I'm doing a research paper and I'm looking for a book similar to "the Influence of seapower upon history" no libraries near me carry the book Sorry if this is not on the right place

Would it have been the stereotypical "raping and pillaging"? Was it more about securing victory in the battle? I've always been a bit confused by what a sack actually is.

I'm a science undergrad but I decided to take a history class to learn more about a specific time period I'm interested in (I realised that self-studying is just teaching me a lot of random things and I need a structure to put it all together). Well, we've been assigned an insane amount of reading and I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed. I'm used to being able to use any reputable source to learn the facts and models I'm supposed to know, and doing whatever amount of studying it takes for me to learn. Now I have to make sense of several thousand pages of different topics and perspectives. This type of reading is all new to me. I looked in the FAQ to see if there were any tips on how to study history, but didn't find anything. Basically I'm wondering what I should learn and how I should learn.

• A few of the assigned books try to give a broad introduction to the entire time period (A Concise History of...). What am I supposed to do? I assume I should skim them to get a general sense of the facts and timeline, but what else? Do I take notes? What kind of notes?

• Most are way more specific (Politics and Propaganda in...). Here, I assume I should read more closely, but there are just so many of them! What should I pay attention to when I read a history book?

• The notes. What do I write down? Is it best to organise notes by topic? By book? In chronological order? By which assignment the book belongs to? How should I even use them, like when do I look at my notes? (There won't be any conventional exams, so I have no clear goal to study for - it's all home assignments that won't be handed out until specific times)

• Overall strategy. What should I aim for to understand an entire time period? How do I make the best of a history class? I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Professors, what do you want your students to learn beyond the mere facts? How should their thinking develop?

I recently heard an anecdote about my deceased grandfather. He was a WWII U.S. Army veteran. The story goes that he was an MP posted to direct traffic when suddenly the jeep that dropped him off came back and yelled for him to get in because a German tank column was coming up the road behind them.

This sounds like the "Battle of the Bulge" to me, but I'm not sure where he was stationed. And I never got the chance to talk to him about it. I know he started the war stationed in the U.S. and ended up in Berlin after. I have some of his medals and citations, but not much else. I was hoping there might be a book or online source where I could look for his name to find out more info.

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Hey everyone! I'm looking to expand my historical knowledge and I've heard a lot of good things about both books. Which do you think I should pick up first?

I saw that GG&S had a fairly mixed review on this sub, but I haven't heard much about Ian morris work.

The Byzantine Empire, based mostly in Anatolia and Greece, spent the entire middle ages with more or less the same land, able to expand only a bit in the 10th century, and otherwise being mostly on the defence. Yet when the Ottoman Empire rose and took over the former Byzantine lands, they then proceeded to conquer the rest of the eastern meditteranean and the balkans. What were the differences between the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires, and their larger geopolitical situations, that allowed the Ottomans to expand so hugely when the Byzantines hadn't been able to?

This is my first time posting here, hopefully this doesn't break the subreddit homework rule.

I'm hoping someone with more authority on the subject can confirm or disconfirm my impressions about the Great Divergence. While there were many sort of different factors which could contribute to the way European countries pulled ahead of Asian ones, is it controversial to suggest that the forms of political institutions in the involved countries are probably among those factors? I've done a quick literature search (admittedly, very shallow), briefly flicked through the Pomeranz, and it seems that there is, for some, a strong emphasis on geographical factors. On the other hand, there's a review by Parthasarathi which criticizes Pomeranz for ignoring the role of politics but doesn't cite a reference for the relevant claims (though I've just seen that he has his own book published later). So it looks like there's some disagreement - how surprising.

My impression is that a number of East Asian countries had adopted Imperial China's scholar-bureaucracy and had implemented institutions which placed considerable political power into officials selected through an examination system. Over time, intellectual progress had stagnated and despite early technological innovations, failed to start an industrial revolution in Asia. Furthermore, after contact with the Europeans after the divergence, Japan had implemented institutional reforms earlier than China along Western lines - presumably abandoning the scholar-bureaucracy - and as a result became the first successful modern industrialized country in Asia despite a severe lack of resources.

Actually, I'll admit that it's enough for me if the weak claim that the Imperial Chinese system simply failed to prevent or mitigate the divergence holds true rather than the strong claim that it contributed to it. I'd like to spend the time to wade through all the relevant literature at my leisure, but my interest in the topic was brought up as a possible argument in my MA thesis. I'm trying to resist the claim that epistocracies (where political power is distributed to the "knowers" or however they wanna frame it) are likely to lead to better consequences compared to democracies. Some of these epistocrats lament that there are no historical examples to prove them right, but it seems to me that the old Chinese bureaucracy bears enough "epistocratic" characteristics to be at the very least suggestive. If it's the case that Asian epistocracies had, historically, not resulted in better consequences compared to European, er, proto-democracies (?), then this seems to be a pretty strong intuition pump, at the very least. I'd like to be told by someone with better knowledge on the subject whether or not I'm barking up the wrong tree earlier rather than later (and, if not, possibly a suggestion for a good resource.)

Edit: I'm doing a philosophy degree, not a history degree, in case anyone thinks I should just know better. I mean, I should. I just didn't have the time or money to go in for a history, anthropology, and economics degree before doing this one.

Obviously this was a huge issue for the Germans, so why wasn't it an issue for the Russians? They had used scorched earth tactics, and ripped up their infrastructure to slow the German advance, how were they able to sustain such vast supply lines where the Germans couldn't?

I'm an enthusiastic amateur genealogist, and along the way I've learnt that a brother of an ancestor married a woman called Sexey (around 1810). A quick search shows that it doesn't seem to be a common name, but it was occasionally given, and usage seems to be predominately limited to the Somerset, England area.

My questions are, would Sexey have the same connotations then, as it does currently? When would usage of the word sexy have come into common use in English (as we would understand it today)? Or were there alternative meanings to the word that would make it suitable as a name for a child in the late 1700s, early 1800s? Thanks in advance

Why canvas and wood? I understand that they made the planes with four wings because the normal two was too flimsy with the materials they were using, along with other reasons. So why didn't they use sheet metal? Were the engines too weak to pull a metal covered craft through the air?

Was France's plans for an inevitable war against Germany, "we'll figure it out when the time comes?" Surely, with the failures of the Franco-Prussian war they had some sort of organized doctrine for such an event..

The best I can find is that (summing it up) France thought it would be a quick war that focused more on mobility and speed than durability and power..

Thanks!

For a class, we are reading They Made America by Harold Evans. I cannot stand the style it is written in and the professor is looking for answers more about the broad history of this subject and They Made America focuses more on the biographies of individuals. Since I can't make the professor change her book choice, I am looking for an alternative title that may be more helpful for a broad view of the history of technological progess. Any suggestions?

I've heard it said that Vikings weren't called Vikings, but that their journeys were called Vikings. You would "go on a viking, to plunder and pillage", if they even did such things. Which leads me to wonder, if they weren't called Vikings, what were they called?

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