There are a good amount of sources out there listing what kind of taxes there used to be, but I've never seen any explanation on how they actually enforced any of this.

Property taxes I can still imagine, as just keeping track of where people build houses and roughly measuring their size probably wasn't too hard.

Income taxes, or at least whatever precursor there was, already seems harder. Would they just ask every employer and employee their salary, compare their answers, and hoped they both spoke the truth? How would they keep track of the constant changes in salary?

Sales taxes / Tariffs / etc are the ones that really baffle me. How could you possibly keep track of how many items were sold, or who takes what goods where? Would they essentially just set up points on the road, and count the goods that came through? Wouldn't people just start avoiding those points?

Duchy of Burgundy, a vassal of France was essentially a rival state of France (from what I understand) from middle of 14th to middle of 15th century with the Duke of Burgundy occassionally being the real power behind the French throne. French vassals in general were also very independent minded where the King exercised very little power till France's centralization during like Louis XIV's days.

Was this really all that far from the limited hold the Holy Roman Emperor had on, for example, Bavaria or Hamburg?

It could also be interesting to touch on other monarchies that were quite decentralized as well like Spain.

I would really value any insights any historians could share. Thank you!

I'm reading the Wikipedia page on Russo-Persian wars and I'm fighting for my life to try and understand this text. Why was Persia so weak to be partitioned so easily that Afghans almost brought them down and their rivals were cutting them down? Then how did they resurge so fast to get those lands back? Ottomans seem to have been defeated militarily, but Russia seems to have just given up those lands voluntarily, why?

We all know the common myth about Harrison dying from a cold because he gave a long inauguration speech in the rain. Clearly, this wasn't what happened.

But how seriously do historians take the relatively recent theory that the White House water supply was downstream of public sewage, and this caused septic shock due to "enteric fever" (typhoid or paratyphoid fever), thus killing him?

Repost, because original was removed for the title not being in a question format. Apparently, "William Henry Harrison's Death" was too vague...

So, I'm reading through Peter Longerich's monster of a biography on Henrich Himmler, and I'm kind of in awe as to how many sources/references he has. He has diary entries that Himmler made when he was a child, to letters he sent to people at various times from his early years in the party all the way up to the end of his life while Nazi Germany was collapsing around him.

My question is, how have all of these documents survived? Take his childhood diary: Himmler, at that age, was just an unremarkable German child. Or any of the thousands of letters/telegrams he sent, that were just basic communications. I mean hell, my emails still exist but that's because I have the internet. I have a difficult time finding my university notes for my courses like a year after the course finishes.

But Himmler lived at a time when nearly all of these documents were physical paper, which is very fragile. And then his home went through the most destructive war in Europe's history. I can't imagine that many people took great pains to save their childhood diaries/random scraps of paper when bombs were dropping and guns were being fired outside.

And add to this that the Nazis tried to destroy as much documentation as they could before the war ended.

Not to mention there are tones of personal anecdotes about what he did/where he was on what days. But like, Himmler was a super busy man who went all over the place, and most of the people involved who he would have worked with are dead or in hiding.

How does a historian get all this info? Is it really just from reading books? Or is there a special archive that have all the personal writings of important historical figures?

And this all goes of course for even older sources before the printing press? How do historians have all of this information, because I can't imagine that paper documents have survived hundreds, or sometimes even thousands of years. I mean sure there are the dead sea scrolls, but that is more the exception rather than the rule ?

One very famous example of the Ottoman case is of Khalil al-Sarmini, whose marriage to a female jinn was tacitly approved by the Shafi'i mufti of Aleppo. Considering the folklore surrounding youkai and them being able to marry and breed with humans, were there similar cases happening in early modern Japan?

In my western perspective of the Cold War, I expected everyone in the eastern bloc would’ve been happy to have the USSR dissolved but the 1991 Soviet Union referendum had 70% in favour of preserving the union. The actual decision to dissolve the Soviet Union was taken almost unilaterally by Boris Yeltsin. However, when individual member states took independence referenda they were overwhelmingly in favour. How come there’s this contradiction? Did people want to stay a part of the USSR or not?

