Just come back from seeing Victoria and Abdul, in which Abdul's wife and mother-in-law are depicted as wearing mesh-faced burqas. Is this accurate for 1890s India? I thought full burqas were a much more recent trend.

(Note: I am referring to the burqa in particular, rather than the hijab or niqab, both of which have a rather longer history from what I can see)

I am watching Peaky Blinders, and one of the main characters Tommy Shelby used to be a tunneler during WW1. Post-war he is recruited by the British crown to carry out assassinations, so he decides to contact Sir Winston Churchill to guarantee his safety. When reading out his letter, they note that he got a DCM and fought at the battles of Somme and Verdun. Upon reaching the part that he was a tunneler, everyone in the room is impressed and the atmosphere changes completely.

Who were the tunnelers and what did they do to earn the respect of Winston Churchill and a bunch of other aristocrats in the tv show?

During and before antiquity there are various cities that had some 100k+ populations and some with close to a million.

But this becomes much rarer after. Why is this?

In so many photos industrial workers are pictured wearing suits and flat caps, in the modern day the suit is viewed as a corporate elitist outfit. How did this shift happen?

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I'm ideally looking for something that provides a breadth of knowledge on the faith, its history and establishment, and growth or change over time. Most sources I seem to find seem to be hold a lot of bias one way or another towards the church, and I am looking ideally for an impartial account.

Any chance of survival?

Am I looking to be well-rounded in administrative and logistical competencies or is it all guts and glory? How fast am I looking to earn a command at some level? Can I climb the ladder without seeing combat? How seriously can a bad family name cancel out my merits? How easily can a good family name push my flaws to the side?

Thanks in advance!

Tagging /u/TRB1783, /u/PartyMoses, et al.

Just curious if that was even a risk to account for during operations or if there are any incidences of this happening. With all of the metal being hurled through the air during the war it makes one wonder.

Hello all, My apologies as this is my first post on reddit, so I'm sorry if I'm making any mistakes. Anyways, a friend and I were talking about the debt that the U.S owes to China and he was concerned due to the relations with China, I said that the U.S will never pay back the debt owed to China, and eventually the conversation turned to how often is it for a Country to stop paying a debt or money owed to another country due to war and what not. I did some looking around on the subject but only found articles about the U.S debts to China, so I'm turning to reddit for help. TLDR: had a conversation on the U.S-China debt turn to wondering how often it is for a country to stop paying a debt

In one of the more popular subreddits, I read that in 1254 a debate was hosted by the grandson of Genghis Khan between a Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist. It ended in them being too drunk to continue. Is this true? The comment thread quoted Jack Weatherford's, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. How reliable is this source?

Thank you in advance!

Sorry, norteño.

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I'm listening to Adrian Goldsworthy's Caesar: Life of a Colossus. He quotes and paraphrases several contemporary sources that say that Gaul is new and unexplored territory for the Romans - sorry, because it's an audiobook, I can't flip back to any specific passages.

If you're a Roman army in unknown territory like that, how do you know where you are and where you're going? Especially when Caesar sends legions to overwinter in different locations. Do you employ cartographers? If so, do any examples of this kind of cartography still exist?

Considering that the US dropped written warnings explaining that the cities were about to be bombed, you'd think the Japanese would do more to evacuate. Why didn't this happen?

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Seems like half the people who have a bow on television could hit a squirrel between the eyes from a mile away. Is there any knowledge about how good the archers actually were compared to what is seen.