Considering the relative proximity to the heavily populated Indonesian islands such as East Timor, I'm surprised how the Australian continent could be practically unexplored by the Indonesians.

Ignoring the debate over Richard III's guilt or innocence of the princes in the tower, is The Daughter of Time a good "representation" of how researching historian's tackle primary source material and make sense of history?

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The book has been recommended to me to read as a historical mystery which is basically a "here's how historians do research" with a detective, but the person who recommended it has no experience in history/historical research and I don't want to come away from the book with completely the wrong idea about what historian's aim to do in the real world and how historical research is done. Reading a book that has a dramatised version of such things isn't a bother, but it's something that I would like to know has been dramatised, or if it is actually quite accurate.

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Any insight would be brilliant, thank you!

I've read elsewhere on this forum that some historians believe that the ancient Spartans often sincerely attributed laws of recent origin to Lycurgus. Even though these new laws post-dated Lycurgus himself by a considerable margin.

Is that the case? And if so: Are there any good academic sources on this phenomenon?

Thanks!

Hi everyone! I'm Dr Keagan Brewer from Macquarie University (in Sydney, Australia). I've been working on the Voynich manuscript for some time with my co-researcher Michelle Lewis, and I recently attended the online conference on it hosted at the University of Malta. The VMS is a 15th-century illustrated manuscript written in a code and covered in illustrations of naked women. It has been called 'the most mysterious manuscript in the world'. AMA about the Voynich manuscript!

EDIT: It's 11:06am in Sydney. I'm going to take a short break and be back to answer more questions, so keep 'em coming!

EDIT 2: It's 11:45am and I'm back!

EDIT 3: It's time to wrap this up! It's been fun. Thanks to all of you for your comments and to the team at AskHistorians for providing such a wonderful forum for public discussion and knowledge transfer. Keagan and Michelle will soon be publishing an article in a top journal which lays out our thoughts on the manuscript and identifies the correct reading of the Voynich Rosettes. We hope our identification will narrow research on the manuscript considerably. Keep an eye out for it!

My understanding is that none of the Gospels were contemporary with the alleged man, and that the next most contemporary chronicler was Flavius Josephus (whose position later in life would appear to make anything he wrote highly suspect).

Are there any direct records or sources that are considered historically reliable to confirm the existence of Jesus as an actual person, rather than a mythic figure?

This is 100% curiosity, as I know the documents are incredibly well cared for where they are, but...

I recently found some old family wills from the 1500s at the local historical society in England near where my ancestors are from. The historical society has been awesome to work with and in no time I was able to order and received very high quality scans of the documents that Im having printed and framed, I really cant say enough good things about them!

However, it made me curious... what if I, as a direct decendant, wanted those items myself? What would happen if someone went asking for their family items from a place like this?

This may be a dumb question, but it was just a random thought I couldn't find an answer to in Google.

I've been reading it lately and its really fascinating, but I was wondering if it is considered a good study or if I should be wary of its claims.

I understand the Byzantine fleet was a major part of that but what made it so much easier to cross over the straits of Gibraltar and fight in Iberia instead of doing something similar or building a fleet in the Turkish straits to take Greece and Thrace?

Whenever discussions on the fall of Rome are held, and the word "Christianity" is mentioned; it's as if people go into a rabid frenzy and start screaming about how you shouldn't touch Gibbons with a 10-foot pole if you know what's best for you. "Modern historical consensus is that he was wrong" is something I read a lot... yet it ends there? No one ever explains what exactly he was wrong about, and how. Why is Gibbons wrong?

While many racists, nazis, facists, and eugenisists claimed influence from Darwin via the concept of "social darwinism", I know he himswlf never contributed to social darwinism. So I was wondering what where Darwin actual views of race, racism and slavery?

I was wondering if American people knew about the project prior to the detonation of the bombs in Japan. If they knew about it, did they properly understand what was being done? Did they support it? Thanks.

What were the common names inside the Iranian populations of the Achaemenid empire. Were names like Cyrus,Darius and Xerxes common names that one could find inside the iranians of the empire. Did different Iranian groups have different sets of names, like would people named darius only be persians?

My knowledge of the Japanese involvement in WWI is minimal but I know they were mostly a diplomatic ally rather than a provision of force for the West. I want to know if Japanese and American soldiers ever fought in the trenches side by side during this war?

I am assuming that Hitler does not have Czechoslovakia before taking Austria and he also does not have Austria before attacking Czechoslovakia.

And let´s also assume that other powers don´t immediately intervene like France or Poland or Italy.

I have heard from other historians like Indy Neidell that Czechoslovakia and France alone had the military power to resist Hitler had they done so before he took the Sudetenland, and that invading Austria would have been difficult in extremis helped by the incredibly mountainous terrain.

How accurate are these claims? Were their armies in reasonably good shape, competently led, large, with manpower reserves, and enough of an industrial base? And what were Germany´s capabilities in 1938?

Learning about this shocked me to my fucking core

A friend told me about it the other day, and I couldn't believe it. They just gave children to pedophiles, with the express purpose of those pedophiles raping them... How? How can anyone convince anyone else this is a good idea? With all the power of my intellect I am not capable to imagine a scenario that would lead to this result. Even if every single person in the German government was evil, shouldn't the public have stopped it? Because it wasn't even a secret

Please, I need to understand

My dad is a survivor of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime, and I’m writing his story. I read a lot of conflicting reports that the US did/didn’t contribute to inciting the coup, but these are all from western sources. But it’s no secret that Nixon was already a shady man that had already unlawfully carpet-bombed neutral Cambodia a few years prior.

Where is the best place to learn an unbiased account of what was going on with the major world superpowers surrounding the time of the Cambodian civil war (China, the Soviet Union, the US)?

I've heard that race was created in order to justify chattel slavery I'm the US. Is this true?