I am mostly interested in the local leadership and their understanding of the general ongoing process.

We often discuss the "intent" of the colonizators and how they understood or rationalize their role in a colonial system; but what about the colonized? How did they envision their future role in a system where they were no longer fully in charge? Did they seek support for their own "progressive" programs and independence ideas in the same way various European nations looked at France and Britain as models of administrative advancement and ideas of national identity (here I am thinking especially to the relations between the various European independentist movements and the British - and to a lesser degree French - society)? Did they see the colonial rule as a moment in their own future development?

From The Myth of Andalusian Paradise. Having a discussion online and this issue came up. It is a common trope that Muslims preserved classical knowledge that would have been lost otherwise, so it was a bit of a surprise first time I read his book.

I'll provide a fuller quote so Fernández-Morera can speak in his own words:

The oft-repeated assertion that Islam “preserved” classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never “lost” to be somehow “recovered” and “transmitted” by Islamic scholars, as so many academic historians and journalists continue to write: these texts were always there, preserved and studied by the monks and lay scholars of the Greek Roman Empire and passed on to Europe and to the Islamic empire at various times. As Michael Harris points out in his History of Libraries in the Western World:

The great writings of the classical era, particularly those of Greece … were always available to the Byzantines and to those Western peoples in cultural and diplomatic contact with the Eastern Empire.… Of the Greek classics known today, at least seventy-five percent are known through Byzantine copies.

The historian John Julius Norwich has also reminded us that “much of what we know about antiquity—especially Hellenic and Roman literature and Roman law—would have been lost forever if it weren’t for the scholars and scribes of Constantinople.”

The Muslim intellectuals who served as propagandists for Caliph Al-Mamun (the same caliph who started the famous Islamic Inquisition to cope with the rationalism that had begun to infiltrate Islam upon its contact with Greek knowledge), such as al-Gahiz (d. 868), repeatedly asserted that Christianity had stopped the Rum (Romans—that is, the inhabitants of the Greek Roman Empire) from taking advantage of classical knowledge. This propaganda is still repeated today by those Western historians who not only are biased against Christianity but also are often occupationally invested in the field of Islamic studies and Islamic cultural influence.Lamenting the end of the study of ancient philosophy and science upon the presumed closing of the Athenian Neoplatonic Academy by Emperor Justinian I in 529 is part of this narrative. Yet this propaganda does not correspond to the facts, as Speros Vryonis and others have shown, and as evidenced by the preservation and use of ancient Greek knowledge by the Christians of the empire of the Greeks.

Recently I had a disagreement about whether any Japanese adopted the practice, and I wanted to see whether there’s any merit to the argument that it spread outside of China.

More specifically, does anyone have any specific online resources I can check out quickly to find more info about this?

Have to do something for AP US History about the Cold War, and being a Korean-American, I wanted to do something about about the Korean War.

I'm still going to try to find some sources myself, but it'd save me plenty of time if I didn't have to try to filter through Wikipedia posts and websites that are pretty generic.

Today I decided to do a family tree and was amazed to find that I was related to someone of significance Charles Von Komstohk. Doing some reading I found this excerpt

Frankfort, Germany, of pedigrees of nine generations of Komstohks prior to Charles von Komstohk, a baron of the Roman Empire, who escaped to England in 1547, because implicated with other noblemen of Austria and Silesia in the von Benedict treason.

After doing some googling and not really coming up with much I am hoping someone may be able to tell me what the incident was about. Thank you in advance!

Based on what I've learned about the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Communist Regime did not try to distance themselves from Sun Yat-Sen. However, Sun Yat-Sen supported a Western-style representative republic. From my viewpoint, as an American, it seems as if the Communists pretty blatantly hijacked and destroyed any hopes of fulfilling Sun's revolution.

Yet, the Chinese still honor Sun and seem to view modern China as what he would have wanted. How did a one-party dictatorship convince the people of China that their government was somehow honoring Sun's goals?

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My guess is that they feared that letting the Germans pass and easily invade France would make them seem sided with the French and they would lose their neutral status anyway. Is this close to the truth?

I noticed that Pushkin's grandfather, an African from roughly modern-day Chad, was freed, treated very well, and received a formal education in Metz; this is quite the contrast with his time with the Ottomans, where he was effectively a royal slave. This got me thinking: were there issues with racism in Russia back then? Even today, you'll see supporters of Zenit St. Petersburg heckling their own players for being darker skinned - how would they have reacted to the Tsar taking in an African child as his own godson? Abram Gannibal was apparently quite the regular in the Royal court as well.

Why did they change the stories? Does this undermine the function the stories were accomplishing?

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After the annexation, new states from Mexican land would join the union, specifically Texas and California. Seeing as Tejanos and Californios were ethnically different than the new white settlers, were Tejanos and Californios allowed to vote for high office, or were their votes surpressed with something akin to literacy tests or poll taxes?

Iconoclast Christians argued that any form of Christ's image is graven. Did this extend to the cross? And if so, how could Iconoclasts hope to rally the masses behind Christ if there was not a unifying symbol?