As many of us know the Browning designed pistols were very popular for military applications and even European police adoption, but US police forces used revolvers for much of the period after the WW2 until the 1970s or 1980s (I'm not sure). Why is this? Seems that semi-automatic handguns took over the majority of military use once WW2 ended.

The stereotypical version of an executioner in shows and movies is someone with a hood over their head. Was this accurate, or were their faces shown? If they were hooded, was it common amongst the locals to know who was actually beneath the hood, or was it truly anonymous?

The cold war itself is covered heavily in US and World history classes, but then they just tell us that the Soviet Union collapsed and that caused it's end. But why did it collapse, and why in the way that it did?

I'm asking as a full-time professional Spanish-to-English translator and a soon-to-be holder of an MA in Translation who would also like to be able to do something with his BA in History.

Is is considered truth amongst laymans like myself that gunpowder was first created in China, with a mix of salitre, coal and sulphur, however what were they trying to create/investigate and what led them to actually create gunpowder? This doubt has been bugging me for a while, as the only answer I came up with is that they were trying to create some kind of festival item, such as a sort of firework or some thing.

Related question, how did the production and distribution of such large amounts of gold from Mali not cause gold to become worthless?

I know metal/rock guys tend to be very anti-pop guys, so I was wondering how the metal/rock community reacted when they found out Eddie worked with Michael. Was it a general acceptance, or did they view him as a sell out?

Please keep in mind, I am not intending to create a deliberately divisive post, I am simply interested in asking a question. A little bit of background. I used to be a Muslim, but am far more secular right now. One of the things that caused me to have a sort of existential crisis was finding out that apostasy is apparently punishable by death in Islam. This ruling, even as a Muslim, made me very uncomfortable. I didn't agree with it at all, nor did I believe that historically, Muslim scholars always agreed with the idea that people should be killed if they left the faith. Anyways, I ending up learning a little bit about three men. Their names are Abu Isa al-Warraq, al-Ma'arri, and Ibn al-Rawandi. All of these men seem to have been either critics of interpretations of Islam that were prominent during their time, or they had left the faith, and were critical of Islam and religion in general. Yet, to my knowledge, none of these men were killed for their writings that were critical of Islam. All of them seem to have died a natural death. Al Ma'arri was apparently even loved by the people of the city he lived in. If this is the case, why weren't they killed for blasphemy of Islam, or apostasy? It seems that not every Muslim state or even not every Muslim scholar believed people should have been killed for their blasphemy or apostasy, but I am ultimately not sure about this. I am also aware that some supposed critics of Islam from these time periods may not have been critics of Islam at all, but accused of being critics. I believe it was Muhammad al-Razi who was apparently accused of being an ex-Muslim, when apparently all the work we have from the man is commentary on him from one of his most vociferous critics, but I am not sure about how true this for the other three men that I mentioned. So, as the question asks, how was apostasy perceived among Islamic scholars or even Muslim rulers throughout the years?

I know the Italian Renaissance was the origin, but when did the transition begin, how long did it take for the trend to spread across Europe and what were the intermediate stages between the Renaissance and full Neoclassicism?

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I have this idea of old western taverns being full of beer. But since I’ve started working with breweries more often, I struggle to imagine brewing in sanitary conditions, effectively distributing beer from the brewery to the tavern, and keeping it cold and fizzy prior to serving.

I'm inspired by the song "Whiskey in the Jar" which tells a story of an Irish highwayman who robs a captain. The song is apparently around 300 years old.

Additionally, did the United States ever have a bandit problem? Can anyone speak to different time periods or regions of the world?

In the context already high tensions due to a lot of other factors, I'm curious about how much of a role Princip actually played i.e. would the war have occurred anyways, with or without the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand?

One area of US history that I see a lot of discussion about US Reconstruction after the Civil War. There seems to have been a lot of changing views of that era, with a lot of discussion still going on. Very generally, while almost everyone agrees that reconstruction was a failure, the old story used to be "the Radical Republicans tyrannically oppressed the South, with carpetbaggers trying to take control of the region using ignorant Black voters to do so," while now it is something like "Reconstruction was ultimately a failure thanks to major Southern backlash against Black rights, which the government tried but utimately failed to crush, resulting in the old Racial system being recreated across the South."

The debate about which is right is still ongoing, and reflects many questions about American culture today. My question, however, is how did the first story actually come about? Why was the experience of African Americans mischaracterized by so many historians for so long? Is there any actual truth to the first "story" of reconstruction (example: were carpetbaggers an actual force in Southern politics, or is that more or less a myth)? I assume this topic has a lot to do with Racial persceptions in America, so feel free to talk about that when answering this question.

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