For example, nowadays we archive sections of the story into chapters.

Chapters into books etc.

What did Homer use to archive The Odyssey? I've read online mentions of poems but surely the stories of such a large scale were not compressed into a poem on a scroll?

In one of those weird historical moments, both the communist PRC and the anti-communist USA (as well as the UK and other allies), somehow ended up supporting the same side. That side being a xenophobic, communist, authoritarian Khmer Rouge, which was at that point responsible for up to 2 million deaths. What led to this scenario? Was communist Vietnam just that hated by its neighbours?

The population of the UK + Germany + France is 212 million people and the british colonies combined (USA, Canada, Australia, NZ) is 400 million. Only a few percent of europeans immigrated to the new world, so why do the colonies 2x outpopulate their home countries population combined?

His rise has never been that clear to me. Why did he come to power after Lenin? What happened to Trotsky? It seemed like Trotsky was in a good position to succeed Lenin but then Stalin ended up on top. I know that Stalin helped Lenin raise money for the Bolsheviks but their relationship deteriorated.

20 year rule note: This question is specifically about the novel which was published in 1985, rather than the much more recent TV series based on it.

The Handmaid's Tale TV series was considered extremely timely when it began running in 2017, because of the parallels between the ultra-patriarchal regime it depicts and the contemporary online alt-right movement, particularly the parts of that movement that promote ideas like "white sharia". For example, "Our big mistake was teaching [women] to read. We won't make that mistake again." is a quote from the novel that the series was based on, that could easily come from the mouth of any one of a number of alt-right figures who were at the height of their influence in 2017.

However, the novel that the series was based on was first published in 1985, before the Internet as we know it existed, let alone the online alt-right. At the time the novel was published, was anyone actually pushing ideas like prohibiting women from reading? And if so, how fringe or mainstream were such views considered?

(EDIT: removed the geographical qualifier from my question. If women's rights were backsliding to the point of losing the right to read anywhere in the world in the 1980s, I guess that's relevant to the context of the novel's publication)

Obviously we can't see into the future, but can it be determined that MAD reduced or prevented large-scale conflicts between major powers in the past?

I realize there are some specific circumstances — like the urban poor of ancient Rome who lacked access to a fire/kitchen — where bread makes more sense.

But I've ground grain by hand. It's incredibly time-consuming and monotonous. Even if you could outsource it to a miller, you're going to pay for it, and if you're poor, why?

And while most poor peasants had access to a fire they could cook over, they'd probably need to pay a baker to bake their bread or, at best, spend time traveling to communal ovens.

On the other hand, it's really easy to cook whole grains or prepare them as part of a porridge/pottage/soup. Doing so must have saved an incredible amount of time vs preparing bread.

So what's the economic/time argument for bread? If I'm a poor peasant with limited time and energy and a ton of farmwork that needs to be done. Why do I devote time —or my equally busy wife's time — to grinding bread, and my scarce money to paying a baker?

Do I like it that much? Is it easier to get than I've laid out here? Was bread really not as common as we assume?

I have been thinking about this for a while, as the normal way of wearing swords on foot couldn’t work that well mounted. The scabbard would slap the horse during a charge, and the way the handle sat it’d get in the way.

Looking at the bao tapestries the seem to sit further back and more straight down so the scabbard wouldn’t get in the way as much.

I know that on hussar saddles there are straps to strap the scabbard on the saddle itself, either in front or in the back, but I haven’t seen this done on any medieval saddles.

How was this done, or was swords just used so rarely in that period that the few times you needed it your squire would just hand it to you when you needed it?

Seemed like an event where people must get over their ideologies and help contain the disaster, especially since it would not only affect the Soviet Union but western Europe too with radiation. It would be in the interest of a lot of western European countries to make sure radiation doesn't spread to the water supplies or through the winds. So why didn't the west contribute significant efforts especially since, I would assume, it was nail-biting to see the disaster unravel especially for everyone in the continent.

What led to countries and other things such as naval vessels being assigned a gender? E.G “she is a great ship” or “for the fatherland?”