Surely Belgium would have wanted to stay out of any future conflict, and wouldn't take kindly to France effectively forcing them to participate?

In short, what did Belgians think of the Maginot Line?

With the Moore, Hollywood, etc. cases coming to light, I got to thinking. Back in the day it wasn't as taboo for an adult to marry a child. It seems like the laws have progressively gotten more strict and penalties more harsh. Am I right in this thinking? Is there an era/decade we can look at where laws started getting more strict, why it happened, and a bit of the evolution of them?

I also see a lot of comments about multiple rock band having sex with 15yr old groupies in the 70s/80s, and it being common knowledge. Is this actually something that happened frequently and people knew about?

(This is my first Reddit post! Yay!) I am an author and the novel I'm currently writing takes place in England during WWII. Pertinent details are: it's 1940. The character in question is a 21-year-old (orphaned) Earl with no children, and only a 10-year-old little sister. If he was killed in action, would the property to his family's estate (and of course the title) go to an uncle (his late father's younger brother) or, by this point in history, would the title go to the uncle and the property go to the little sister? Could he have at least had it written in a will that he wanted the property to go to his sister? Or could an entailment potentially still be enforced, ensuring that the title and the property both go to the uncle?

I've scoured the depths of the internet trying to get a clear understanding of what would have happened in these circumstances during this time period, and while I've found a lot of information on the 19th century and earlier, there's not a lot for the 20th century. I'm aware that the Administration of Estates Act of 1925 changed a lot of things as far as inheritances go for women, but I'm still unsure of the realistic legalities of this, especially since she would be underage as well.

I hope this makes sense! Any information would be so very much appreciated!! If I can provide any more details about the characters to help you give a more definitive answer, please let me know! Thanks in advance!

What does recent scholarship say about this topic?

Richard I and Saladin for example. Do we know much about the translators? Was Arabic directly translated into Latin or French?

I've always heard that agriculture took to root and spread 10,000 or so years ago because agricultural civilizations could bring more manpower to bear against enemies and had logistical advantages that come with having storable/moveable food surpluses.

Yet there are many examples where agriculturalists seem to have failed to outcompete their hunter-gatherer competitors.

The major ones I can think of all involve people of the steppe/plains - people who rode horses.

All throughout history, we hear of nomadic steppe peoples beating settled agriculturalists on the Asian/European steppe.

In the Americas, agriculturalists seem to have won out in Mexico/South America, but in north America, the agriculturalists were largely limited to the eastern and western coasts. The vast central part of the continent was ruled by horsemen.

Why was this?

Were the steppe peoples really hunter gatherers, or would we consider them more as farmers of animals, and so comparable to the agriculturalists in terms of population availability?

So one of my students asked a question I've never thought about and that my google-fu skills aren't up to answering -

What happened with the first US Senate? As in how did the rotation of 1/3rd of the senate every two years start if all senators were initially elected to six year terms?

Wouldn't Africa have been closer and less difficult to colonize?

I've seen this said a lot lately and it seems just completely BS. I'm sure there was a law that said soldiers were allowed to say no, but I have some severe doubts that it was ever actually applied in real life during WW2.

If I was in the Wehrmacht and was given an order to execute a family of partisans, communists, or Jews, would I have been allowed to say "No" without any punishments?

I know that they joined late in the war around 1917 and provided fresh troops for the exhausted Allies, but to me it seams as if they walked into the war, punched the stumbling Germany once knocking him out. Then they started dancing around and cheering that as if they single handedly won it. Sure they were effective in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, but what else did they do?

Germany was suffering from the effects of internal political collapse late in the war, so my question is this: was the US really that important to winning the war, or was it just a matter of time until the Allies would be victorious?

I've looked for a bit online and can't find any good sources/answers. Help?

So when I was in high school (in Germany) there was this history "fun fact" my history teacher once told us:

at some point in history there was a Belgian emperor, who had a crown made out of aluminium, because back then it was really expensive and seen as worthy of a royal.

Is this true?

Did Romans, for example, think of the A.D. 20's as a sea change from the A.D. 30's? How about Frenchmen from 1750 to 1760? Etc.

Followup question: where did this decade-based sense of generational shift originate? Was it a result of the nice, round number 10? Or were there historiographers who posited it? Or something else?

So after watching the series Vikings, I noticed that the viking felt no external force to deal with. I know a tv show can't show every detail, but also from history books, it seems like the vikings never even knew their southern neighbors, as I've never heard of a viking attack on germany. Considering their proximity to Otto I holy roman Empire I wondered did they fight at all? Or trade? Or did germany send missionaries? Or raid? I've heard that denmark had a sort of hadrians wall against germany in jutland, but never figured out why, since they never have seemed to fight. Was it because the slavs were in between them?

Women in medieval and renaissance paints always look chubbier than what you would expect a high ranking female in modern times to look like. Why is this and what was the beauty stand in these times?

Will Durant says they were "half-mongol, half-European, ferocious bearded gaints who lived in wagons and ... fought to live and lived to fight... destroying and killing everything in their path ... were suddenly decimated by a mysterious disease and were finally overcome by the Medes and driven back to their northern haunts." William Durant - Our Oriental Heritage That sounds a lot like legend. Who were these people? Did they survive in any way to present-day?