My wife and I are going on a three week trip to Budapest, Vienna, and Prague and I was hoping to delve a little deeper into these three cities rather than just reading travel guides.

I enjoy history books that span several centuries, as I find it helps me appreciate the architecture and culture more. As an example, I loved Rebecca Fraser's narrative history, "The Story of Britain."

If any of y'all could recommend some good books I would be very grateful! I am having a harder time than I expected trying to narrow down some good contenders.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

Decided to start watching the Pacific recently. If you don't know, it is basically Band of Brothers but with Marines in the Pacific ocean rather than paratroopers in Europe. It is not as great as Band of Brothers, but what is?

Anyway, a lot of the marines when they are away from the front, and quite often on the front, either are not wearing shirts, wearing unbuttened shirts, wearing their shirts with the sleeves pulled off, or some combination thereof. I understand that the tropics they were fighting in were hot as Hell, but was this practice of forgoing/cutting the standard issue uniform common, and how did upper command view the practice?

I'm currently reading Battles of the Thirty Years War by William Guthrie.

In it he mentions that Tilly and several other commanders were trained in Flanders. Is there anything special about Walloonian geography?

Sorry if this is kind of specific.

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For example, how did the United States and Canada get +1, but Mexico got +52, and some nations got ones with huge numbers, like Guernsey with +441481?

So, in essence, I am asking is there any way to know what the accent of a language was in 1100 Rome or 1600 England or any place and time before the invention of sound recording in 1859. If so how? Also is this a field of study?

I take part in a lot of historical recreation for the medieval era and sometimes people get all gatekeeper on new folks and an easy fall back is how they pronounce things. To get those people to go away I like to speak as much Latin as I can muster at them with a thick Texas accent, whilst taunting that they don't know if that was how it sounded and that they should leave the new people, and their way of saying "hospitaler" alone.

On one hand, I sort of want to know if anyone is going to call me out and start a lengthy explanation of how we know Marcus Aurelius did not sound like he came from Dallas. On the other hand, If this actually is a thing I think that is fascinating and I would love to hear all about it.

Thanks for your time.

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This was obviously a very important battle during World War Two after which Germany lost the initiative in the Eastern front. However I'm still a little unclear as to what exactly happened during this battle. According to the Soviets this was a massive victory with the Germans losing hundreds of tanks but according to the Germans they permanently lost only a few dozen tanks with many damaged tanks being recoverable and inflicted horrendous losses on the Soviet tank forces in turn. Only the Allied landings at Sicily prevented turning their tactical victory to a strategic one. At least that's my impression of how this battle is portrayed in various online sources. Do we have a more accurate portrayal of the true version of events?

I understand that crossing the Berlin Wall border was a difficult task. But there had to be some spots that historically had lots of people flood through/sneak past. I don't really know much about the Berlin Wall, so this made me curious.

I was wondering this because many conquerors (e.g. Romans, Macedonians) are and althought they did not settle the land they conquered or rule it, they traded from it. Did this help unite Europe and bring it into the renissance or did it move Europe backwards? My history teacher only talks about the negative effects of vikings so I was wondering.

When Henry Ford introduced the world's first practical car in the early 1900s with the Model T, they were, for quite some time, referred to as automobiles. How, over time, did that name transition into the everyday word "car" that we have been using for nearly 100 years now?

Where is the best place the find resources and do research other than books? Is Wikipedia a reliable source if not what website should I use instead for History?

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I have studied some high middle ages topics that start by saying that England was unified and fairly wealthy but that in West Francia the king pretty much only ruled the areas around Paris. Why did this happen?