Hello, I realize this may be a weird question because it’s not asking about a topic in particular but I hope it’s allowed. I’m looking to learn more about the ancient history of what is now modern Syria, as in all that’s within its current borders and I know/understand very well that kingdoms and empires stretched over the land of several modern countries today. Could someone suggest some books I could read about the ancient near east and that area in particular? Many thanks in advance.

I like reading about the development of Indo-European languages on Wikipedia and whatnot. To me, it seems that as languages go from Ancient times to the present, they lose complexity. For example, English doesn't really have a case system even though German does, Romance languages have dropped case structure despite Latin having seven, and Greek loses cases over time. Same applies to verb conjugation. English does not have genders despite coming from old German, and many Romance languages have dropped from three to two genders. Many languages used to have a 'dual' grammatical number, however this is now dropped.

Is there any reasoning or mechanism behind these trends, and does it make language more vague?

Almost all record labels in 1920s were owned by white people, yet blues music emerged mostly because of Afro-Americans. To what extend did these white owners shape the blues music in this era? Were black musicians forced to adjust their music by the white owners with the purpose to sell more records? Also, were white musicians told to alter their music when it sounded to black?

I’m reading The Terror by Dan Simmons, a horror novel about two British Naval ships trapped in arctic ice. The crews are comprised entirely of white Englishmen; officers enforce an alcohol ban and there are long religious services every Sunday. However after three years out in the cold with dwindling supplies, morale is low and paranoia is setting in. When an Inuit woman is allowed to board the ship many of the sailors call her a “Jonah” and demand that she is sent back out onto the ice. At one point they almost form a mob and slit her throat. I understand that a “Jonah” is a person who brings a ship with bad luck, based on the story of Jonah in the Bible (who went to sea to try and escape the wrath of God, got tossed overboard and was swallowed by a giant fish that only spat him up once he’d found God again) Then there’s the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, where a sailor curses a ship by killing an albatross. I want to know what kind of superstitions were rife amongst sailors from other nations and religions. Did other countries heap scorn on the British for indulging in their silly superstitions, or were different superstitions and traditions widely respected by anyone who lived and died at sea? The Terror is set in 1847 but I would be interested to hear about any time period. Many thanks!

I just came across a picture of the ordinary patent for toilet paper and now I'm curious what people did after using the rest room before toilet paper

Was the maus ever actually used in combat

In 1338, the Battle of Arnemuiden took place, involving 5 English ships going up against a significantly larger French fleet.

One of the English ships, the Christopher, was equipped with 3 cannons and one hand cannon.

The English lost and the Christopher was captured.

The wikipedia article on this battle is extremely sparse and has almost no information.

How successful was the Christopher prior to the surrender? Are there any French records of going up against naval cannons for the first time? Were the French aware they would be fighting such a high tech ship?

Were there any battles in the war following this where ships equipped with gunpowder cannons went up against a fleet without these weapons, or did both sides quickly arm their ships with cannons?

Listening to Dan Carlin’s Blueprint For Armageddon series for probably the 10th time now (highly recommend, BTW) and he mentions the utilization of colonial soldiers during wartime by the major powers. He mentions the wariness of the German soldiers when they first notice these foreign soldiers as they realize how much human capital the French and British have at their disposal.

So, what happened to them after the war ended? Did they simply go home? Did they earn any kind of additional rights or benefits as a result of their participation? Did any get to stay in-country instead of returning home?

Edit - a friendly moderator has asked me to narrow this question down as it is a bit too broad. For right now, I’d like to focus on Senegalese and Australian soldiers. However, if anyone here has expertise on another colonial power that was involved, please comment anyway! All answers are appreciated. :)

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Looking back in time and considering all a wooden ship must do to survive a voyage at sea, it seems like the risk of Fire is practically insurmountable.

Surging waves, raging storms, and fires lit by whale oil aboard a ship constructed of pure kindling. While I know that lamps were tied down and secured, and surely the lights would need to be put out in a raging storm, but surely unforeseen circumstances were pretty common on an ocean voyage, especially at night.

Perhaps it's a ridiculous question since the knowledge would've sunk with the ship, but do we have any estimation of approximately what percentage wooden ships might have been lost to a Navy due to fire mishaps in times of peace?

Just got curious is all. Many studies show secularism spreading deep in modern culture. This could be linked to multiple environmental and cultural factors in society today.

While not directly comparable, do we have any conclusive knowledge of just why the scales tipped towards reformed practices during the end of the Sadducees and rise of Karaism?

EDIT: crap I missed a word from the title

It's a lot to unpack- not sure how to refute all of it -

"Abraham Lincoln repeatedly stated his war was caused by taxes only, and not by slavery, at all.

"My policy sought only to collect the Revenue (a 40 percent federal sales tax on imports to Southern States under the Morrill Tariff Act of 1861)." reads paragraph 5 of Lincoln's First Message to the U.S. Congress, penned July 4, 1861.

"I have no purpose, directly or in-directly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so," Lincoln said it his first inaugural on March 4 of the same year.

There is no proof of Lincoln ever declaring the war was fought to abolish slavery, and without such an official statement, the war-over-slavery teaching remains a complete lie and offensive hate speech that divides Americans, as is being done now by the media and politicians regarding the Confederate flag in South Carolina.

