So in a lot of developed cities and in rural places all over the world encountering a couple rodents in a subway station or in the barn is not at all unusual even if personally or economically undesirable and is generally handled by the city or the farmer as just the cost of living life or doing business - and lots of people in the country regard a barn cat or two as sufficient, regardless of how questionable the net effect of that is. But a rodent in the house is something that needs to be more or less immediately dealt with, possibly by an expensive professional depending on the severity, local health concerns (my region of the U.S. is home to hantaviruses and the plague), and homeowner's proclivities.

But I imagine this wasn't always the case and one point rodents in the home could be expected as normal part of life, even if never exactly desirable (like how most people don't freak out or even care if a moth is fluttering around, especially if they don't have any fur or cashmere clothes). So when did that change? And does it have any relation to public awareness of modern germ theory or were they separate developments?

Thanks!

Until very recently it seems like the history of much of the world was made up of the conquering and re-conquering of territory between vast empires and feudal warlords. During certain periods like the medieval era, a province could change hands a dozen times over without too much difficulty.

In the modern era as the current political landscape shows us, it is almost impossible for even the largest and most powerful nations on earth to hold on to even small territories. from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan(twice) and now Ukraine, it seems like no one can grab even a sliver of territory for any length of time. why?

I was looking on Wikipedia and saw an uncited claim that black property owning men could vote in South Africa from 1853 until 1948. Is this true? Where black men systemically denied property, making this technically true but not in practice? How did they lose this right?

I've found plenty of stories regarding the Library's history within the Capitol—how it was burned during the sacking of Washington, the fire in the 1850s, how it was literally overflowing with books in the 1870s, and so on. Hell, I've been able to find photos of a large, multi-story reading room from the 1860s. But I've never found any specific info on where in the Capitol Building the library was located. The most specific info I could find was "the Senate wing." The Architect of the Capitol and Library of Congress sites were useless. Does anyone have any more specific information?

I'm wondering mainly how Protestants, Catholics, and the public at large reacted to having an Eastern Orthodox candidate for president.

Does anyone have any data about how taxes were collected in a place like 1880s Tombstone Arizona? Looking for intervals and amounts collected and how those amounts were determined . I'm trying to figure out how town coffers were replenished. Thanks

I hear of back in the day when school days began with prayer and nobody complained, but you'd think something would've been done about it early on in American history.

It recently dawned on me that fascism spawned from the same region as Machiavelli and most fascist leaders can definitely be described as machiavellian. I was wondering if anyone had any good resources to read about it’s development, especially relating to Italian history/social trends starting around the time of Machiavelli until the fall of Mussolini. My European history class in high school really only focused on Machiavelli, Italy uniting, and then the immediate origin of western “isms” leaving many gaps.

Also, I guess if my premise that facism was founded on Machiavellian principles is fundamentally flawed a quick debunk would be appreciated.

I could totally picture an Eastern Roman scholar purposefully referring to it as Latin and not Roman because, after all, he considered himself Roman but spoke Greek.

I understand that the conventional BC/AD system was created by Dionysius Exiguus in 525 AD for his Easter calendar, so I wouldn't be using that system quite yet.

Would I be referring to the Julian calendar? Were there similar BC/AD conventions in that system or because the empire has been gone for a hundred years would the local populace have devised their own system? Or perhaps "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?

Thank you!

Specifically wondering what chefs of higher end restaurants, food critics, and any sort of 'big name' in the culinary arts world thought of this 'gelatin with everything' trend at the time. Was it embraced? Frowned upon? Any examples of a restaurant of 'prestige' ever serving a menu that had a more unusual gelatin based dish.

Also curious if most folks thought the dishes were good or just saw it as more of a novelty than anything (such as bacon with everything about 10 years back).

I know that in France guilds were abolished by the National Assembly in 1791, but were they already in decline before the Revolution? What about in the rest of Europe?

The English Civil War had many of the same elements later seen in the French Revolution a century later but it is not studied with the same detail or seems to have the same implications in world history. Why is that?