Additional question: Did Jefferson Davis attempt to create a CS Camel Corps out of the captured animals in Texas? Were they used by the Army of New Mexico during the New Mexico campaign?

It’s hard to phrase this question, but I read somewhere that few men make it from the beginning to end of WWII. They said something like most survivors of D-Day being dead by the time Germany surrendered. But I hear tons of anecdotes and stories about certain veterans and units surviving the entirety of their time in the war (Easy Company comes to mind), but are these occurrences just extremely rare?

I am currently a sophomore at Iowa State University. I am in the process of adding a history major, but I am not sure which degree I should pursue. I've looked online and spoken with professors, but nobody can seem to give me a clear answer of the real-world difference between a B.A. in History and a B.S. in history. Do different employers look for one or the other? I'm hoping for a future in museum work, especially in restoration and conservation.

For example, literary translation was historically done on the side by multilingual literary writers; to some extent, it still is, since literary translation is not lucrative enough in itself for one to make a living doing only that (even Gabriel García Márquez's English translator had to have a separate day-job).

Therefore, I would assume that translation of other types of documents was also simply done as an ancillary task by bilinguals in a given profession (e.g., legal documents would be translated by lawyers or judges happening to know different languages, or medical texts would be translated by multilingual doctors, etc.).

Do we know if this is true? If so, when does translation emerge as its own profession rather than a side-activity of a given field?

Also, please know that I am talking about written translation, and not interpreting (i.e., spoken translation), so try to keep your answers focused mainly on written translation.

Hi,
My dad's been helping clear a family friend's home and found an old suitcase full of the most beautifully drawn designs of eg. lancasters and airships, with endless detail, as well as investigations into german aircraft including the then 'experimental' Messerschmitt, and V1s, with hundreds of unbelievably high quality photos and exploded diagrams of their engines, flight patterns, individual components, performance at various mach speeds etc.
There are A1 handdrawn schematics and newspaper pages from as early as 1917.
We are not interested in making money from this find we just want to ensure it goes to someone who can appreciate, extrapolate and publicise the information responsibly, ethically and professionally. Which British museum would you suggest we approach, and given the ongoing ww1 centenary events, is it worth contacting the bbc, antiques roadshow etc.? The documents do seem very unique - most are hand drawn and addressed to various committees and institutions - and continually underpinned with a RESTRICTED notice.
All stored in a brilliant old laundry box with a 12 shilling fine if not returned.
Thanks very much.

I am a huge nerd for both history and comics. While reading one of my favorite series, The Sandman Saga, the name Lilith appeared. This is not the first time I have heard of this figure of being "Adam's first wife" while reading comics but is there any religious or historic backing to this individual or is it just a constructed figure for the sake of a good story?

I was thinking about the expense of owning slaves, and was wondering if any owners would ever lease out their slaves. Not so much as in "hey, you can borrow my slave for a few days", but more like a "come down to johnny's slave emporium and rent some workers for the planting season".

I know that different cultures and nations treated their slaves differently, but was there ever a market for short-term slave sales?

Given what we know of reactions to the assassination of MLK stateside, I’m curious what details—if any—are known about the ripple effects of the event amongst those deployed to Vietnam and their leadership. For instance: Were there any concerns of increased racial tensions? Do we know of any discussed policies for how the situation should be handled?

Some of the greatest musical artists of the time were black, how did this sit with white audiences? Was there hostility/resentment towards the acts? I recently heard Mavis Staples recount a story of police harassment whilst touring and wondered whether this attitude from some sections of society made it inside the venues.

I’ve always been under the impression that Vladimir Ulyanov’s alias was a simple “Vladimir Lenin” or just “Lenin”. But I saw the man’s primary alias listed as “Nikolai Lenin” in S.L.A. Marshall’s “World War I”. I tried to find out some more info on it, but just found people using “Nikolai Lenin” casually. So, what’s with this alias I’m just now learning about? Was Lenin known as “Nikolai Lenin” in his time?

I have stumbled again upon a quote of Golda Meir's that we had discussed in my highschool history class some years ago.

It goes:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

As quoted in Sunday Times (15 June 1969), also in The Washington Post (16 June 1969).

(I copied this from Wikiquote.)

Now to me as a layman this seems both like a gross oversimplification and not too far off from reality. I am also somewhat aware of when it was said and who Golda Meir was and thus have added some grains of salt to understanding/reading this quote in this context.

However, I would love some in-depth elaboration on (1) the time and context of the quote as well as some background knowledge on Golda Meir relevant to understanding the quote and (2) the historical status of Palestine and the status, identity and/or self-perception of Palestinians.

I realise that this can also be a very political question and be tainted with ideology for this reason. With this question I have no interest in that, though. I am only interested in neutral, objective historical facts with no regard to what political or other consequences this might entail today.

cheers :)

Why does the spanish coat of arms has the old flag of France?

The general argument is that the upper classes of Rome and Greece were Northern Europeans, while the middle and lower classes were darker-complected whites. There is an unvariable claim that miscegenation caused the decline of the patrician families and so the decline of Rome.

It always bothered me that such diametrically opposed ideologies such as Fascism and Communism have such close ideological genealogy, so I wanted to have a better historical context to these ideas through the lense of Mussolini's transition. Any further reading you could give me would also be appreciated.

Seems pretty obvious that James Edmonds, the British Official Historian for WWI really had it in for Haig with an obvious impact on the historiography of the war.

But why? What was the cause of this animosity?

I have a bunch of letters both to and from my grandmother from the early post WW2 era. She was Belgian, and moved to Canada in 1946 with my grandfather who was a Canadian soldier in the war.

The letters are all written in Flemish, so I have no idea of their contents, but I imagine they are mostly updates on the family, missing you, births, marriages, etc.

My question mainly is whether these are of any historical use to anyone? I know in my own studies of my family history I've found such things useful, but is this something that would be worth archiving? Should I keep them and pass them down? Or just toss them away given their likely superfluous contents?