Been watching a lot of shows and movies based the old west, and I notice they always show saloons with those medium sized swinging latticed doors. Is that just a Hollywood embellishment or a common structural design? If it's the former where does it come from? If it's the latter why?

The full quote is below, but I’m most interested in the meaning of, “…a Union of hearts and hands…”

Thank you in advance!

Washington, April 14th, 1865. My dear Sir: I intend to adopt the advice of my friends and use due precaution. . . . I thank you for the assurance you give me that I shall be supported by conservative men like yourself, in the efforts I may make to restore the Union, so as to make it, to use your language, a Union of hearts and hands as well as of States. Yours truly, A. LINCOLN.

When I was a middle schooler long time ago, I studied about the "droit du seigneur" or "jus primae noctis" (the right the Feudal Lords had to have the first sexual intercourse with his female subjects during their wedding night). For my (and my colleagues') contemporary sensiblities it seemed awful not for religion but for moral reasons.

Recently I read that this alleged right had been contested for quite some time and today it seems it's most discredited. Yet I also read some historians still argue it existed.
If it indeed existed, it must have had some far stretching argumentations to cover for adultery and fornication sins and their punishments, and how did Roman Church overlook it?

I’m writing a book that takes place in Charleston in 1861, and one of the main characters is a young slave girl. I want to present her and her family accurately, as I know a lot of history regarding the personal lives of enslaved black people gets watered down and ignored. Especially as a white girl, I don’t want to misrepresent the true history, and really want black people to be a part of creating characters to represent them. Thanks!

I've been reading Sebag Monfengou on Stalin recently and I'm confused about Russian penal practices at the time. Stalin was caught more than once but they would just send him into exile in Siberia, where he was able to to continue his revolutionary activity seemingly with impunity. I'm assuming (as with most of the world) that capital punishment was a thing in Russia at the time, so why were the revolutionaries spared this? Or if not killed, at least locked up tightly so they couldn't organise?

Supposedly there were plans for Syria and Iraq to both unite under the flag of the Ba'ath parties but for some reason they hated each other so much that they sent each other assassins and Syria even joined the international coalition against Iraq in 1990. What is the reason for that animosity despite both parties's same name?

I've been reading up on AR but if there's any book or website that collects all (or at least most, as I appreciate some or much of it may not be extant in English yet) of the testimonies from former inmates and prisoners alike that would be very useful to me.

So I remember hearing back in high school that some historians were looking into artifacts found in Mesoamerica with symbols that were very similar to those made by Egyptians. I cannot find the article I read back then, and most of what I see online either dismissed the concept out of hand or sounds like a conspiracy theory. Is there any actual evidence that cultures in those regions could have contacted one another, or is this another History Channel-esque conspiracy theory with nothing behind it?

I'm thinking about ancient cultures, and what strikes me is aside from having different names, I'm not totally sure what would make one culture different to another in an area. Is it clothing, traditions, food, social structure? If people at this time mostly lived rural lifestyles, how different were these to be called different cultures?

I know this is a loaded question, but through a lot of thinking I've become scarcely sure what would differentiate a rural peasant in e.g. the Roman Empire and in Gaul, for example.

I want to learn more about him and his progressive governance as a forerunner to the New Deal.

I mean a lot of countries around the world participated, on multiple continnents on the sea and land .

The only diffrence is that the americans werebt really involved.

So i know roman slaves were very expensive and because of that treated well, often like a member of family, as well as freed and even married as free people by their owners. I know they were treated like a property though, considering that, could a roman slave have a romantic relationship? As in date a woman, maybe other slave or a free peasant that also works on his owners land? Or would this not be possible?

I'm writing a novel in which the main characters are tracking down a necromantic cult in modern-day Alexandria that originated in Roman Egypt. One of the clues to the location of a shrine involves taking a certain number of steps which the characters realize are equivalent to the number of bones in the human body. I was going to blithely put 206, but it occurred to me to wonder how many bones would a physician in 2nd-century Alexandria be aware of? Would they know about the tiny bones of the inner ear or, say, the hyoid bone? Thanks in advance, historians!

Taffy 3 was hopelessly outgunned. Yamato alone outweighed the entire force, and the IJN had nearly 20 other ships with it. So Taffy 3 made what they thought was a last stand.

Yet when the smoke cleared, the Americans had won a decisive victory. How did this happen?

I've read a number of academic sources concerning the Sogdian tolerance and syncretism of diverse religious ideals. However, it seems that for that for the major part they were a variety of Zoroastrianism that permitted the worship of certain Greco- Roman deities as well as the Mesopotamian Goddess Nana (who appeared to be a central a figure as Ahura Mazda). My question is more so about how they conceptualized this metaphysically. How did their cosmology possibly differ from normative Zoroastrianism given the placement of Nana.

Moreover, I've seen different opinions as to whether Nana is a direct iteration of the Babylonian Ishtar or some late derivation but a separate deity. Would love some thoughts on that.

Was Nana and Ahura Mazda both supreme beings for the traditional Sogdians? How did all of that work conceptually?

Thanks!

I know that arms manufacturers exerted a lot of influence back in those days and maybe even today. If they had such leverage why they didn't just give their weapons to a bunch of people and decide to rule over the countries in 19th century Europe?