Slavery was NOT abolished; just the name was changed to sharecropper with over 5 million Southern whites and 3 million Southern blacks working on land stolen by Wall Street bankers.

White, black, Indian, Hispanic, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish Confederates valiantly stood as one in thousands of battles on land and sea. Afterwards, they attended Confederate Veterans' reunions together and received pensions from Southern States.

Photos of black Confederate veterans may be seen in Alabama's Archives in Scrapbook - 41stReunion of United Confederate Veterans, Montgomery, June 2,3,4 and 5, 1931."

Lincoln did not claim slavery was a reason even in his Emancipation Proclamations on Sept. 22, 1862, and Jan. 1, 1863. Moreover, Lincoln's proclamations exempted a million slaves under his control from being freed (including General U.S. Grant's four slaves) and offered the South three months to return to the Union (pay 40 percent sales tax) and keep their slaves. None did. Lincoln affirmed his only reason for issuing was: "as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said (tax) rebellion."

Mrs. Grant wrote in her personal memoirs: "We rented our pretty little home (in St. Louis) and hired out our four servants to persons whom we knew and who promised to be kind to them. Eliza, Dan, Julia and John belonged to me. When I visited the General during the War, I nearly always had Julia with me as nurse."

Lincoln declared war to collect taxes in his two presidential war proclamations against the Confederate States, on April 15 and 19th, 1861: "Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein."

On Dec. 25, 1860, South Carolina declared unfair taxes to be a cause of secession: "The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three-fourths (75%) of them are expended at the North (to subsidize Wall Street industries that elected Lincoln)." (Paragraphs 5-8)

It was on April 8, 1861, that Lincoln, alone, started the war by a surprise attack on Charleston Harbor with a fleet of warships, led by the USS Harriet Lane, to occupy Fort Sumter, a Federal tax collection fort in the territorial waters of South Carolina and then invaded Virginia.

On April 29, 1861, President Jefferson Davis described the South's response of self-defense in his Message To the Confederate States Congress: "I directed a proposal to be made to the commander of Fort Sumter that we would abstain from directing our fire on Fort Sumter if he would promise not to open fire on our forces unless first attacked. This proposal was refused." (Paragraphs 8-9)

The only reason the South ever gave for fighting was in self-defense of the voluntary Union of independent States, as symbolized then by the U.S. Flag.

Secession (withdrawal from a voluntary union) and war are two very different events."

In the fictional serie's fictional wild west park there is a group of former Confederate soldiers who refused to surrender and gone rogue as mercenaries south of the border, does this have an historical basis?

Conventional wisdom tells us that today’s modern Jewish people are descended from converts to the faith. An ancient form of Judaism is known to have been practiced well before the Bronze Age Collapse, as evidenced by a complete lack of pig bones in the region around Judea starting around 1300 BC, but the Israelites didn’t show up until around 1000 BC. The original population is not well known to us - the so-called Jebusites.

Is it possible that it was the Jebusites who fought the Philistines, and their stories later told by the converts? Is it possible the Philistines, who lived in the land and built cities, and who are said to have disappeared to parts unknown, are those same first converts? The Philistines were Mycenaean Greeks, after all, and modern Ashkenazi Jews have a lot of Greek and Armenian DNA.

Do these two puzzle pieces fit together?

We often think of dictators as sitting at their desks, surrounded by cronies, planning the next vile move to usurp more power and oppress the masses when they're not giving speeches, attending marches, or congratulating the military. Yet there exist films of Hitler playing with his dog, Blondi.

So that brought the question to mind: what did they do when they weren't crushing the opposition? What kinds of games did they play, books did they read, branches did they whittle? Did other dictators have surprising hobbies?

I encountered this while wandering the internet recently

Actually, the original-original pre-Grimm Brothers’ stories that were passed around Europe via oral tradition are nowhere near as violent as the Grimm’s made them. Cinderella’s stepsisters were never ugly and kept their eyes, Snow White’s mother was not even a villain (instead a group of bandits were), and instead of spending the whole story napping Sleeping Beauty outwitted a dangerous bandit leader, wouldn’t let him sleep with her, and saved herself.

The original oral stories were radically changed by the Brothers Grimm to fit their personal and political beliefs. Most notably, they often added in female characters solely for the purpose of making them evil villains and took away most of the heroines’ agency and intelligence. Both brothers belonged to a small fanatical sect of Catholicism that vilified women because of the idea of Original Sin and Wilhelm in particular had a particularly deep hatred of women. The Grimms were actually pretty horrible people. Those cannibalistic queens and ugly stepsisters and the mass amount of violence against women didn’t exist until the Grimms wanted them to. Their ideas stuck so soundly though that we now assume they were in the original tales and that these terrible characters and ideas come out of some perceived barbaric Old World culture. But in truth they’re really the Grimms’ weird obsession with hating women showing through. The original oral folklore focused on the heroes’ and heroines’ good deeds and used them as ways to teach cultural norms and a society’s rules and encouraged girls to be quick-witted and street-savvy instead of passive princesses, and the Grimms promptly stripped that all away.

which doesn't square with my understanding. How much truth is there to this, if any?