Inspired, like so many things, by something inflammatory posted on facebook.

The Irish famine was no accident
The highland clearance was no accident.
Both are crimes of the British crown against the people of the west European islands!

I don't want to get into the former, but the second sparked my interest. Looking into the subject of the clearances a bit, they seem to have had more than one phase, and a number of different causes. Could someone explain these more fully for me?

Context: I'm only 17 but I still feel odd being British and knowing next to nothing about our history (thanks Education system) so I watched a few documentaries about the Plantagenet family tree and how that eventually led to the War of Roses and the Tudors origins in Henry the 7th. I found these really fascinating.

Question: So my question is simple, are there any good documentaries I should give a whirl about British history? I'm reluctant to pick up any books at the moment since I'm reading a good few for A-Level English at the moment already. Thanks in advance.

I’m currently studying American history for my A-Levels and really want to support the text books with some podcasts/ audiobooks I’m looking at 1820-1880 time period

The school is UCLA and my professor, David Myers, said that the debate was many years ago.

How would a person become a pirate? Ask around? Was it just that most people would become pirates as a group and you just had to know one? Did you have to be lucky and hope that they wouldn't murder you on a raid and then ask? Btw I'm mostly talking about pirates in the 17th and 18th century.

I'm not trying to be in the realm of historical fiction, or alternate history speculation. I'm not asking what if's about what if the plan had succeeded, but rather I'm trying to understand if there's any evidence within the known political climate of that time if the plan was arguable a good idea. Were the conspirators insane terrorists, or was their conclusion to bomb the parliament building a reasonable one? Could the damage of the building have prevented or delayed something? Were politicians back then more easily swayed by assassination attempts? Was the government so unstable that a big enough disruption could have caused it to collapse?

Something about the fact that people nearly 500 years later are still celebrating the failure of their attempt seems to suggests that it would have been very significant if the conspirators had succeeded, but i have no reference for what that significance potentially could have been.

In other words, military science is a discipline which has been developed over the past several hundred years to be just that - a science. Was this true in the Hellenistic era? In The Macedonian Way of War, David Karunanithy writes about how Philip's obsessive creation of the Macedonian army in the mid-4th century BC was both influenced by, and attracted, great military minds of the day; Xenophon especially had a lot of things to say on the making of a model army. This, and Alexander's subsequent conquests, were transmitted through the Hellenistic era beginning with Alexander's generals and, when many of them became kings of various territories, they held courts which in turn attracted more great military minds; Pyrrhus, for example, is cited as having both been heavily influenced by, and greatly added to, Hellenistic military science.

Is it right to think of the Hellenistic military era as an early time of military science, or is that a bit too optimistic, especially when compared to the Romans?

I read a lot of history, and am often impressed by the level of detail many books include. For example, a detailed narrative description of the sun coming up with a mist over a runway, or details about what an historic figure had for lunch on some particular day...

I've always assumed these details were merely intended to dramatize otherwise documented historic narrative. Perhaps they were based on an average day or morning.

Are these details usually based in some specific historic evidence or is there an understanding among historians that some details can be added to add depth to a narrative?

When I think of Europe, I think of a number of different polities. I might think of the union of Aragon and Castile or of Burgundy and France. I would think of the expansion of Prussia with its consumption of other German states and Polish territory. That is to say, I see Europe as being composed of a number of polities (some of which would evolve into nation-states) that engaged with one another, fought one another, and changed over time.

When I think of the Americas I hardly think that. Normally I imagine that there were Mayans, Inca, and Aztec, but I am not really sure what their chronological relationship to each other was. I've heard of other groups (Toltec, who apparently spoke the same/a similar language to the Aztecs, the Teotihuacan, who I thought were Aztec but am apparently wrong, and the Tarascan who I only heard of because I was curious about the Spanish Conquest of Mexico despite them apparently being a major rival of the Aztec), but I know nothing about them. I know that the Aztecs were an empire that extracted tribute, but I have no idea who these tributary states were. I have no idea what was going on in North America at all. And I have no sense of the dynamism that I feel when it comes to Europe.

So what would the Americas have looked like between 1392 and 1592. Who were the great powers? How did they get that way? How did they conflict with each other? How did the different polities respond to the European invasion? For that matter, is there a better time period for this question than from 1392-1592?

(An inspiration for this question was reading on Wikipedia about Proto-Uto-Aztecan. It hit me that I had barely thought Nahuatl was part of a broader language family and that its ancestors might have migrated from present-day United States to present-day Mexico. But, by contrast, I think a lot about the movement of languages and people in Europe.)

When my great auntie died, we collected some boxes of her possessions and among them we found a copy of Mein Kampf dating from 1939.

She worked fairly high up in the UK Home Office during the war so obviously had to know about current affairs. It's likely she read it (along with the many other political books we found) to know what was going on with the enemy, and it just got relegated to the bottom of a box as she moved house and office over the years.

She was a very kind, gentle soul, with no racism or antisemitism about her at any point in her life. She probably didn't know she still had half the stuff in those boxes.

So what do we do with it? We don't want it around the house, because it's a hateful thing. But can you just destroy something of possible historical significance (if indeed it has any). I've no idea.

What would you suggest we do with it?

Thanks

I'm writing a story set in the new world during 211 c.e. its not very realistic (roman colonisation of the new world) but I'm trying to make it as true to history as possible and was wondering how could they survive during the hurricane season and the only comparable civilisation that i know existed in that area were the maya so I'm trying to find how they survived hurricanes.

to be more precise how did they keep there crops safe. how did they make their buildings hurricane proof i'm guessing by building stone buildings but even now brick houses can be destroyed by a hurricane

i'm assuming only the wealthiest people in their society could afford stone houses so how did the poor survive.

I remember watching a documentary a few months ago about the dying months and weeks of the war and one former German soldier mentioned that there was a rumour spreading among the German troops that the British/Americans were allies for now, but that they secretly hated one another and when the British/American forces from the West ended up encountering the Soviet forces in the East that both sides would end up attacking each other, and that the British and Americans would call up all remaining German forces (and German forces captured by the Western Allies) to help with the attack, so they essentially believed that very soon they would be allies with the British and Americans.

Now obviously this rumour was completely inaccurate, but I thought I would ask how wildly believed this rumour was among German forces in the dying months and weeks of the war, and also if possibly ask what other sort of rumours were flying about back in that period?

Thanks a lot.

Allow me to clarify. The French support of the American Revolution was a major contributor to their massive debt, and therefore large taxes. Did the French people harbor any anti American feelings because of this?