taking Jerusalem away from Byzantine?

Weren't the people of Naples or surrounding areas at all curious what happened to the people who were in Pompeii? Didn't anyone attempt to dig up the ash after, say, a year and bury the bodies/loot the town?

I honestly don't know. They seem inaccurate and unwieldy, they're huge, and heavy and slow down armies. They just fire 1 really big ball. Why EXACTLY were they useful?

Reading about Roman laws made me wonder how did they manage to control their established citizenship status? Were there lists that had names of those who were citizens or did they have to prove it somehow?

Every now and then I hear about famous Polish, Czech, French, etc pilots and troops that escaped to allied countries and served later in the war. How did they get across a hostile Nazi occupied Europe? Were they stationed in the remote enough places to escape before the Nazis got there?

I was doing research on capital ships of the Royal Navy and I was shocked to see that HMS Dreadnought (Or really any dreadnought class battleships) wasn't around as a museum ship. I also discovered that it was the case for most eras of their capital ships.

Granted, I'm an American and we have tons of ships from the all of our eras in ports all over the country but I thought there would be more capital ships floating around as museums in the UK due to the Royal Navy's history.

There are things that make this fairytale seem more real than others such as, the name of the town inserted into the story, the year this supposedly happened, and the very specific number of 130 children leaving. Thank you!

I’ve been reading about the Transylvania saxons a small (use to be quite large) ethnic German minority in Hungary and Romania. How the hell did they manage to stay German for like 800 years, considering they moved to the kingdom of Hungary in the 1100’s/1200’s? How did they not get absorbed by Hungarian and romanian culture and become assimilated both culturally/linguistically and ethnically/racially?

Some historians argued that the Nazi regime might have been too chaotic to be considered totalitarian:

• Martin Broszat in "The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing"

• Hans Mommen (same book)

• Ian Kershaw in "The Nazi Dictatorship Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation"

Why did they suggest this? Because the Nazi leaders encouraged competition in all aspects of life, like in business, and this signifies a lack of social cooperation?