In a letter from Thomas Phillips, the commander of Hannibal, Phillips writes:

"Having my compliment of 700 [African] slaves, viz. 480 men and 220 women..."

This begs me to wonder how slave traders were able to dehumanize slaves so much yet still refer to them as "men and women" In school, I was taught that slaves were not considered people, yet references of gender and pronounce would seem to be describing slaves' personhood. Was there ever an effort to stop referring to slaves as "men" or "women" or to remove the uses of pronouns to refer to slaves. Did abolitionists ever use this as an argument against slavery?

I'm doing a clutter item for a popular video game that's pseudo-medieval, and I have habit of trying to find solutions that are (or at least feel) era appropriate.

It's made me discover a lot of interesting things about refrigeration, the many types of clever cooking apparatuses that were available in pre-modern times, and other ingenuity that we take for granted.

I was going to make a painting can from wood or clay, and have it covered with a wooden lid or cloth and string. Googling for "era-appropriate" references proved a little difficult, so I have to assume that the way we package and store paint these days is a very modern phenomenon.

I should mention that the item I am making is supposed to evoke a can of paint for houses. As I write this, it struck me that this might - as well - be a very modern thing (to paint interior/exterior areas of the home).

Hello all, I'm currently writing a historiography paper on the Fall of the Roman Empire. I'm starting my sources list with Gibbons work, but am finding my university library has a surprisingly limited number of works on the topic. What are some must-have sources that I should include in the paper?

So the title says it all: why has Mexico not become a highly developed power like the USA and Canada? I know that in the case of several poor nations that were formerly colonies, they have failed due to the lack of proper industrial infrastructure. Is the same true for Mexico, and why did this not happen to the USA and Canada?

I've always had a major interest in the two world wars and have read quite extensively on both periods and the interwar period. Deapite this I've never found a detailed answer as to how trench systems in the first world war managed to grow so large and complex so quickly. Could anybody explain this to me? I'd really appreciate it.

The Prussians were one of the first nations to introduce a breech loading rifle from what I can tell.

That and their focus on rapid mobilization seem to set them apart from other nations like Austria, who seem to have drawn the wrong conclusions from their defeat in 1859.

So how did the Prussian military come up with the form of warfare that it ended up with?

(Like the IJN who after their war against Russia focused on Tsushima, or a lot of different navies, who studied the battle of Lissa, leading to a load of ramming bows equipped ships)

As impressive as chainmail and plate armor are, their biggest drawback is cost. Many battles one can hear about, had tens of thousands of people participate, and It is clear that's way more than the amount of people in a country who could afford such equipment.

How many percent of fighters could be reasonably assumed to wear armor tougher than a gambeson, in the given time period?

I know the roles were in flux across the period, but using the the inexact science of looking at paintings, the Scots Greys are indistinguishable from the 15th Hussars at a glance.

I'm doing an EPQ on the viability of operation sealion, and am in need of good reference material to use to write it. What books should I be looking at to purchase to enable me to best do that?

It's usually said that prior to the Principate, "Imperator" just meant "a great general". But it must have had a less direct meaning as well, as "one who possesses Imperium", which as far as I understand it was basically the right or recognized power to use violence to enforce your political demands.

So, a highly successful general would also be hailed as "Imperator" and awarded a triumph. But how did this title connect to the notion of Imperium? Was the idea that he was a general who had established or asserted his political will using violence, akin to how we today recognize some people as "the Conqueror"?

Finally, as I understand it, the Princeps had Imperium over all Roman holdings, which caused the terms "Imperator" and "Imperium" to transform into something akin to "Monarch" and "Realm". But when does this transformation occur, when do people, for example, start considering themselves as part of "Imperium Romana"?

If a ship was sailing from India to the UK for example, it would have to make several stops at ports around Africa, how would the crew know that the designated port was still friendly?

Did many ships looking to take on supplies get attacked or captured because of this?

Columbus believed that he had reached Asia until his death (although some of his contemporaries already suspected that he had found a new continent). But could he actually have made it all the way around the globe if North- and South- America hadn't existed? Would he have run out of provisions?

I think that the concept that there were large population movements in the Migration period is uncontroversial. And where the 'Romans' saw barbarians at the gates, echoing a lecture I remember on the polarising discourse of barbarians and 'Romans', those 'barbarians' were not part of the Roman polity in the past.

And if they existed, were separate from the Roman polity circa the third century, and moved into that polity, what caused the tribes or peoples that crossed the Danube and the Rhine frontiers in Late Antiquity to move in the first place?

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